Operation Magpie was a citizen science project that involved the community in collecting data about magpies. This article describes one aspect of the project from an education perspective. The study began with a collaboration of teacher educators, environmental scientists and a local radio station. After an initial workshop with 75 teachers, three…

REEFGAME is a computer-assisted role-playing game that explores the interactions among management strategies, livelihood options, and ecological degradation in subsistence fishing communities. The tool has been successfully used in the Philippines and a variety of student workshops. In the field, REEFGAME operated as a two-way learning tool,…

While environmental argumentation has recently received much attention from science educators, little consideration has been given to how personal identities and social relationships can either support or constrain student argumentation. This study attends to this issue by examining environmental argumentation as a sociocultural activity (how…

Animal learning researchers have argued that one example of a linearly nonseparable problem is negative patterning, and therefore they have used more complicated multilayer networks to study this kind of discriminant learning. However, it is shown in this paper that previous attempts to define negative patterning problems to artificial neural…

This article describes an interdisciplinary, activity-based lesson plan implemented in a third/fourth-grade classroom. During these activities, students use musical concepts to think about, illustrate, and discuss animal behavior, and they use scientific concepts to motivate musical composition and performance. The lesson ends with small group…

Velo-cardio-facial syndrome/DiGeorge syndrome (VCFS/DGS), the most common micro-deletion disorder in humans, is characterized by craniofacial, parathyroid, and thymic defects as well as cardiac outflow tract malformations. Most patients have a similar hemizygous 3 million base pair deletion on 22q11.2. Studies in mouse have shown that "Tbx1", a…

The touchscreen testing method for rodents is a computer-automated behavioral testing method that allows computer graphic stimuli to be presented to rodents and the rodents to respond to the computer screen via a nose-poke directly to the stimulus. The advantages of this method are numerous; however, a systematic study of the parameters that…

The degree of acceptance of dog guides at public facilities, which is required by law in Japan, was investigated, and evidence of rejection was found. Japanese people with visual impairments who used dog guides reported higher daily stress levels than did those who did not use dog guides. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

This article profiles Christopher Benfey, 53--an art critic for Slate, a poet, and a prolific literary essayist for such venues as "The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic," and "The New York Review of Books." His latest book, "A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily…

To achieve the vision of mathematics set forth in "Crossroads" ("AMATYC," 1995), students must experience mathematics as a sensemaking endeavor that informs their world. Embedding the study of mathematics into the real world is a challenge, particularly because it was not the way that many of us learned mathematics in the first place. This article…

Gene-environment interaction (G x E) has been treated as both a statistical phenomenon and a biological reality. It is argued that, although there are important statistical issues that need to be considered, the focus has to be on the biological implications of G x E. Four reports of G x E deriving from the Dunedin longitudinal study are used as…

This article shows how a matrix can be used to represent a food chain and how the square of this matrix represents the indirect food sources for each animal in the chain. By exploring, through mathematics, the implications when the bottom of the food chain is destroyed, students will see an important connection between mathematics and science.…

Mutational inactivation of a specific gene is the most powerful technique to analyze the biological function of the gene. This approach has been used for a long time in viruses, bacteria, yeast, and fruit fly, but looked quite hopeless in more complex organisms. Targeted inactivation of specific genes (also known as knock-out mutation) in mice is…

Several lines of evidence in humans and experimental animals suggest that the hippocampus is critical for the formation and retrieval of spatial memory. However, although the hippocampus is reciprocally connected to adjacent cortices within the medial temporal lobe and they, in turn, are connected to the neocortex, little is known regarding the…

Fear responses can be eliminated through extinction, a procedure involving the presentation of fear-eliciting stimuli without aversive outcomes. Extinction is believed to be mediated by new inhibitory learning that acts to suppress fear expression without erasing the original memory trace. This hypothesis is supported mainly by behavioral data…