Science & Medicine

Teaching algorithmic problem-solving with puzzles and games

By Anany Levitin
In the last few years algorithmic thinking has become somewhat of a buzz word among computer science educators, and with some justice: ubiquity of computers in today’s world does make algorithmic thinking a very important skill for almost any student. There are few colleges and universities that require non-computer science majors to take a course exposing them to important issues and methods of algorithmic problem solving.

What do mathematicians do?

By Jason Rosenhouse
Writing in 1866, the British mathematician John Venn wrote, in reference to the branch of mathematics known as probability theory, “To many persons the mention of Probability suggests little else than the notion of a set of rules, very ingenious and profound rules no doubt, with which mathematicians amuse themselves by setting and solving puzzles.” I suspect many of my students would extend Venn’s quip to the entirety of mathematics.

Space weather

By Storm Dunlop
We are all used to blaming things (rightly or wrongly) on the weather, but now it seems that this tendency has been extended to space weather. Space weather, for those who are uncertain, describes the effects that flares and other events on the Sun produce on Earth. Consult many of the sites on the World Wide Web that are devoted to events on a particular day in history, and you will be told that on 16 August 1989, a geomagnetic storm caused the Toronto Stock Exchange to crash.

So the world didn’t end? A new cycle

By Barbara Rogoff
The news was full of claims that the ancient Maya had predicted the end of the world with the winter solstice of 2012. The solstice went by a few days ago, and here we still are. Related to the mistaken claims of those in the news, the ancient Maya and the apocalypse-predictors conceive of time and life in very different ways. Unlike the end-is-coming view, life and time are cyclical in Maya cosmology. An end is a new beginning, as many current Maya spiritual guides have been trying to clarify to the world.

Animal evolution: a new view of an old tree

By Peter Holland
The metaphor of the ‘evolutionary tree’ is powerful. Closely related species, such as octopus and squid, can be pictured as twigs sitting near each other on a small branch, in turn connected to larger and larger branches, each representing more distant evolutionary relationships. Every animal species, past and present, is a twig somewhere on the vast tree of life. But what is the shape of this metaphorical tree? Can we find the correct place for all the twigs, or perhaps even just the largest branches? In short, who is related to whom? To solve this would be to reconstruct the history of animal life on our planet.

From cigarettes to obesity, public health at risk

By Mark S. Gold, MD
Public health officials and academics identified cigarette smoking and related disease as the nation’s number one killer and foremost driver of health costs in the 1980s. At that time overeating and obesity were not major problems, yet they may soon cause more disease, deaths, and health care costs than cigarettes. Food addiction, which may explain part of the epidemic, is slowly and finally “catching on”. It’s been controversial, with some scientists dismissing it out of hand, so like any hypothesis, it needs additional tests.

Neuroscience in education

By Sergio Della Sala & Mike Anderson
In the past ten years, there has been growing interest in applying our knowledge of the human brain to the field of education – including reading, learning, language, and mathematics.Teachers themselves have embraced the neuro revolution enthusiastically. 

Community-level influences of behavior change

How can you resolve to change in 2013? With a community. The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press suite of publications is now available on Oxford Medicine Online, and to highlight some of the great resources, we’ve excerpted Prathibha Varkey, MD, MPH, MHPE’s Mayo Clinic Preventive Medicine and Public Health Board Review below.

I resolve to take Benjamin Franklin seriously

It’s that time again: time to set resolutions and goals for ourselves as we enter the New Year. In this excerpt from Pursuing the Good Life, the late Christopher Peterson puts the spotlight on Benjamin Franklin, encouraging us to take the statesman a little more seriously… not for his political or scientific achievements, but for the way he set and cultivated his personal goals. Peterson shows that whether our resolutions are set in the beginning of January or halfway through the year, Franklin’s approach is one that we can all take some notes from.

Questioning the health of others and ourselves

By Patricia Prijatel
A little evergreen tree has died alongside our road and, as we walked by it yesterday, my husband wondered why. All the other trees around it are healthy and it did not look like it had been hit by lightning or damaged by wind or attacked by bugs. The tree is about six feet tall, so it lived several years. We are in the Rocky Mountains and this little guy took root on its own, growing precariously in that place by the road.

Music: a proxy language for autistic children

By Adam Ockelford

I spend around 12 hours a week – every week – sharing thoughts, feelings, new ideas, reminiscences and even jokes with some very special children who have extraordinary musical talents, and many of whom are severely autistic.

Romanticism: a legacy

By Michael Ferber
The Very Short Introductions are indeed very short, so I had to cut a chapter out of my volume that would have discussed the aftermath or legacy of Romanticism today, two hundred years after Romanticism’s days of glory. In that chapter I would have pointed out the obvious fact that those who still love poetry look at the Romantic era as poetry’s high point in every European country. Think of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Leopardi, Lamartine, Hugo, and Nerval. Those who still love “classical” music fill the concert halls to listen to Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Wagner; and those who still love traditional painting flock to look at Constable, Turner, Friedrich, and Delacroix. These poets and artists are still “alive”: their works are central to the culture from which millions of people still draw nourishment. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I would feel if I knew I could never again listen to Beethoven or read a poem by Keats.

New year’s resolution: don’t sabotage yourself

By Susan David
We humans are funny. Often we create beliefs or engage in behaviors that seem to help us in the short term, only to discover they get in the way of the lives we really want to live, or the people we want to become. Allow me to share the story of my friend, Erin.

Celebrating Newton, 325 years after Principia

By Robyn Arianrhod
This year, 2012, marks the 325th anniversary of the first publication of the legendary Principia (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), the 500-page book in which Sir Isaac Newton presented the world with his theory of gravity. It was the first comprehensive scientific theory in history, and it’s withstood the test of time over the past three centuries.

Can the shape of someone’s face tell you how healthy they are?

By Anthony J Lee
You can tell a lot about someone from their face, from simple demographic information such as sex and ethnicity, to the emotions they’re feeling based on facial expressions. But what about their health? Can the shape of someone’s face tell you how likely this person is to catch the common cold?

Resources to help traumatized children

By Robert Hull
As parents, children, and communities struggle to come to terms with the events in Newtown last week, it is important for educators and parents to be aware of just how deeply children can be affected by violence. Community violence is very different from other sources of trauma that children witness or experience. Most trauma impacts individual students or small groups, whereas the violence that was experienced in Newtown affected the local community and the entire nation.