al-mofhariz

Yes, I did just say math....I usually only blog about science, but today is an exception.  I've got to share with you my favorite way to teach probability, fractions and decimal connections.  My good friend, Sherrie Roland, came up with this idea many years ago and shared it with me. I have done it for the past three years and each year I believe it is one of the best ways my kids make sense of probability and fractions....through the events that happen on American Idol!

I must admit, this year has had me on my toes!  Usually we have some time to explore with 18 contestants and watch them dwindle down to the top 12.  But this year we went from the top 20 to the top 10 in one week!

Here's how we start....I created a bulletin board that shows the top 20 contestants with their official photo shoot pictures. 


 After they were eliminated, and we went from 20 to 10 we noticed that we had lost 10/20 contestants which is the same as 1/2 which is the same as 50%.  We also noticed that …

We asked Evan Hepler-Smith, a historian of science whose work focuses on how chemists have used language, data, and method over the last hundred years, what the sort of questions he asks might reveal about contemporary science. He sent us the following guest post; you can find out more about his work here.
Recently, a small group of scientists has begun been laying the foundation of a new interdisciplinary field. Their ambitions include applying biological mechanisms to the synthesis of new drug candidates, integrating huge collections of biological and chemical data, and linking western pharmaceutical science with the study of traditional Chinese medicine at the molecular level. They call their new field “chemomics.”
So far, chemomics isn’t much more than a twinkle in the eye of a few pharmaceutical chemists, but it already has a catchy name, which makes one reflect on how, as Patrick McCray recently remarked, nearly everything seems to have an “-omics” these days.
In the life sciences,…