Science in the City

I’m in the process of organizing a small intra-network science fair for students and teachers working Internationals Network schools.  Our goal is to showcase the awesome work being done with English Language Learning kids who have not often had an opportunity to get involved in larger fairs, like NYSEF or Intel.  We’re inviting a guest speaker in Dr. Dickson Despommier, and will have poster sessions, giveaways from the AMNH, NASA and NYSci.  During the state exam week, I took the opportunity to check out the space at Washington Irving HS, whose library will house our big day, courtesy of our co-habitant sister school, Union Square IHS.

See the images affixed!

On Friday the 20th of January, kids from the elective Astronomy class I teach undertook one of our favorite activities in the course: Hunting the streets of Flushing for micrometeorites.  I ordered a small (and I do mean small) set of rare earth (neodymium) magnets.  They were about a quarter inch square by an inch long.  I was worried that they wouldn’t have a strong enough field to attract the particles we were looking for.  I was reassured when Gunnar (a graduate apprentice teacher I’m working with) and I managed to each find examples in just a few sweeps near the school building’s entrance.

The next day, kids braved the chilly temperatures, fanning out along the sidewalk adjacent to the school.  We were fortunate in that the snow held off long enough to afford us unencumbered access to the cracks in the sidewalk where micrometeorites seem to accumulate.

Back inside, we transferred the metallic debris attracted to the magnets onto packing tape.  Folding a non-sticky tab makes maneuvering the specimen way easier under the scope, and leaves a convenient place for kids to mark their names with permanent markers when waiting for imaging.

The kids all struggled a bit to find the meteorites, but sure enough, every single piece of tape we looked at had at least one (and many several) of the characteristically pitted metallic spheres.  Some day, I’d like to get a university around here to try running one through a mass spectrophotometer, just to see if we could quantify the Fe-Ni composition, and thus classify the type of meteorite the sample originated from.

Until then, we enjoyed a great day outside doing a little bit of hands-on astronomy!

LOCATE THE DISEASE ASSIGNED TO YOUR TABLE, USE THE LINKED WEBSITES TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS ON THE HANDOUT:

Emphysema / Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001153/

http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease.printerview.all.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/copdchronicobstructivepulmonarydisease.html

Asthma

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/asthma.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials/asthma/htm/_no_50_no_0.htm

http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/asthma.html

Coronary Artery Disease

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/coronaryarterydisease.html

http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/coronary-artery-disease.printerview.all.html

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/cad/

Anemia

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/anemia.html

http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/anemia.html

Hypertension / High Blood pressure

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials/hypertension/htm/_no_50_no_0.htm

http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/highbloodpressure.html

Students, complete the questionnaire at the link below to report your results for the biometrics lab!

Biometrics Survey

The Cold Spring Harbor Lab is a partner in our work on the Urban Barcode competition.  They are also sharing our work with the wider world via their blog ‘Lab Dish,’ and journal ‘Harbor Transcript.’

Three cheers for the great student work, and for our friends at Cold Spring Harbor who are helping us in our efforts!

Last night, I visited with faculty and students of the Columbia University Department of Astrophysics to get some hands-on practice using the new charge coupled device (basically, a camera) for use with the 6-inch telescope they previously loaned to the school.  It’s an Orion Deepspace Mono Imager III, mounted with a filter wheel capable of imaging in Red, Green, Blue and Infrared bands.  The image processing software isn’t Mac-friendly, necessitating the use of a parallel OS, which creates lots of interesting configuration issues when doing the troubleshoot.  It was insanely windy on the roof, so we eventually retreated to the building’s library, where we practiced running the program, configuring the camera, taking darks and bias images (needed for shooting artifact-free science images) though we will need another go to work on doing ‘flats.’  One totally fun incidental is the camera’s carrying case, which looks like the kind of thing you see handcuffed to a Bond movie’s MI6 courier, right before the villain nabs him.  Too cool. Later we ran into a french astrophysicist, who gave us some ideas about how to create a mini radio-telescope from an old TV satellite dish and code a colleague of his wrote.

The DNA check gels mentioned in a recent post were successfully completed, reviewed by our ubp collaborators, and are on the way to the sequencers.  Stay posted to hear how they come out….I think we’re the first to get DNA to this stage of the process!

On November 4th, the Rooftop Variables, the public school outreach program of Columbia University’s Department of Astrophysics, held its 2011-12 season kickoff in the halls and roof of Pupin Hall at the Morningside campus. Students from the FIHS Astronomy elective and Science Challenge Club were in attendance to hear the University of Glasgow’s Dr. Martin Hendry present a lecture entitled “Captain Cook and the Cosmic Yardstick.” Dr. Hendry invited our kids to recreate the historic experiment he describes in June 2012, when Venus will once again make a transit of the Sun. With observers on different continents, accurate timekeeping and good weather, we should be able to use geometry to calculate the geometry of our solar system.

Others can learn details about how to participate at:

http://transitofvenus.org/

pizza and posters and astrophysics were enjoyed by all!

Before leaving, the kids also had the opportunity to use the university’s telescopes to observe the surface of the moon, Jupiter and its moons, and even a distant nebula. They won door prizes, and of course, enjoyed pizza before the night was done. Thanks to the students, faculty and staff at Columbia for a great night under the stars!

Students from our Science Challenge Club have been hard at work on their research projects for the NYC Urban Barcode Challenge, an invitation to NYC’s kids to propose, design and implement their own research using DNA barcoding technology! After review by scientists at the AMNH and Cold Spring Harbor Labs, we have spent recent sessions collecting samples, extracting DNA and running pcr. These ‘check gel’ images will help determine if we’ve collected enough of the right kind of DNA to proceed with our final stages: sequencing the genetic codes and using bioinformatics to compare them. It’s an exciting time to do science at our school!

https://picasaweb.google.com/118106260739645138239/DNABarcodePhotosOctober282011?authuser=0&feat=directlink

On Friday, October 14th, Team Connections visited Kissena Park in Flushing, Queens.  The day was used to work in small teams to look for examples of organisms in ecological roles, or niches, throughout the Park.

Images from the visit are linked below:

https://picasaweb.google.com/109721719700804129608/KissenaParkTrip?locked=true