science education

This spring, Missouri University of Science and Technology is offering its first fully online section of a biology laboratory class using an at-home lab kit. Students can perform “wet” laboratory experiments, hands-on chemical-based work in open-air areas, and follow provided instructions for biological course work.

As thesis writing approached, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Veronica Berns faced a conundrum. She knew how hard it was to describe her work to friends and family — indeed, anybody outside the tight clan of structural chemists. And that was particularly true since she concentrated on a category of should-be-impossible structures called “quasicrystals.”

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics schools vary in many ways, but they share eight major common elements. So finds a nationwide study of 23 STEM schools conducted by the University of Chicago’s Outlier Research & Evaluation group.

The University of California at Berkeley's planned Richmond campus aims at ushering in a transformation of the American research university.

When it comes to the future of medicine, small is indeed beautiful. Working at the nanoscale, tens of thousands of researchers are in a race to develop tiny nanoparticles, nanodevices and nanopatterned surfaces for medical applications. Their goals are both comprehensive and ambitious. They are hoping to create drugs that stop disease processes at the molecular level where they start, engineer drug delivery systems that are small enough to reach deep within the body and build scaffolding and textured surfaces that the body can use to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.

Open any introductory biology textbook and one of the first things you’ll learn is that our DNA spells out the instructions for making proteins, tiny machines that do much of the work in our body’s cells. Results from a study published on Jan. 2 in Science defy textbook science, showing for the first time that the building blocks of a protein, called amino acids, can be assembled without blueprints – DNA and an intermediate template called messenger RNA (mRNA). A team of researchers has observed a case in which another protein specifies which amino acids are added.

A recent study published in the BMJ came to the conclusion that, "exaggeration in news is strongly associated with exaggeration in [academic] press releases."

There is cloud hanging over climate science, but one Cornell University expert on communication and environmental issues says he knows how to help clear the air.









