Science & Engineering Indicators 2012

These figures come from the National Science Board, which has published a report that contains "a broad base of quantitative information on the U.S. and international science and engineering enterprise."  
The full report is on their website and is quite detailed.

This excerpted table contains data showing how students in various countries responded to the same questions, which makes for more direct comparisons:  

The tomato genes question is my favorite.


And this table compares scientist vs. public opinions on several STEM topics. It's quite interesting to see by how much the numbers differ in the two columns:

Venus Transit

By some miracle, we had a brilliant sunny afternoon today for observing the transit of Venus across the sun at Catlin.  The larger bright circle is an image of the sun, projected through binoculars onto a paper.  The tiny dot on the lower left is Venus, making her way from the lower left to the upper right of the bright circle.  There are lots of higher resolution images online, but we had lots of fun watching this in person.  It'll take about 6 hours for the transit to finish, but once it's over, you'll have to wait until December 2117 to see the next one!   

Tiny Creature Roundup

Anyone else noticed the abundance of small organisms in the news lately? Let's take a tour, starting with the leaf chameleons from Madagascar, which are described as an "extreme case of island dwarfism" at less than 30 mm, full size. A recent PLoS ONE article describes them. Here's a juvenile:




Next, here's a recently discovered terrestrial frog from New Guinea, described as "the smallest known vertebrate species, attaining an average body size of only 7.7 mm" in a different PLoS ONE article. These itty bitty frogs are described as likely prey for scorpions and other large invertebrates.




Speaking of invertebrates, the fairy wasp is one fifth of a millimeter long. Note the scale bar in the photo! Even more interesting is that the adult wasp's nervous system has just a few thousand neurons, most of which do not have nuclei. The juvenile cells seem to accomplish enough protein synthesis before losing their nuclei to last through the wasp's 5 day adult lifespan.



This guy seems giant in comparison, and he'll certainly grow more, but Lil' Drac is an adorable short-tailed fruit bat, abandoned by his mom, but cared for by humans. These videos have a pretty high awww factor.


Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FkeSSdwbnPg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kldBXAB2Kws

A topical post....

Who says that scientists are humorless, dour individuals out of touch with the real world? Thanks to Larry Hurst for this lighthearted end to the week.

DNA Infographic--Guest Post

Oh, wow.  This is my first blog guest post.  I'm both honored and humbled at being invited to contribute to the Catlin Coverslip.  My first thought when Dan invited me to post was what on earth could a social studies teacher contribute to a science blog?  Then I began breathing again and remembered how much fun I've been having the past few years sending Dan, Becky, and Veronica science related tidbits I felt were in keeping with the Coverslip's intent.  Today, I offer two infographics for thought.  I suppose they are related in a way.  My daughter, Noa, is currently studying genetics, so I thought this dna related infographic might be of use to her and her sophomore classmates.  Now that Earth's population has passed the 7,000,000,000 (numbers are so much more impressive than words) milestone, revisiting Per Square Mile's density infographic also seemed appropriate.  I also promise to return to the spirit of the Coverslip with a much shorter post next time.

Teenage Brain Roundup

All sorts of interesting tidbits in the news lately about the teenage brain:

Paul Monheimer points out that this month's National Geographic features an article on the teenage brain, which is available online here.

Dan Griffiths points out the recent study, "Online social network size is reflected in human brain structure" that yes, shows a positive correlation between number of Facebook friends and gray matter density in certain areas of the brain involved in social perception and associative memory.

Finally, check out the recent report from British researchers on how verbal & non-verbal IQ can fluctuate throughout the teenage years. Here's a summary of their work:

"The mental ability of teenagers can improve or decline on a far greater scale than previously thought."

Happy reading!

Ocean Salinity Mapping

Paul Monheimer shares this BBC article about mapping ocean salinity via satellite with us. The article has details about how the map is created via data gathering probes in the oceans.

It's neat to look at the map and see that the Pacific is apparently less salty than the Atlantic. Any oceanographers out there have an explanation for this?

Here's the full article:

Aquarius Satellite Comes Of Age - BBC News