About this time last year, I posted about a new course I was going to teach, Phage Genomics. Briefly: Phage isolation, electron microscopy, DNA sequencing in the first semester, annotation and comparative genomics in the second. And I get to teach the bioinformatics bit: annotation and comparative genomics. Woo-hoo! The great thing about this course, [...]
The Playing for Change Foundation is dedicated to musical education worldwide. From their mission statement: A decade ago a small group of documentary filmmakers set out with a dream to create a film rooted in the music of the streets. Not only has that dream been realized, it has blossomed into a global sensation called Playing [...]
Miami University has joined the National Genomics Research Initiative (NGRI) offered by HHMI Science Education Alliance (SEA) in their Phage Genomics course. The students go directly into the lab, participating in an authentic research experience. In a full-year academic course they: isolate and characterize bacterial viruses from their local soil prepare the viral DNA [...]
The PhD Challenge asks graduate students to do their utmost in their submitted papers. You thought getting a paper accepted is hard? Try getting a paper accepted which contains the sentence “I smoke crack rocks”. That was the PhD challenge for 2010, and Gabriel Parent from Carnegie Mellon University has lived up to it with [...]
If you are a teacher / instructor in the broadest sense of the word and have used this blog in your instructional capacity, please take a couple of minutes to fill out this short survey below (Five questions only, short. Really! short!!) It is important for me to know the extent of BsB’s outreach and [...]
A small spike on my blog traffic yesterday led me to look for the source via Google Analytics. (If you are a blogger, you should really use this tool, lots of useful traffic information.) Seems like most of the traffic came from the page of a high school science teacher at Badin High School in [...]
The celebrations of Darwin’s 200th birthday and 150 years for the publication of The Origin of the Species are in full swing. We are apes equipped with 10 digits on our forelimbs, which we use in just about everything we do. We like numbers that are multiples of 10; even better if they are 10 [...]
