What are the forces that drive science and technology? How do we get from Wilbur and Orville Wright’s day where they could tinker their way to a major engineering breakthrough with little more than spruce frames, canvas and a hand built engine.... what.... "a hand built engine?" Where did this come from?

It might be hard for the young student to see the fun in math. Up till now it has been memorize, memorize, memorize for them. This can give them a break and tease their minds.

How do we get kids excited about math? In this age of high tech video games why would a kid want to be excited about math they have to do in their mind or with pencil and paper?

Humor-

Comics are supposed to be fun, light reading. Something I read on MSNBC’s Comics & Games website has been on my mind for a few months. The column titled "News of the Weird" by Chuck Shepherd (March 30, 2008) had one paragraph that caught my attention.

"A team of researchers from the University of Calgary and the Tokyo Institute of Technology proudly announced in February that they had successfully stored "nothing" inside a puff of gas and then had managed to retrieve that same "nothing." That "nothing," is called a "squeezed vacuum," and the physicists tell us that a light wave can be manipulated so that its phases are of uncertain amplitude, then the light itself removed so that only the "uncertainty" property of the wave remains. ScienceNOW Daily News, 2-29-08"

Everything interacts with its environment - from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the largest galaxy. We are no different.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about a Chicago charter school.

I was naive enough to believe that if a group of ninth graders could not read it was unique to this Chicago school. Today I read a report by Christopher B. Swanson, Ph.D. titled "Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytical Report on High School Graduation." Dr. Swanson’s report clearly shows that we are in an academic crisis in the U.S.

This report shows beyond a doubt America’s urban high schools are in a state of crisis. "Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in the America’s largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss." In the most extreme cases, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis, fewer than 35 percent of students graduate. "The 50 most heavily populated cities in the U.S. were identified using 2006 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. These urban centers are widely distributed across the country, with top-50 cities scattered across 29 states."

If you read the medical news lately you may have seen a headline title Skeleton May Show Ancient Brain Surgery. This article was about an 1800 year old skeleton found in Veria, Greece. The skeleton was of a woman of about 25 years of age that suffered severe head trauma and underwent cranial surgery, unfortunately evidence shows that she did not survive.

There is an interesting history of skull surgery, known as trepanation, which comes from the Greek word trypanon, meaning auger or borer. Cranial trepanation has caught the interest of surgeons and archeologist since the 1860's, when it was first realized that ancient humans had scraped or cut holes in the skulls of living persons in France and Peru.

Trepanation is serious enough surgical procedure in this day and age, could this procedure have taken place as a routine operation as long ago as 2000 BC? We do have a historical record of thousands of skulls with evidence of this surgery. Sometimes historical records suggest a reality that we find hard to accept.

I feel like I am going to be preaching-to-the-choir with this blog. The fact that you are reading it puts you in the "choir." I would encourage all of you to read the first two columns of the article "A New Bottom Line For School Science" by Jeffrey Mervis in Science Vol. 319, p. 1030-33, Feb. 22, 08.

The quote from this article that has me upset is "I don’t use a textbook or assign written homework because so many of them (the students) wouldn’t be able to read it." If this were a quote from a third grade teacher in a rural school for the children of migrant workers, I would still be upset but I could understand the teacher’s dilemma. How do I reconcile the fact that this quote is from a ninth grade teacher in a Chicago charter school, a school that specializes in math and science education?

How do we get to the point where an article in a prestigious science journal mentions the fact that a group of ninth graders in one of our largest cities can’t read and there isn’t a national outcry. The emphasis of the article is not about this school or this quote, it is about the $14 billion corporate philanthropy give away in the U.S. that targets pre-K - 12 activities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education. Reading would appear to be a prerequisite for understanding math or science.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

The Science and Technology Facilities Council has provided information that Science Daily has posted as an abstract of an article by Dr. Hong Sheng Zhao titled "Dark Fluid: Dark Matter And Dark Energy May Be Two Faces Of Same Coin." You can read this abstract at the web site below:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080109173722.htm

The above address is a post on Science Daily about an antimatter cloud. This should be of interest to the hard core science types and SiFi fans like myself.

The post describes an antimatter cloud that surrounds the galactic center. This cloud is about 10,000 light-years across. The European Space Agency’s "Integral" satellite has provided clues to the possible origin of this antimatter cloud. This post is well worth reading.

The author of this post quotes professor Marvin Leventhal, "I think I can hear a collective sigh of relief emanating from the (high-energy astrophysics) community." This may be so, but from the rest of us science hacks you are hearing a collective "What!" Apparently the "antimatter cloud was discovered in the 1970's by gamma-ray detectors flown on balloons."