This clean roadcut exposure of Marin County's finest ribbon chert is documented in a gigapan image that can be enlarged 100 times. Image by Ron Schott.

If you've ever wished your camera could take a humongous photo that captures everything, then gigapans are for you. Gigapans are billion-pixel images that are stitched together, like a patchwork quilt, from hundreds of shots made by ordinary cameras. A special mount and software programs the camera to take precisely overlapping images, which are then seamlessly merged into one colossal shot tens of thousands of pixels across.

Many of us first witnessed the potential of gigapans when photographers compiled them during President Obama's inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2009. This example, by David Bergman, allows you to zoom in and study every face in the crowd that day, from four former presidents to Jane and Joe Blow (and Newt Gingrich is there too).

There are over 50,000 gigapans uploaded at gigapan.com. Their subjects range from the night sky, to cityscapes, to hotel room interiors.

Naturally I would want such a thing used for geology. First I would want to see eye candy, like the Grand Canyon. And places I'll never visit, like the South Pole. Scientists have made gigapans like those—how could they resist?—but they've also made real teaching and research tools.

For instance, you and I in the Bay Area can easily drive to the Marin Headlands or elsewhere in Marin County and inspect all the deep-sea red ribbon chert we want. But geology teacher Ron Schott, the leading geological gigapanner, has captured a fine roadcut exposure in the image at the top of this post. Now his students in Kansas can zoom into it as close as being there, inches from the rock face:

Detail near the left edge of the Marin County roadcut. Image by Ron Schott.

Any teacher, anywhere, can assign a lab exercise built around this image that's almost as good as a day trip. Instructors can show students the classic wave-cut platforms of the California coast in a gigapan that's every bit as good for teaching as standing on the spot with binoculars—in fact there's a 3D version, too.

It gets better. Northern Virginia Community College's Mid-Atlantic Geo-Imagery Collection (M.A.G.I.C.) has great outcrops, but also great macros of sand. A petri dish of Hawaii's green sand, for instance, can be blown up to display every gorgeous olivine grain, microscope style. M.A.G.I.C. is the brainchild of Callan Bentley, an NVCC professor who features gigapans often in his Mountain Beltway blog.

M.A.G.I.C. image

The Obama inauguration gigapan hints at another thing scientists can do, which is to archive and document large-scale natural features in detail. A great example from Yosemite Valley is the Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project, which compiled a photographic dataset of the granite walls of the entire valley by stitching together 20 gigapans into something I can only call a humongapan. Then this image was tied to a 3D terrain model, constructed from laser scans, for real 21st-century analysis. The project has already pinpointed the sources of rockfalls to aid in analyzing where they may come next, helping protect the public from danger. You can explore the walls of Yosemite in a gigapan of the final product.

 Capturing the Night Sky: Past and Present Educator Guide

Which begs the question, how did they do that before cell phones? As the saying goes, behind every good digital astronomy app is an analog photographic plate. Beginning in the mid-19th century, astronomers began utilizing the art of photographic emulsion to capture images of celestial objects. For the first time, astronomers were able to etch their discoveries onto thick glass plates ushering in a new era of data analysis that would help unlock the mysteries of the universe.

But don’t take my word for it. If it’s good enough for Einstein, it’s good enough for me.

Photographic plates helped scientists determine the size, distance and composition of celestial objects such as stars, comets, meteors and planets. Galileo Galilei would be proud. By the early 1990s, the once highly esteemed “analog” plates had fallen out of favor for images captured by new, charged-coupled devices such as digital cameras. Many of the old plates were put on the shelf and stored in basements and barns.

PARI to the rescue: the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) is a non-profit astronomy, research and education facility located in western North Carolina. PARI scientists recognized the archival value in saving the old astro-photographic plates and created the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, or ADPA, to be housed at PARI’s vast campus.

I recently had the opportunity to visit PARI, poke around their archives and find out why it’s worth saving the old data. What I discovered was that these plates – which a lay-person like me can easily mistake for a dirty windshield {include pic here} – contain a lot data that’s not only historic, but vital to today’s research.

During our visit we spoke with scientists from NASA (link to web extra) as well as the European Space Agency who attribute the success of current and future space missions to data gleamed from APDA.

It turns out there is no expiration date on these invaluable snapshots of the night sky. The plate’s spectral images act as a time-stamp for what the night sky looked like before it was polluted with what one NASA scientists described as “space junk.”

The scientists at PARI compared their collection to the Library of Alexandria. Science Director Michael Castelaz told me, “If that library hadn’t been destroyed, the knowledge that could have been passed on from the philosophers and the Greeks from three millennia ago would just have benefited us greatly. So I think we’re in the same situation.”

Castelaz believes the hidden potential inscribed in the plates have yet to be fully realized. He and his PARI colleagues are stewards of history, preserving the pates for future generations and ensuring that the next Einstein has the resources to turn the world on its axis once again. After all, the proof is in the plates.

This weekend, I went to Año Nuevo State Reserve to see the elephant seals, along with 14 Oakland middle schoolers. Some friends at The Lawrence Hall of Science, where I work, needed an extra driver for a field trip. I’d never been to Año Nuevo before, so I volunteered. We had a great trip—warm weather, a terrific tour guide, and plenty of animals to observe. Those perceptive middle schoolers narrowed in on a few salient facts about elephant seal life.

We took a guided walk through the sand dunes with a docent named Bob. He started and ended the tour with poems by John Muir, peppered the kids with questions, and told us some amazing info about elephant seals. He had elephant seal whiskers in his pocket, and a piece of molted skin, which he passed around to the students. They were simultaneously repulsed and fascinated. After two hours in the warm sun, peering at elephant seals through binoculars and snapping photos with cell phones, we were headed back. During our long walk from the beach to the parking lot, I asked a few kids what they found most interesting about the elephant seals. And when we got back the parking lot, we asked the kids to share with a partner what they learned about the seals, and what they still wondered. Here are the top three things that middle schoolers noticed about elephant seals.

1. Elephant seals mate. Right in front of you. And… it’s sort of violent. Males move in on the females, and sometimes bite them so they won’t struggle. As our tour guide explained, pregnant female elephant seals come onshore to give birth in December. When they head out to sea a few months later, they’re pregnant again. They’ll return to Año Nuevo and repeat the process again next year. As one girl put it, “I wouldn’t like to have a baby every year. And I wouldn’t like it if I couldn’t pick who dad would be.” From the sounds of some of those female elephant seals, they may feel the same way.

2. Elephant seal moms are mean. They nurse their babies for about a month, and then leave the babies to fend for themselves. Elephant seal milk is super fatty—the pups gain up to 250 pounds during their month of nursing. Once they’re fattened up, the moms take off. The pups are then called weaners, and they live off their fat while they learn to swim and fish for themselves. About 50% of the weaners will survive the year. However, some weaners don’t even make it off the beach. We saw a skinny-looking little elephant seal, all alone, making meager movements of its flippers to flick sand onto its body to keep cool. It was forlorn and wrinkly, not glossy, fat, and round like its neighbors. Bob said it probably wouldn’t survive. It likely got separated from its mother before it had gotten fat enough to get through the weeks without food. The students were really upset about the fact that we were standing on the sand dunes, basically watching this little elephant seal die.

A dominant male elephant seal shows who’s boss.

3. Elephant seals can be huge. The dominant males, called bulls, can be up to 16 feet long. This is three times the height of Justin Beiber, who, as I learned on the drive out, is only 5 foot 4. Big male elephant seals can move improbably quickly across the sand, to defend their harem from smaller males who try to mate with the females on the sly. In their rush to scare away the interlopers, the big bulls sometimes mow down little elephant seal pups. The small pups are basking in the sun, and can’t get out of the way in time. About 5% of the pups at Año Nuevo are crushed under adult seals. We might have seen a pup get mowed down. Maybe. Its rear flippers might have been squished; we weren’t really sure. The little guy moved a bit, but then stopped moving. Then it moved again. And then it was time to go.

Look!

These kids will go on a series of field trips throughout the year, to tidepools and marine labs, as part of a Lawrence Hall of Science program funded by a California Coastal Commission Whale Tail Grant. The Coastal Commission awards dozens of grants for youth programs and coastal cleanups. The funding comes from the sales of the Whale Tail license plate.

Learn more about elephant seals in Sheraz Sadiq’s QUEST blog post, Diving to New Scientific Depths with Elephant Seals.

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These Chinese students are kicking our butts in science.

New test results confirm what many of us have feared: U.S. students suck at science. These new numbers are not only bad for our reputation, they spell trouble for the future U.S. economy and possibly the world. Maybe President Obama is right and we are in the middle of another “Sputnik” moment.

The most recent test results put us on par with France, the Czech Republic and Hungary and miles away from the likes of China, South Korea, Finland and Australia. The top countries will be producing the best scientists who will drive economies forward. Those of us in the middle of the pack will either fall behind economically or stay competitive either by attracting good scientists from elsewhere or by changing our education system to match the Finns or the Aussies.

Of course this is only true if these results hold for top performing students, too. Since most scientists come from this group, if the top performing students in the U.S. hold their own against their counterparts in other countries, then we may be OK.

The testing folks provide this great tool, the International Data Explorer, that lets you parse the data in lots of different ways. And no matter how I sliced the data, we are in the middle of the pack. If I look at wealthy folks, or students who have educated parents or students that have scientists as parents, each category is still behind lots of different countries.

So we can’t blame the test results on immigrants, the poor or any of our usual convenient scapegoats. We are simply doing a poor job of teaching science. Such a poor job that our economy is going to be in real trouble in the not so distant future.

And it isn’t just our economy that is threatened. A general U.S. public that is not up to snuff scientifically might just put our world at risk too.

A scientifically illiterate public will fear vaccines and GM foods, won’t understand and so won’t believe in global warming and so on. This could mean a spread of disease, starvation and environmental catastrophes just to name a few.

It is important to remember that none of this is inevitable. We can ramp up our science education so that we train the best scientists in the world and maybe even create a scientifically informed and savvy public in the process.

In fact, Massachusetts has done just that in the last 15 or 20 years. If it were a country, Massachusetts would now be in the upper ranks of countries. We need to look to Massachusetts for how to improve other states' failing education systems.

Massachusetts shows that with the will and money to do it, we can turn our educational system around. Sadly, though, I am not sure most of the country will. Sputnik came with the fear of nuclear holocaust. Our current crisis comes with the fear of future irrelevance and a decreased standard of living.

The current risks are not life and death and so it will be much harder to mobilize the government, the public, and the unions to transform our education system. I guess our dominance economically and scientifically was good while it lasted.

A fun interactive that lets you compare math, science and reading scores between states and different countries.

State by state math scores compared to other countries.

Why this crisis will be harder to overcome than the Sputnik crisis.

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Finally a reliable scientific resource on the web.

A really interesting project called Scitable recently came to my attention. This site is sponsored by the same folks who publish Scientific American, Nature, and many other scientific journals and magazines. It is intended to provide students, teachers, professors and the public with easy to read, understandable materials about science.

From a quick look, it looks like a great website for advanced high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, scientists, and the well educated. If this is you, take a look here and let me know what you think.

Below is an email interview I did with the guy who runs the site, Vikram Savkar. It focuses on what Scitable offers and some ways to heal our ailing science education system.

Many of our readers will not have heard of Scitable before. Can you please give a brief history of the group and what you hope to accomplish.

Scitable is an open, high quality science teaching and learning site from Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature, Scientific American, and a number of other science journals and magazines. We launched Scitable because we feel strongly that inspiring and enabling today’s students to immerse themselves in science is crucial for the future of the planet. Without dedicated scientific researchers, or at least a science-literate population, we won’t be able to make the progress we need as a global community on sustainability, food security, diseases, and so on. Our goal is to make access to very high quality science education information and compelling scientific experiences a common denominator for students regardless of their socioeconomic or geographic background.

Can you please tell our readers who the sources are for the information on your site and how often information is updated? Do you see it as a more reliable source for people compared to what else is out there on the web (e.g. Wikipedia)?

We actively commission the pieces you see on the site from leading scientists, faculty, or science journalists, depending on the subject matter, and every piece is put through a formal review by other experts in the field. The result is that the information is high quality: current, carefully thought through, scientifically accurate, and designed explicitly for use by teachers and students. We update our pieces on average once a month . . . often when a member of the community points out a topic they think we should have covered but didn’t; we’ll route the opinion to our reviewers and if everyone agrees, we will update the article. Yes, our intention is very much for Scitable to be a marriage of the reliability and quality of information that we’re all familiar with from journals and formal publications with the ease of discovery of use that’s characteristic of sites like Wikipedia.

What is your favorite feature of Scitable? Why?

I sometimes use the search box in the People area of Scitable to figure out whether we have any student or faculty users from far-flung parts of the world . . . and usually find that we do. (Mauritius: yes. Swaziland: no. We’ll have to work on that.) We’re really trying to create a kind of global classroom – a place where students from any part of the world can collaborate with researchers, teachers, and fellow students who are interested in the same subject but potentially thousands of miles away.

Can you tell us a little bit about the resources that are available for the public, students, and/or teachers at your site? How easy is it for these people to access and use these resources?

The heart of Scitable is the extensive (and growing) content library. We have more than 600 readings in genetics, cell biology, and ecology right now, and we’re adding more across the life and physical sciences this year. We have mini-textbooks in the life sciences as well as on special topics like scientific communication and career planning. And our learning paths allow students to progress through “hot” issues like biotechnology at their own pace. We also have a strong set of classroom tools, which teachers can use to run private online research spaces for their students. In just five or ten minutes, a teacher can create a customized reading list (using content from Scitable or from anywhere on the web) and enroll students in discussions, news feeds, and so on. All of this is free. The bulk of the content doesn’t require registration; people do have to register to build or join a classroom or take a learning path. Overall, it’s really easy for people to learn through the site . . . our users are growing rapidly every month, and they come from all walks of life: students, teachers, researchers, parents, veterinarians (yes, I’ve noticed a lot of these!), genetic counselors, and more.

What do you see as the primary problem with science education today? If you had a magic wand and could fix science education, what would you do? Would it differ between K-12 and undergraduate education?

I don’t think there is a primary problem, I think that the overall quality of science education is driven by the convergence of a lot of factors: Do parents encourage kids to tinker with nature and science? Are there enough well trained science teachers, and are they incentivized to stay at tough schools? How widely available are good lab equipment and other learning materials? How successful are college instructors at reminding students of the “magic” behind the memorization? If I had a magic wand, I would wave it at all of these. If I had to pick one . . . that’s tough . . . I would probably work on ensuring that there are highly qualified teachers (which means not only understanding science but having a solid background in teaching methods) in all schools, including and particularly under resourced ones. But, really, the key point for me is that there isn’t just one thing to focus on, we must take a holistic approach.

Who is the primary audience for Scitable? K-12 students, K-12 educators, undergraduates, the general public, graduate students, etc.?

The audience in formal education ranges from advanced high school classes to junior/senior level undergraduate classes . . . we have a broad set of content in the site, so there is much there for everyone within that range. The audience among the general public seems to be encouragingly varied, there are so many different kinds of people whom I have seen find their way to the site. People really do instinctively get excited by science; when we provide a way for them to easily find good answers to their questions, they will take advantage of it.

Do you see Scitable as a resource for that day in the not too distant future when everyone knows their own DNA sequence? Are there any resources available and accessible for the average person at your site? Or is it mostly focused right now on aspiring or actual scientists?

There are many resources for the average person, and we plan to publish more. A good example is our growing collection of Spotlights, which are essentially “home pages” for topics like Alternative Energy and Acoustic Pollution, intended specifically to help general learners go beyond the newspaper headlines and learn the actual science behind hot-button issues. I don’t see us ever helping people to make medical judgments of any kind, but I do see us helping a broad set of citizens to understand something substantial about the fields of research that can lead to a vastly improved quality of life for all of us. And to vote in ways that help make this future a reality.

A previous blog on the difficulties of finding good scientific information on the web.

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School of Rock participant Amy Work interviews marine
geophysicist Kris Ludwig

I have just finished my first week at the School of Rock on board the research vessel JOIDES Resolution. My fellow "Rockers" and I have just four more days on the ship before we are back in port in Victoria, British Columbia. Then we head our separate ways to share our experiences with those back home. The educators participating in the School of Rock have diverse workplaces and audiences, yet we are all developing projects to communicate what we have learned on the JOIDES Resolution from the scientists (and from each other). These projects will be shared with students, colleagues and other educators around the country.

The theme of "science careers" is emerging in many of the projects being developed. As educators, we try to expose students to the numerous career options available in the sciences. On this ship alone, there are scientists with expertise in chemistry and geochemistry, geophysics, paleontology, sedimentology and paleomagnetism–who all collaborate since they concentrate on different areas of oceanography. Beyond the scientists, the ship requires laboratory technicians with many of the same specialties to assist the scientists, as well as drilling engineers and coring technicians.

When discussing how we can best demonstrate these disciplines and careers to students, the first thought that comes to mind is using media. By recording the scientists as they talk about their work, we can hear the passion they have for what they do. We can see the animation on their faces as they discuss how what they do makes a difference to society. And we can show students that scientists are real people, with diverse backgrounds, who all took a different path to get where they are today. Let the interviews begin.

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Participants of the School of Rock discuss the process of science

Get a group of science educators and scientists together, ask them the question "What is science?" and see what happens. Will everyone agree exactly on each term? Maybe not, but you'll see a shared passion for the subject. On our second day of the School of Rock, our "principal" posed that question to the group. What followed was an engaging and intelligent conversation.

We started by listing components of science, which was a fairly easy task. We agreed that science includes the following: observations, generating hypotheses, data collection, reasoning from multiple lines of evidence, revisions based on new data, seeking additional evidence, peer review, and collaboration and consensus. When put all together, science is a process, although not a linear one.

We then looked at a flow diagram entitled "How Science Works," published by the University of California Museum of Paleontology. It is an updated version of the outdated linear scientific method that most of us were taught in school. Absent from this newer diagram is the idea that the scientific process must start with a question, and that a question warrants a single hypothesis. Also gone is the notion that after doing an experiment and getting results, you have an answer to your question and the process is over. Instead, the diagram shows feedback between exploration, testing, analysis and outcomes…and this process does not stop.

"How Science Works" (image credit: UCMP)

Our discussion around the diagram focused on the pathways between each of the components. One pathway demonstrates that the benefits and outcomes of science, such as problem solving and new technology, can lead back to exploration and discovery. The pathway isn't shown in reverse, but we wondered if exploration can lead directly to community benefits without first gathering and interpreting data. Also, there are pathways into the system, illustrating that the scientific process is not a closed system, but that there is input from external sources. We wondered if there should also be pathways leading out of the system that depict outreach and education.

What do you think? How would you alter this description of science?

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The JOIDES Resolution

How many science educators have the opportunity to spend two weeks at sea on a scientific drill ship? Only about 20 per year, and this year I'm one of them. QUEST Education was invited to participate in the School of Rock, sponsored by Deep Earth Academy, on board the research vessel JOIDES Resolution. The JR, as the ship is called, is 470 feet long and runs 24 hours a day drilling core samples and collecting measurements from under the ocean floor. The data gives scientists a better understanding of the history of the Earth's climatic change.

For the next two weeks, my School of Rock comrades and I will be working alongside scientists exploring cores and developing educational resources. We're departing out of Victoria, British Columbia, and are headed for Site 889 (that's about 50 miles off the coast). The specific purpose of this expedition is to install a CORK–not quite like one found in a wine bottle, but a Circulation Obviation Retrofit Kit. The CORK will mon­itor pressure at different depths in the ocean floor over time.

As part of my role with QUEST Education, I will be working with the other School of Rock participants to create short multimedia pieces about our experiences and about the drilling research we will be taking part in. These slideshows and videos will be great tools for engaging students in various aspects of earth science, careers and to help them better understand current scientific research. My arsenal of equipment contains 10 Flip Video cameras, 10 tripods, an audio recorder, digital camera, several sets of headphones and the all-important laptop. I'm looking forward to seeing the creativity of my colleagues.

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The Bay Area Festival of Science

Every year, Wonderfest pairs researchers to answer provocative questions in the world of science. The point is to create an engaging dialogue between the scientists and the audience, empowering people to make up their own mind.

I’m always blown away by the scientific luminaries that take part in the dialogues. Just last year, there was a dialogue on our energy future featuring current Secretary of Energy (and Nobel Laureate) Steven Chu and co-lead author of the IPCC report on climate change Dan Kammen.

This year is no exception with an expanded line-up of exceptional dialogues:

Does Moore’s Law Apply to Energy Technology?
Does Media Violence Inspire Real Violence?
Is Evolution Still Darwinian?
Do Robots Make Better Astronauts?
Does Darwin Illuminate Emotion & Spirituality?
Can We Create Life?

Dialogues not your thing? This year brings the debut of the Amateur Science Forum, (exhibitions of local citizen science programs), the Bay Area Science Expo (shop for science inspired books, crafts, and music), and my personal favorite: the Mind Duel. The Mind Duel is a science quiz competition between a local high champion and a panel of local science professors. A Nobel Laureate humbled by a local high student…it’s possible and likely at Wonderfest.

Wonderfest 2009

When: Saturday 11/7 1-10 PM, Sunday 11/8 10 AM -5 PM
Where: Saturday – Hewlett Teaching Center, Stanford University
Sunday – Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley
Cost: FREE
Details: Through public discourse about provocative scientific questions, Wonderfest aspires to stimulate curiosity, promote careful reasoning, challenge unexamined beliefs, and encourage life-long learning. Wonderfest achieves these ends by presenting series of scientific events to the general public. At most of these events, pairs of articulate and accomplished researchers discuss and debate compelling questions at the edge of scientific understanding.

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Aquaman was Healy Hamilton's favorite superhero growing up.

When I first heard about Healy Hamilton at a meeting QUEST was having with the California Academy of Sciences, I just knew I was going to like her. I mean, what kind of scientist studies not only the effects of climate change on biodiversity, but also has independent projects with river dolphins, seahorses and octopuses? Talk about Bio…Diversity! (ouch)

So what do you do with a scientist with such diverse interests? Well, we featured her in no less than three QUEST TV stories in our third season. (Incidentally, this record is only matched by another Cal Academy Scientist, Bob Full. I guess they attract a lot of very interesting people over there at the Academy).

This latest story "Why I Do Science" is geared towards kids (and Aquaman fanatics). Also see Healy in ""Seahorse Sleuth" and "Climate Watch: California at the Tipping Point."

Watch the Why I Do Science television story online.

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