Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. This week [...]

The Science Writers for Students DonorsChoose Drive is almost over! The drive ends on Saturday and I’m hoping that we can fund at least one of the social science requests for a classroom in need. Thanks so much to Janet, Kate, and Emily, who have contributed to projects so far! Your support is greatly appreciated. [...]

New York’s World Maker Faire helped spur a fantastic discussion on innovation in STEM education, highlighting the importance of partnerships that include educational institutions, communities, and private entities to ensure the broadest impact possible. I’m delighted to share that Cognizant’s Making the Future has been in touch with Teach2Learn in Boston and I’m hopeful that [...]

Tomorrow the #NYCSciTweetUp and The Story Collider will partner for an evening of science, stories, and beer! The Story Collider invites people to share the roles that science has played in their lives. From humble beginnings like the #NYCSciTweetUp, The Story Collider has grown immensely, attracting a diverse showing that highlights the broad, and sometimes [...]

It’s almost time! Will you be there? Next Tuesday, the #NYCSciTweetUp and The Story Collider will partner for an evening of science, stories, and beer! The Story Collider invites people to share the roles that science has played in their lives. From humble beginnings like the #NYCSciTweetUp, The Story Collider has grown immensely, attracting a [...]

Maker Faire invites young Makers to enter a world of innovation and imagination. If you can dream it, you can build it—particularly as experienced Makers are on-hand and willing to share what they know. How can we better encourage a broader participation in this science and technology showcase by underrepresented groups—beginning in the very neighborhood [...]

Edit: The Story Collider is a ticketed event. The cost to attend is $8.00 and tickets can be purchased at The Story Collider website. At the door, the price to attend will be $10.00. There is no fee to attend the #NYCSciTweetUp.   Like science? Like stories? Well, hold on to your beakers and field [...]

To the public, museums are mysterious, magical places. Science, history, and context are carefully preserved and displayed—though the guy-wires are carefully hidden so as to not disturb the experience of the visitor. The work that goes into constructing the fancy dioramas and exhibits, the science that helps construct the scenes that we view as visitors [...]

Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 P.M.–8:30 P.M. The New York Academy of Sciences For more information about the event click here. School has traditionally been about teaching kids new knowledge and skills. Most people have long believed that each child’s temperament and capacity for learning are more or less inborn—or at least, not the [...]

More than 30,000 people visited the White House for the 135th annual Easter Egg Roll on Monday—and I spent several happy hours there myself doing science activities with dozens of kids and their families with the Lawrence Hall of Science. If you couldn’t make it to Washington, D.C., you can find instructions to make the [...]

What is it like to win a Nobel Prize? Should you worry about picking something “important” to work on as a scientist? How can art help in trying to understand how the universe works? And what is the real key to success? You can find out by watching today’s Google Science Fair Hangout with Sir [...]

Magicians need to resort to trick props to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But we pulled DNA out of a banana with nothing more than a few household ingredients during a Scientific American Google Hangout on December 20. (See Scientific American Goes Bananas on December 20. No artifice or foolery was involved: just [...]

Editor’s note: Join the Hangout by visiting Scientific American’s Google Plus page at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. That’s right. Using ordinary household items and a humble piece of fruit, we’re going to perform a seemingly magical feat of science while you watch on a Google Science Fair Hangout on December 20 at 1 p.m. [...]

Remember MacGyver from the old TV series? He could build a laser from a pair of eyeglasses, a match, and some dental floss and then mount it on a shark, or so it seemed. We’re not asking you to do that, exactly. Rather, we thought it’d be fun if science enthusiasts like you could explain [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. Meet Sabera Tulukder and Sakhiwe Shongwe. On June 6, the winner of the Science in Action award will be announced. Sabera Tulukder, [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of the Science in Action award will be announced. Grace Brosofsky, a 16 year-old [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of the Science in Action award will be announced. Katherine Zimmerman, a 16 year-old [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of Science in Action award will be announced. Carlos Vega García, a 13 year-old from Las [...]

When William Schmidt, an expert on math education at Michigan State University, moved his family from East Lansing to Charlottesville, Virginia for a year’s research leave, his work took a personal turn.  He noticed that the public school his daughters would be attending outside Charlottesville was academically behind the one they had attended in Michigan. [...]

A recent survey by Intel found that only 28 percent of teenagers had ever considered becoming engineers and that only 5 percent associated engineering with the word “cool.” That’s not terribly surprising given that engineering ranks in the bottom half of professions with which teens are familiar, falling below teacher, doctor, nurse, police officer, chef, [...]

One day after new test results showed that only 32 percent of U.S. 8th graders are proficient in science, a group of 26 states has helped draft a document that may bring about a major overhaul of science education in this country.  Known as the Next Generation Science Standards, the draft sets ambitious new expectations for [...]

  Two graduate students from the City University of New York’s  NOAA-CREST program showed me this simple experiment, above, for young kids. The three of us volunteered at an Earth Day fair at a New York City elementary school on Friday, and kids were mesmerized by it. It illustrates the concepts of accretion — when [...]

Earlier this week The New York Times profiled the director of the M.I.T. Museum and founder of the Cambridge Science Festival, John Durant. The piece mentioned that science festivals have been multiplying across the country; last year there were more than 20. According to the Times: “A science festival has more in common with a film, [...]

Earlier this month, I watched groups of kids ages 9 to 16 present their own original ideas for solving major food safety problems. They were participating in the annual  First Lego League challenge, the robotics competition founded by inventor Dean Kamen and Lego. We heard ideas for better ways of monitoring the pH level of [...]

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute paints a grim picture of state science standards across the United States. But it also reveals some intriguing details about exactly what’s going wrong with the way many American students are learning science. Standards are the foundation upon which educators build curricula, write textbooks and train [...]

In his State of the Union address last night, President Barack Obama spent less time than in years past discussing his ambitions to reform science education. He referred to his administration’s offer to let states opt out of  No Child Left Behind (” … grant schools flexibility to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching [...]

Imagine walking through a science museum and, among the usual displays of dinosaur bones, butterflies, and amphibians you come upon a series of windows into state-of-the-art research labs. Inside, scientists from nearby universities and veterinary schools work on projects related to biodiversity, genetics, nanoparticles, and animal health and welfare.  In front of each window is [...]

Tonight PBS airs the second of its four part series “Fabric of the Cosmos,” (9 pm ET/PT) based on the bestselling book by Columbia physicist and mathematician Brian Greene. He spoke with Budding Scientist about the NOVA series, which aims to demystify such concepts as multiple universes and bring viewers up to date on the [...]

I’ve been a freelancer for over 20 years. It’s not quite accurate to say there aren’t benefits. There are; they just don’t include health care and employer-matched IRAs. The benefits are such things as not having to use an alarm clock or wear pants everyday, if you don’t feel like it. You can.  But you don’t [...]

“I have an idea,” my brother said to me last winter. Jacob is an elementary science teacher at a neighborhood charter school in Northeast Philadelphia and, at the time, I was working as a lab technician in the same city. “How would you like to come into my classroom and talk to my students about [...]

How a local program is changing the way families experience nature. Ten families hiked into Davidson College Ecological Preserve on a bright Saturday morning to get a glimpse of the kudzu-eating goats, usually off-limits to the public. The outing was part of an environmental education program, World of Wonder (WOW!), a partnership of the Davidson [...]

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being [...]

  “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done – men who are creative, inventive and discoverers” –Jean Piaget   Looking back on my childhood, the times I remember most fondly were spent with my father, learning how to [...]

June was the busiest month of the academic year for New York State high school teachers and their students.   In addition to getting their students to hand in any last minute assignments, NYS high school teachers had to make sure that their students were fully prepared to take required standardized tests, called Regents examinations, [...]

"I’m from Britain, and when I first moved here I couldn’t believe that American kids got three whole months of summer vacation. Back in England our children only get six weeks. But here…it’s…bleech!" This rather unkind comment was uttered by a woman sitting next to me at Mathnasium, a math tutoring center located in Chatham, [...]

This is a group post written by the teens on the ScienceOnlineTeen planning committee. Naseem, 16 years old: What is ScienceOnlineTeen? Imagine a bunch of people from all walks of life with one interest in common -science- all in one place at the same time. These people are not ordinary; they each offer unique experience [...]

Apple introduces the latest “i”-gadget; Samsung takes the reins as the world’s leading smartphone provider; Blackberry mounts an all-or-nothing comeback. Just a typical day of tech headlines, right? Dig deeper, however, and you have to wonder what impact all of these new multimedia devices will have on the networks that give them life. Short answer: [...]

Sugata Mitra gave street kids in a slum in New Delhi access to a computer connected to the Internet, and found that they quickly taught themselves how to use it. This was the moment he says he discovered a new way of teaching. He calls it the grandmother technique, and it goes like this: expose [...]

LAS VEGAS—In a sign of how wireless technologies have moved to the fore in consumer electronics, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs kicked off the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here Monday night with a keynote spotlighting the impact of superfast processors on mobile apps, gaming and even ultra high-definition television (Ultra HDTV). Smart phones, tablets and [...]

Math can be a beautiful, immersive, full-body experience, according to the creators of the newly opened Museum of Math, or MoMath, in New York City. A sculpture that lights up and plays music, a touch-screen floor that turns into a maze and a square-wheeled tricycle that one can ride around a bumpy track are just [...]

In the Sunshine State, science is ready to bloom. On December 5, I attended the official grand opening of the new, $64 million, 100,000-square-foot Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience in Jupiter—and the first of the Max Planck Institutes outside of Europe. The institute will focus on the human brain, which scientific director and CEO [...]

A group of college and high school students has designed a Star Trek-inspired sensing device that can beam environmental data to a smart phone.  The team developed their project during a summer internship program run by the Wright Brothers Institute and the Air Force Research Laboratory. and shared their results at this fall’s World Maker [...]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Smart phones, tablets and video game systems are often seen as distractions to school children in developed countries, which tend to adhere to a strict teacher-student educational model. At Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies (EmTech) conference here on October 25, a panel of technologists and educators posited that it’s time to embrace students’ use of [...]

October 21 is the anniversary of Martin Gardner’s birth. Gardner (1914-2010) is a legend in recreational (and professional) mathematics circles. Although he had little mathematical training, his 1956-1981 Scientific American column “Mathematical Games” has had a huge impact on the way people view math. In a Science Talk podcast shortly after Gardner’s death, Douglas Hofstadter, [...]

Summer Davos—formally, the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions—is known as a gathering of captions of industry and policy leaders. Increasingly, it is also making room for discussion of science and technology as drivers of the innovations needed for us to continue to thrive in a finite world. I moderated or facilitated [...]

Education in science, technology and engineering leads to strong, innovative future generations. Scientists and educators (probably rightly) credit the U.S.’s global leadership to advances in these fields. While American science may be strong, math and science proficiency will be critical for maintaining that position, and reports are less certain on the strength of our schools. [...]

So you thought the nuttiest thing we did in North Carolina this week was appoint a director of child development and early education who was against … um, early education. What’s wrong with you: have you never heard of North Carolina before? This is the NEW North Carolina, with a new governor and bulletproof majorities [...]

I’ve never had the pleasure of being in the UK at the time that the Royal Institute of Great Britain have aired their very famous Christmas Lectures, but I hear often from followers and friends in the UK on social media how many of them have been positively impacted by these lectures. The history of [...]

Looks like I’m in for a great summer full of science video goodness! At the end of June, both Carin and I will be heading to an unconference (taking a clue from Bora from Science Online) called BrainSTEM at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada (maybe I’ll get to wave at Stephen Hawking!)  We will be [...]

On Monday, May 13, at 7pm, I’ll be moderating a panel at The New York Academy of Sciences. If you are in the area, please attend! Here a description of the event: Social and Emotional Learning: Preparing Our Children to Excel Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM The New York Academy [...]

A few months ago, I logged on to Lumosity.com to play my daily dose of brain games. The company had given me a free, temporary account so that I could try out their system as part of my research for an article I was writing on brain training. My then 11-year-old son wanted to play, [...]

Practice makes progress, if not perfection, for most things in life. Generally, practicing a skill—be it basketball, chess or the tuba—mostly makes you better at whatever it was you practiced. Even related areas do not benefit much. Doing intensive basketball drills does not usually make a person particularly good at football. Chess experts are not [...]

I recently interviewed author and inventor Ray Kurzweil about his new book, “How to Create A Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” The 58-minute segment aired on December 1, 2 and 3 on the C-SPAN2 program “After Words.” The book’s thesis is that it is essentially possible to reverse-engineer the human brain to create [...]

Editor’s note: The below is a response to a critique of MindUP, a social and emotional learning program pioneered by actor Goldie Hawn. I have covered this program in other blogs (see list below) and in a feature in Scientific American Mind (visit “Schools Add Workouts for Attention, Grit and Emotional Control”). I hope this [...]

Editor’s note: The following is a critique of a social and emotional learning program called MindUP that I have covered in other blogs (see list below) and in a feature in Scientific American Mind (visit “Schools Add Workouts for Attention, Grit and Emotional Control”).  Please also read a response to this critique, posted separately, from [...]

Guest blog by Frank C. Worrell, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius and Rena F. Subotnik For more than a quarter century, critics have faulted gifted education programs for catering to kids from advantaged backgrounds. These programs do, after all, typically enroll outsized numbers of European American and Asian American students hailing from relatively well-off homes. Members of other [...]

The November/December Scientific American Mind, which debuted online today, examines the origins of genius, a concept that inspires both awe and confusion. Some equate genius with IQ or creativity; others see it as extraordinary accomplishment. As this issue reveals, genius seems to arise from a mosaic of forces that coalesce into a perfect storm of [...]

One of the hardest aspects of school for young children is in some ways the simplest: sitting still. Recess is the time worn antidote to such restlessness. But regular physical exercise is also generally important to academic performance—and not just for young students. It can help boost various types of cognition in kids into the [...]

Emotion is a powerful driver of behavior, sometimes too powerful. Virtually everyone has had the experience of reacting in the heat of the moment only to later regret his or her words or deed. An almond-shaped structure in the center of the brain called the amygdala is a hub for emotional responses. When it’s in [...]

The Promise – a bold credited, copyright future Initially, I was enamored by Pinterest, the image sharing and collecting site.  It’s like a visual scrapbook of all the things you love online, and does what Tumblr has neglected to do, and requires a link back to the source of each image. Amazing. A boon for artists, illustrators [...]

“What famous painting does this remind you of?” I was sitting in the offices of Spongelab Interactive about a month ago speaking with  Jeremy Friedberg, molecular genetics and biotechnology professor, now science education game-guru, and we were discussing the interactive opening image of History of Biology, an expansive mystery game. The image in question, above, contains [...]

Tonight, Channel 4 here in the UK screens a new TV show called Alien Investigations [adjacent screengrab from here on the Channel 4 site]. I believe that it has already been screened on the Science Channel in North America, where it was titled Alien Mummies. I haven’t yet seen the show so cannot comment on [...]

Addiction remains a topic riddled with bad science commentary and outdated beliefs, mainly because no one wants to talk about it. One of my favorite drug and addiction writers Dirk Hansen has tied his posts, those covered in his Addiction Inbox blog, together in an anthology — a fascinating and detailed one, about questions and [...]

I’ve asked a scientist who has struggled with mental health issues and substance abuse through STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate school to write about it, to highlight the pressures faced and the way problems are noticed, exacerbated and often, perhaps unintentionally, masked over the course of education. This as well as other recent [...]

Infographics are the internet’s current darling, which got me thinking if there are any good ones on drugs and addiction. Low and behold, they exist! Here are my favorite eye-openers, covering the gamut from prescription drugs to teen drug abuse: ++ Click to Enlarge Image ++Image Source: SpinaBifidaInfo.com ——————————————————————- Via Recovery Connection View More Addiction [...]

I asked a dear friend if she would share her story on my blog, and I’m honored that she agreed. I’m amazed to know her and to be involved with sharing her message. Please read, watch and share it with parents you know: Robin and Zoe My name is Robin Kellner. I live in New [...]

To offer different insight, here’s a guest post written by a 12-year-old, illuminating the scarcity of drug knowledge kids have. Tomorrow, I’ll look into the drugs he discusses. Today, here are his thoughts on drugs and responses to questions posed by me. This is his unedited, typed draft: So I’m sitting in this school assembly [...]

The Occupy Wall Street movement may do wonders in fighting outlandish bouts of capitalism on the upper echelons of society, but it got me thinking about egregious waste on our own ground, right here within the 99%. Let’s consider, for a moment, the question of substance use and abuse. Alcohol Our U.S. consumer culture spends [...]

Continuing in my recent vein, I’m still wondering about the intricacies of drug education. I started perusing decades’ worth of drug education campaigns, only to be heartily amused by these videos…and wondering if we’ve advanced much. We can laugh at these and shelve them as vintage relics of yesteryear and ridiculous campaigns if used today [...]

Last week at an open and lush Midtown East coffee shop, I met a stranger, a chance Twitter connection. This well-dressed, petite, dark-haired woman somehow recognized me when I was still half a block away, her clasped hands in front of her glimpsing into a wave. “I knew it was you,” she began warmly. Then, [...]