“Our experience of explaining polarimetry to the general public is that they frequently ask how molecules rotate light, which is difficult to explain using non-technical language. Therefore we were keen to find an analogous large scale system which mimicked the polarimeter and used everyday left- and right-handed objects.” – explain Claire Saxon, Scott Brindley, Nic […]
Tag: education
Do a person’s genes predict how high they will go in school? — The 3.2% solution
Scholars have wondered whether (and in some cases, assumed that) success in schools comes largely from the good genes a person inherits. A new study of scholars and their genes provides evidence that YES, IT DOES, sort of, a little bit, maybe. The study is powerful — its authors tell us exactly how powerful. The study is “Genome-wide association study […]
The Candy-Fish Sustainability Experiment
Candy fish gain an additional and/or alternative kind of value in this study: “Ecological and evolutionary effects of harvesting: lessons from the candy-fish experiment.” Beatriz Diaz Pauli [pictured here] and Mikko Heino, ICES Journal of Marine Science, vol. 70, no. 7, 2013, pp. 1281-1286. (Thanks to investigator Martin Aker for bringing this to our attention.) The […]
Discovery: Students Who Do Homework Get Higher Grades
A proud press release from East Carolina University announces: Department of Economics professor Dr. Nick Rupp, who counts education tactics among his research interests, recently published the results of a study in which he found that doing homework assignments leads to higher test grades. “There’s always been anecdotal evidence,” he explained, “but I wanted to […]