Always chasing, never catching.
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‘Living Lens’ Made From Stem Cells Could Treat Blindness
“Scientists have used stem cells to cure blindness in rabbits—which could be incredible news for visually impaired people.
Using human stem cells, researchers from Osaka University and Cardiff University created living tissue that could repair damaged lenses, retinas, and corneas, restoring the power of sight. Their findings were described today in the journal Nature.
Mark Daniell, head of corneal research at Melbourne’s Centre for Eye Research Australia (who wasn’t involved in the project), called the development “mind-boggling,” “science fiction,” and “an eye in a dish.”Here’s what they did: human stem cells were used to create a disc in a lab that generated several different types of eye cells, including those found in corneas, lenses, and retinas. The team successfully transplanted those corneal cells to rabbits that had wonky, vision-impairing corneas, allowing them to see again.”
Breaking News: Too Faced will be rolling out their own matte liquid lipsticks and will be available April 6th at Sephora! 18 new shades with a formula infused with avocado oil and vitamin E. Who else is excited?!
I Lie About My Teaching
Here is an interesting article I came across in The Atlantic.
The story of a Teacher and how we portray our lives to others in the field. What are your thoughts?
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I liked Devon. We were all first and second-year teachers in that seminar—peers, in theory—but my colleague Devon struck me as a cut above. I’d gripe about a classroom problem, and without judgment or rebuke, he’d outline a thoughtful, inventive solution, as if my blundering incompetence was perhaps a matter of personal taste, and he didn’t wish to impose his own sensibilities. When it fell upon us each to share a four-minute video of our teaching, I looked forward to Devon’s. I expected a model classroom, his students as pious and well-behaved as churchgoers.
Instead, the first half of Devon’s four-minute clip showed him fiddling with an overhead projector; in the second half, he was trotting blandly through homework corrections. The kids rocked side to side, listless. For all his genuine wisdom, Devon looked a little green, a little lost.
He looked, in short, like me.
Teachers self-promote. In that, we’re no different than everyone else: proudly framing our breakthroughs, hiding our blunders in locked drawers, forever perfecting our oral résumés. This isn’t all bad. My colleagues probably have more to learn from my good habits (like the way I use pair work) than my bad ones (like my sloppy system of homework corrections), so I might as well share what’s useful. In an often-frustrating profession, we’re nourished by tales of triumph. A little positivity is healthy.
But sometimes, the classrooms we describe bear little resemblance to the classrooms where we actually teach, and that gap serves no one.
Any honest discussion between teachers must begin with the understanding that each of us mingles the good with the bad. One student may experience the epiphany of a lifetime, while her neighbor drifts quietly off to sleep. In the classroom, it’s never pure gold or pure tin; we’re all muddled alloys.
I taught once alongside a first-year teacher, Lauren, who didn’t grasp this. As a result, she compared herself unfavorably to everyone else. Every Friday, when we adjourned to the bar down the street, she’d decry her own flaws, meticulously documenting her mistakes for us, castigating herself to no end. The kids liked her. The teachers liked her. From what I’d seen, she taught as well as any first-year could. But she saw her own shortcomings too vividly and couldn’t help reporting them to anyone who’d listen.
She was fired three months into the year. You talk enough dirt about yourself and people will start to believe it.
Omission is the nature of storytelling; describing a complex space—like a classroom—requires a certain amount of simplification. Most of us prefer to leave out the failures, the mishaps, the wrong turns. Some, perhaps as a defensive posture, do the opposite: Instead of overlooking their flaws and miscues, they dwell on them, as Lauren did. The result is that two classes, equally well taught, may come across like wine and vinegar, depending on how their stories are told.
Take the first year I taught psychology. I taught one section; my colleague Erin taught the other.
When I talked to Erin that semester, she’d glow about her class. Kids often approached her in the afternoons to follow up on questions, and to thank her for teaching their favorite course. Her students kept illustrated vocab journals totaling hundreds of words. They drew posters of neurons, crafted behaviorist training regimes, and designed imaginative “sixth senses” for the human body. Erin’s mentor teacher visited monthly and dubbed it an “amazing class” with “incredible teaching.”
Catch me in an honest mood, and I’ll admit that I bombed the semester. I lectured every day from text-filled overhead slides. Several of my strongest students told me that they hated the class and begged for alternative work. I wasted three weeks on a narrow, confining research assignment, demanding heavy work with little payoff. One student openly plagiarized another. I wound up failing several students who, in hindsight, I should have passed. Yet I know that this apparent train wreck of a class was, in truth, no worse than Erin’s.
That’s because I made Erin up. The two classes described above were the same class: mine. Each description is true, and neither, of course, is wholly honest.
I’m as guilty as anyone of distorting my teaching. When talking to other teachers, I often play up the progressive elements: Student-led discussions. Creative projects. Guided discovery activities. I mumble through the minor, inconvenient fact that my pedagogy is, at its core, deeply traditional. I let my walk and my talk drift apart. Not only does this thwart other teachers in their attempts to honestly evaluate my approach, but it blocks my own self-evaluation. I can’t grow properly unless I see my own work with eyes that are sympathetic, but clear and unyielding.
I had a private theme song my first year teaching: “Wear and Tear,” by Pete Yorn. It was my alarm in the mornings, my iPod jam on the commute home. The chorus ended with a simple line that spun through my head in idle moments and captured the essence of a year I spent making mistake after rookie mistake: Can I say what I do?
It’s no easy task for teachers. But I think we owe it, to ourselves if to no one else, to tell the most honest stories that we can. I’ll only advance as a teacher, and offer something of value to those around me, if I’m able to say what I do.
Source: The Atlantic
Share some feedback. What are your thoughts of the article?
How to learn about science online.
A lot of the questions I get are easily answered with a Google search, or cracking open a textbook. But let’s try to be charitable and assume that those who ask these questions are simply ignorant. Being ignorant isn’t necessarily an insult: it’s an opportunity to learn. So here’s an attempt at educating you on how to educate yourself.
Suppose I wanted to learn about the horned toad. The most obvious first step is to check out Wikipedia.
The horned lizard can squirt blood out of its eyes. That sounds really interesting! I want to learn more about that. See those references at the end?
Those aren’t merely decorative. I’m going to let you in on a secret trick. Suppose you’re writing a paper and Wikipedia isn’t an acceptable reference. You can just go to Wikipedia, check out their references, and cite those instead! It’s not cheating if you actually read the references and use the information contained in them.
Off to Google we go. Google Scholar is great for finding academic papers.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem. The paper is behind a paywall.
Luckily, there’s a workaround. Personally, I think all scientific information should be free to all. It’s especially staggering that the public pays for a lot of research, only for that research to then be locked behind the gates of outrageously priced academic journals–all the while, scientists are doing all the hard work, and there’s plenty of organizations (such as Google) that would host the information for free. Open journals are the future. But until such time, we might have to be a bit sneaky. Sci-hub.io is one such workaround. You might have to install a browser extension to get it to work. Yes, it’s a bit cumbersome, and no, I don’t know why it requires an extension to do the job when a website would do just fine–but you only have to do it once. If you can’t find something using Sci-Hub, you can ask on Reddit’s r/Scholar, but they’d appreciate it if you tried Sci-Hub first.
See that DOI number at the top? We’re going to paste that into Sci-Hub in order to obtain a juicy, blood-squirting PDF.
Whenever possible, I try to go directly to the sources. If you read a journalistic account–or worse, a blog on tumblr!–you’re one step removed from the source, and things get lost in translation. If other blogs then cite the first one, you’re even further removed. While academic prose can be dry, and some disciplines are heavy on math and therefore inaccessible to laymen, a surprising amount of scientific papers are rather easy to read. Even math-heavy papers usually state their conclusions and the implications in a somewhat accessible way in the abstract and conclusion parts of the paper.
I’ve just now learned that the taste of lizard blood scares off dogs. Nice.
While many technical terms are used in science, they’re usually defined either in the paper itself, or in a citation, and Wikipedia is very helpful when it comes to explaining technical terms and jargon. You can just repeat the process and obtain more papers, or more Wikipedia pages, and read until you find something you understand.
That’s a lot of work, I hear you say. Well, yes and no. Finding and downloading a paper takes all of two minutes. Reading takes a bit more time, especially if you need to track down additional papers to understand the first one, but that’s how you learn. Chances are you’ll learn more this way than your peers who merely perused a textbook or listened absentmindedly in a lecture, too. If you think this is a lot of work, well, don’t ask me to do it for you!
Take a Trip Into Californian Lights
The neon lights of L.A. illuminate the new Chanel Spring Colour Collection.
In this week’s Trilobite Tuesday, we present a brief history of the ebb and flow of trilobite evolution. These amazing arthropods existed for nearly 300 million years of earth history, during which time they produced over 25,000 different scientifically recognized species. But the fact is that after presenting a dizzying array of species during the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian periods, by thetime the trilobite line reached the Devonian some 400 million years ago, their species count had dwindled down to a precious few. And by the time the Mississippian began, their was ostensibly only one order of trilobites left—the Proetids. Here is an attractive example of a “double” Ameropiltonia lauradanae from the Mississippian-age shale of Missouri. These proetids were among the last survivors of the noble trilobite lineage.
Learn much more on the Museum’s trilobite website,
