Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Video: Bill Gates narrates "Defeating Dengue" with Wolbachia

This week Bill Gates appropriately labelled mosquitoes the most dangerous animals in the world in this blog post. The nearly two-minute long video below is narrated by Gates, who explains how Wolbachia researchers in the Eliminate Dengue project have been aggressively infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia bacteria and releasing the mosquitoes into areas where dengue virus is a significant problem. "Wolbachia blocks the disease…It has a very good chance of success", Gates says.


Saturday, April 26, 2014

I F***ing Love Science. I f***ing love Charles Darwin.



The viral video age demands that science have a video anthem. And here it is (uncensored). Lyrical shots go out to Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Rosalind Franklin. Rumor has it that the epic Facebook page I F***ing Love Science (13 million people follow it) will officially have this song as its official theme song. I would be remiss not to share it here. Science needs so much more entertainment like it.




Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Flipping Discovery Based Research: An Interview With High School Students

For the past decade, the international outreach program Discover the Microbes Within! The Wolbachia Project has embraced a learning revolution in discovery-based research, inquiry, and collaborative bidirectional learning. I had the pleasure to capture some of these elements with this video below. Here is the YouTube link if you can't see it.

Recorded on April 22, 2014, three talented high school students from the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt talk about their learning experiences in peer-to-peer learning. In the last five months, their goals were (i) to become experts in the international outreach program Discover the Microbes Within! The Wolbachia Project (ii) synthesize and retool the content to transmit it back to a metro Nashville high school classroom and (iii) find out what they learned about themselves and scientific literacy during the process. The latter is what this portion of the interview captures and is the "secret sauce" of peer-to-peer learning. Find out what they had to say.

Website for the Discover the Microbes Within discovery-based research program: http://discover.mbl.edu