PBS's new series Sid the Science Kid stars an inquisitive boy with a knack for asking revealing questions; a companion science curriculum, offered in English and Spanish, helps teachers engage kids and build the skills the show's characters exhibit.

Here’s a way to make the kids’ eyes glaze over: Tell them they have to watch an educational science program on TV.

But plenty of children — and adults — have made science-based shows like MythBusters into hits. Turns out there is a place for TV in science education.

And there’s a need, too: The «hard truth,» as President Obama recently said, is that Americans have «been losing ground» when it comes to math and science education.

«One assessment shows American 15-year-olds now rank 21st in science and 25th in math when compared to their peers around the world,» Obama said.

The president was speaking at the recent launch of Educate To Innovate, a nationwide effort to move the U.S. «to the top in science and math education in the next decade.»

Prominent scientists from NASA and the National Science Foundation were invited to the White House event. So were a couple of cable TV stars: MythBusters creators Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman.

Everybody loves science when he or she is young. You cannot find a kid that doesn’t want to taste the kitchen floor.

‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye

«I hope you guys left the explosives at home,» Obama joked. And not without cause: The MythBusters love to blow stuff up.

It’s not a science show per se, but scientists are some of its biggest fans. Since launching the series eight years ago, Savage and Hyneman have been inducted into Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. The California Science Teachers Association made them honorary members. They’ve been asked to speak at numerous schools, including MIT and Georgia Tech. Savage says they get the rock-star treatment when they visit.

Recent episodes of MythBusters include «Can a sonic shock wave shatter glass?» and «Does double dipping cause germ warfare?» They go to great lengths to get to the bottom of these popular beliefs.

And their experiments are highly dramatic. In one episode, Savage and Hyneman visited the world’s largest portable hurricane simulator — nicknamed Medusa — at the University of Florida to test whether it’s better to keep the windows of a house open or closed during a hurricane.

Savage and Hyneman are quick to point out that they are not scientists — in fact they’re former Hollywood special-effects guys — and they didn’t create the show to educate.

MythBusters: Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage (with Buster the crash-test dummy) put science to work week in and week out on their Discovery show.

«We don’t have pretensions to be teaching,» says Savage. «We’re still very much in touch with the 14-year-old pyromaniacs inside us.»

But high-school science teachers approve. Mindy Bedrossian, of Strongsville, Ohio, says her students turned her on to MythBusters, and she thinks what the guys do on the show is «raw science at its best.» She even wants her students to test hypotheses the way they do on MythBusters: They study. They measure. They build high-tech props. They test — over and over again.

«We don’t want [students] to blow up buildings and things like that,» Bedrossian laughs. «But we would like for them to do science in exactly the same way.»

Bedrossian says she pays close attention to what science TV shows are out there. She’s concluded there’s a lot of garbage. But her real problem is that schools themselves are offering so little science education in the younger grades.

That’s where TV can help. There are a number of new science shows aimed at the very young:Dinosaur Train, Zula Patrol and Sid the Science Kid. The latter premiered on PBS last year, partly because Linda Simensky, the head of programming, was frustrated there weren’t many science shows for the pre-school set. So she commissioned the Jim Henson Company to create one.

«I really wanted daily science that you encounter every day in life,» says Simensky. «And something that models asking questions.»

Sid asks plenty of questions. In fact Sid can be — how to put this nicely? — a little annoying. He’s an extremely happy extrovert who loves his toy microphone, and who’s hugely curious about how stuff works.

Will the show actually impart any knowledge to little viewers? The producers aren’t making any guarantees. But they do hope Sid will get kids excited about science.

According to Bill Nye, that shouldn’t be too hard. Nye stopped producing his show Bill Nye The Science Guy in the late 1990s, but teachers around the country still show it to their students.

«Everybody loves science when he or she is young,» says Nye. «You cannot find a kid that doesn’t want to taste the kitchen floor, or that doesn’t want to know how houseflies make a living.»

He says the U.S. needs young scientists — so why not start with this willing audience?

Artículo original en: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121146862

Preparing high-school physics teachers
Theodore Hodapp, Jack Hehn, and Warren Hein
Phys. Today 62, 40 (2009)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3086101

High-school teachers are one of the most important factors in developing the science and technology workforce of the future. Institutions of higher learning in the US will need to dramatically increase the number of high-school physics teachers they educate if every high-school student who wants to take a physics course is to have access to a highly qualified teacher. The responsibility for that teacher preparation cannot be left solely to education departments or schools of education; we physicists must work with our colleagues in education to address the significant shortage of qualified physics teachers.

Many of the more than 23 000 US high-school physics teachers are not adequately prepared to teach the subject. Only one-third of them, for example, majored in physics or physics education. Poor teacher preparation denies students access to a quality education in the physical sciences. Moreover, students without access to a good high-school physics course are often unprepared for introductory college physics. Physics once attracted the best undergraduates, but now other options seem more attractive. Quantitative indicators are down too. Physics majors now represent only about 1.4% of all science and math undergraduates; 40 years ago the number was 4%.

To improve physics teacher education, the American Physical Society (APS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) jointly created the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (http://www.phystec.org) in 1999. Funded primarily by NSF and the APS 21st Century Campaign, PhysTEC has been working closely with about a dozen colleges and universities—and more broadly with a larger coalition of institutions—to identify and disseminate effective practices and innovative methods and to advocate for an enhanced role of physics departments in the education of future teachers.

The number of highly qualified teachers educated at PhysTEC institutions has substantially increased over the past eight years. From our experience in PhysTEC and from visits to successful programs around the country, we are excited to report a number of ideas for helping physics departments to improve the education of future teachers. We include examples and offer suggestions for direct action.

Artículo completo en: http://link.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_62/iss_2/40_1.shtml

Émilie du Châtelet, famous for being Voltaire’s mistress, was actually a talented scientist and intellectual in her own right. Overcoming challenges that kept women from becoming scientists at the time, she educated herself and carried out experiments in physics, and completed a translation and commentary on Newton’s Principia.

Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil (later Émilie du Châtelet), was born December 17, 1706 in Paris. Her father, Louis Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil, was a high ranking official of the court of Louis XIV. The de Breteuil family was part of French aristocratic society, and as such they entertained often. Distinguished scientists and mathematicians were frequent visitors to the household.

Educated at home, the young Émilie learned to speak six languages by the time she was twelve, and had lessons in fencing and other sports. Even from a young age she was fascinated most by science and math, much to her mother’s displeasure. Such interests were not viewed as proper for young ladies, and her mother even threatened to send her away to a convent. Fortunately, her father recognized her intelligence and encouraged her interests, arranging for her to discuss astronomy with prominent scientists he knew.

Émilie also had a flair for gambling, applying her talent at mathematics to give herself an advantage. She used her winnings to buy books and laboratory equipment for her scientific investigations.

When she reached age 18, she knew she had to get married, and she accepted the proposal of Marquis Florent-Claude du Châtelet, a distinguished army officer. This was a convenient arrangement for Émilie, because Châtelet was often away from home, leaving her free to indulge her interests in studying math and science on her own.

She was also free to carry on an affair with the writer Voltaire, one of the few men who appreciated her intelligence and encouraged her scientific pursuits. Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire renovated Châtelet’s large estate house in the countryside. The house included several rooms for scientific equipment and space for experiments, and a large library holding over 20,000 books, more than many universities at the time.

Although she was frustrated at being excluded from scientific society and education because she was a woman, she was able to learn mathematics and science from several renowned scholars, including Pierre-Louis Maupertuis and Samuel Konig, by inviting them to her house.

In 1737, after several months of conducting research in secret, she entered a contest sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences on the nature of light, heat and fire, submitting her paper Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu. In it she suggested that different colors of light carried different heating power and anticipated the existence of what is now known as infrared radiation. She did not win the contest, but her paper was published and was positively received by the scientific community.

She also developed a strong interest in the work of Isaac Newton, which was somewhat controversial at the time in France, where Cartesian philosophy was favored over Newton’s ideas. Émilie and Voltaire jointly wrote a book, Elements of Newton’s Philosophy, which explained Newton’s astronomy and optics in a clear manner for a wide French readership. Only Voltaire’s name appeared on the book, but he acknowledged her important role.

Émilie also worked on another manuscript, Foundations of Physics, in which she considered the philosophical basis of science and tried to integrate the conflicting Newtonian, Cartesian, and Leibnizian views.

One of her most important contributions to science was her elucidation of the concepts of energy and energy conservation. Following experiments done earlier by Willem ‘s Gravesande, she dropped heavy lead balls into a bed of clay. She showed that the balls that hit the clay with twice the velocity penetrated four times as deep into the clay; those with three times the velocity reached a depth nine times greater. This suggested that energy is proportional to mv², not mv, as Newton had suggested.

While conducting her scientific work, Émilie du Châtelet still carried out her duties as a mother to her three children and as a hostess for her many visitors so she was always busy, and had little time for sleep.

At age 42 Émilie du Châtelet discovered she was pregnant. At that time, a pregnancy at such an old age was extremely dangerous. Knowing she would likely die, she began working 18 hours a day to complete her biggest project, a French translation of Newton’s Principia, before she died.

More than simply a translation, Émilie du Châtelet’s Principia included her own notes, examples, derivations, and clarifications of Newton’s often obscure writing, as well as examples of experiments that confirmed Newton’s theories. Her modern notation and clear style soon helped French scientists understand and build upon Newton’s ideas.

With determined effort, she achieved her goal of finishing the manuscript just before she died in September 1749. The complete work was published ten years later, when the return of Halley’s Comet brought about a renewed interest in Newtonian mechanics.

Émilie du Châtelet’s book was for many years the only available translation of Newton’s Principia into French, and the translation and insightful commentary probably helped advance science in France. Nonetheless, Émilie du Châtelet herself was largely forgotten by history (or remembered mainly as Voltaire’s mistress) and only recently have her scientific achievements been brought to light.

Physics History
This Month in Physics History – APS News Archives
Historic Sites Initiative – Locations and details of historic physics events

Low-drag suit propels swimmers

Competition in the pool at this month’s Beijing Olympics will be not only among world-class swimmers but also their swimsuits. Since its debut in February, the low-drag hydrophobic Fastskin LZR Racer swimsuit from Speedo International Ltd has had more than 44 world records broken in it; critics allege that the $600 «space-age» suit, in part developed by NASA scientists, gives its wearers an unfair boost in buoyancy and amounts to «technological doping.» The company claims a 5% decrease in drag over the previous model but no buoyancy increase, and the suit, along with competing models, has been approved for Olympic competition by FINA, the international swimming federation.

The LZR Racer is a descendant of the full-body swimsuit Speedo introduced in 2000 to mimic the viscous-drag-reducing denticles on a shark’s skin. The shark suit proved that surface-engineered synthetic materials can be made to have lower drag than a swimmer’s shaved skin. The next move for Speedo’s internal R&D unit was to form a team of external partners led by Barry Bixler, the late Honeywell Corp engineer and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) expert, to further cut the passive drag.

NASA aerospace engineer Stephen Wilkinson joined the team in 2005 after Bixler suggested that NASA’s aerodynamic testing of materials would provide valuable data for CFD simulations used to model the fluid flow profile around the swimmer–swimsuit system. Wilkinson measured the skin-friction coefficient of more than 60 fabrics in a low-speed wind tunnel with a cross section of 18 × 28 cm at the Langley Research Center’s flow physics and control branch. The results led Speedo to go with lightweight woven elastane-nylon as the base fabric of the LZR Racer.

With the new suit, Speedo abandoned denticles and turned its focus to minimizing form drag, which is due to body shape. «There is still debate as to what the primary source of drag is for a shark, but for a swimmer, it is primarily form drag,» says Amy Lang, an experimental fluid dynamicist at the University of Alabama. From CFD simulations and studies in a swimming flume, the researchers determined that total drag is reduced when low-drag polyurethane panels are inserted to compress the chest, upper thighs, and other areas of the swimmer’s body where form drag is most pronounced. «We spent a lot of time [on the previous model] drag testing anatomically accurate mannequins» in the flume, says David Pease, a biomechanist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. «This time around involved quite a bit more actual athlete testing in order to test differences in compression and support provided by the new suit.»

The Olympic-ready design of the swimsuit is based on three-dimensional volumetric body scans of some 400 elite swimmers and the results of tests with prototypes at the Australian Institute of Sport. Instead of being stitched together, the various segments of the swimsuit are bonded by ultrasonic acoustic vibrations—a first for swimwear. «It’s a complicated process to produce a fast swimsuit and that’s why it took [nearly] four years to produce the LZR Racer,» says Jason Rance, Speedo’s head of innovation.

Speedo’s external CFD expert, University of Nottingham fluid mechanist Hervé Morvan, says that the company’s R&D collaboration is already looking to reduce active drag in preparation for the 2012 London Olympics. FINA will no doubt face mounting pressure to address advances in swimwear innovation. Some competitive swimming enthusiasts wonder whether the sport is becoming more like drag racing or golf, in which equipment is often as important as human skill, while skeptics say drag-reducing technologies offer at best a psychological advantage for swimmers. But for a sport in which the difference between winning and losing is often on the order of a hundredth of a second, any reduction in resistance is appreciated, says Iowa State University exercise physiologist Rick Sharp, who leads Speedo’s external R&D team. «After the excitement dies down from the Olympic Games, what I hope the swimming community learns is that this suit has taught us that we stand far more to gain from drag reduction than we previously realized.»

Jermey N. A. Matthews