Writings and videos about science activities with an emphasis on environmental science and energy measurement

The One of my most unusual activities involves the creation of spreadsheets from the CIA Factbook comparing different countries in their levels of socioeconomic development and quality of life (Lab 2-3: Development and Quality of Life). When I first tried this activity on my students I made them create the whole spreadsheet from scratch, and split the work rather inefficiently. There was a lot of groaning, but the long-term rewards more than made up for it. The worldly per...

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Yesterday I attended a job fair and used this opportunity to promote my manual in person. One of the school representatives asked me if these labs had been approved by the College Board. I told her that I based my labs on topics from the textbook by Richard Wright ("Environmental Science: Towards a Sustainable Future" ISBN-10: 0132302659 • ISBN-13: 9780132302654). This is helpful, but I forgot to tell her that the College Board approved a syllabus I submitted in 2009 with labs that came exc...
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Some of you who are mostly trained in biology will see the Lab 3-6 (Fuel Cell Dynamics) and get turned off before you even purchase the lab manual. For the record, my doctorate is in zoology, and the title of my dissertation is “The Hormonal Control of Vitellogenesis in Decapod Crustacea” (are your eyes glazing over?). I teach classes peripherally related to my specialty because my post-doc did not take me anywhere (mostly my fault). In fact, I never heard of environmenta...

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This is not an update on my lab manual. It is environmental news that some of you might find interesting. Here is a lecture by Allan Savory on using grazers to reverse the process of desertification, thereby addressing one of the worst consequences of climate change. Here is the link: 

http://vimeo.com/8291896

I am not an agronomist, but what he suggests is both counterintuitive and contradictory to what we teach from our textbooks. Nevertheless, his hypothesis on how this impr...
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Lab 2-3 (Development and Quality of Life) entails the construction of a large spreadsheet from scratch. If you have plenty of time (as in my case when I worked at Saint Anselm’s) you can apply it as a cooperative assignment in which students are assigned different sections. This does not work if you are pressed for time (as I am in my current job), so I used a different strategy: I took the students to the computer room and had them navigate the CIA fact...
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Last week we carried out Lab 1-5 (Solution Chemistry of Natural Waters) without the benefit of the conductivity meter I had in my previous job. Though I probably could have borrowed one from the chemistry department, I chose to use my digital multimeter (easily available in most electronics hobby shops and hardware stores). A physics instructor had told me that all I needed to do was to set the multimeter for measuring ohms, then simply measure the electrical resistance of the solution (which...
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Two weeks ago we performed Lab 3.1 (Carbon Cycling Between Goldfish and Elodea) using Spirogyra and zebra fish. Even though the procedure went smoothly, I did not realize that the manual had failed to provide formulas for properly answering questions 5 and 7. Below are the formulas with explanations:

5) If you divide the numbers in column I (fish) by column I (plants), you will have the reciprocal of the ratio of fish to plants needed to provide a 1:1 ratio...
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Last week I needed green water in order to do Lab 1-2 (Net Primary Productivity & Biological Oxygen Demand). It's not easy finding it in the middle of January, but on the day of the lab I drove to my most reliable source: a 1-acre pond in a small park heavily trafficked by waterfowl. To my dismay, the pond had been drained for cleaning! With little time to spare, I needed a substitute, so I used the filamentous algae that was invading my fish tank. I distributed the algae equally into light a...
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