First Real Snow

On Friday we woke up to what would eventually be about 6 inches of snow - in a relatively snow-less winter, this was something to celebrate. So here are a couple of pics of the kids in Ft. Tryon Park.


My camera is definitely spazzing on me - there's some crazy horizontal streaking in the images, but I haven't had time to check what the problem is.

After watching some other kids, they both just on their own decided to start "snowboarding" (basically standing up on a boogie board, and later borrowing someone's plastic snowboard). It took them about 10 tries to get the hang of it. Ah youth...

I would have pictures but they were terribly badly exposed. I'm thinking of going into debt finally for a digital SLR after years of piddling with this point & shoot toy.

Muscle Fatigue

The required NY State Living Environment lab called "Making Connections" (no electronic version is available) investigates muscle fatigue as students squeeze a clothespin as quickly as possible for a one-minute period of time. The lab, without mentioning lactic acid per se, goes on the state that muscle fatigue is caused by a buildup of the waste products of cellular activity, lactic acid being the standard suspect (the regents curriculum is notorious for avoiding the use of specific names of things).

That explanation has been pretty much laid to rest recently, and the NY Times article from February 12 (I'm just getting around to catching up on the news feeders) finds another likely explanation in leaky calcium ion channels :

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion.

There's a graphic that I'll post below, but it will probably disappear soon. It isn't really all that helpful:

It also leaves open the question as to why the calcium channels become leaky in the first place. Is it a change in pH, temperature, physical stress on the proteins that make up the channel? That question isn't even raised in the Times article. The obvious issue that is raised is the potential for abuse in competitive athletics of therapies to combat fatigue (the study was initially designed to find ways to combat cardiac muscle fatigue from heart disease). The investigators in this study were able to reduce fatigue in skeletal muscle of mice using drugs called rycals, which stopped the leaky calcium channels, and allowed the mice to continue exercise for 10 - 20% longer than without the drug. There's an interesting speculation at the end of the article about the utility of muscle fatigue:

“Maybe this is a protective mechanism,” he said. “Maybe fatigue is saying that you are getting ready to go into a danger zone. So it is cutting you off. If you could will yourself to run as fast and as long as you could, some people would run until they keeled over and died.”

Just ask Pheidippides.

Road Runner

I've been a member of the New York Road Runners Club since sometime in 1994. I always enjoyed participating in their "races," not as a competetive runner (I'm exceedingly slow by race standards as I'll document below) but just as a way of pushing myself a bit and mainly for fun. Today I ran in the Snowflake 4 miler, and although we just got a load of snow yesterday, no precipitation was falling today during the race. It was my first race since 2003, back when I was dreaming of running in the NYC marathon but didn't quite make it there. I'm working toward that goal again now. I need 9 races this year to get automatic entry for the 2009 marathon. That part is easy. The hard part is then getting my mileage up to a point where I am physically ready for the marathon.

One nice benefit of the club is that they keep all your race history on file and available online. So I can look at my performance today and compare it to how I was doing in the past. Of course the drawback is that I can look at my performance today and compare it to how I was doing in the past! What a difference 14 years makes. Back before the kids were born (pre-1998) I was consistently running sub 8-min miles, for 3 & 4 mile races.

Today I really thought I was moving fast and pushing myself, when much to my disappointment I looked at my watch at the one mile mark and saw - 10 minutes. Wow. Of course the first part of the course is always slow going as the crowded starting field gradually thins out, so I finally finished the race at 36 minutes - a 9 minute pace overall, but boy was I huffing and puffing over that final mile. If the mile markers were accurate and we take away the first mile, the final three were at approximately 8:40 pace, which isn't that far off the old marks. Pretty much in line with the 2002/2003 marks I was turning in as I was dreaming of the marathon. Of course I was about 10 lbs heavier then, so I'm a little concerned about the apparent effects of aging on my body. I will definitely be looking for improvement over the next few months as I get back into my training.

Fantastic Voyage into Creationism

I thought I would show some excerpts from the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage to my biology classes. Although some of the biology is just plain wrong, I'm not sure how much of it is due to a more primitive state of the science in the 1960's and how much is just Hollywood getting rid of any little factual details that might interfere with a good story. I'll ignore the absurd physics elements, but here's a good starting point for considering just the silliness of shrinking things. For a biology example, there's the red blood cells (corpuscles) changing from blue to red as they pick up oxygen in the lungs. I thought the blue blood myth was pretty well known already in the 60s? The special effects here are all lava-lampish, so there's that little detail as well.

A second problem is the antibodies. We just studied the immune system in my classes, so the kids would probably pick up on that error - antibodies don't just spontaneously appear to attack a new pathogen. There's a substantial lag time between exposure and the production of antibodies. On top of that, the antibodies are seen almost as mindful agents seeking out the intruder - which simply isn't the case. Lastly, the wetsuits worn by the scientists are all the same material, so how is it that the antibodies only attack Raquel Welch and not the others? Of course it's a great excuse to have four men clawing at her breasts to remove the antibodies before she suffocates.

Then there's the problem of the cytoskeleton. At the size they have been reduced to, antibodies are clearly visible, about the size of a hand. At such a scale, the cytoskeleton, not to mention other blood proteins, would be a bit of an obstacle. As it is, the cells are portrayed as a thin, fragile, almost gelatinous film with little more than water inside. So many other little details that don't work from a scientific point of view, it might be fun to watch it just to let the kids point them out in class.

On a positive note, there is an interesting trip through the heart, the lungs, the inner ear, a look at lymph vessels, and the depiction of blood vessels as a tunnel of cells, which is pretty cool.

As the title of the post implies, however, there's the other more sinister aspect of the film, the classic cold-war anti-communist propaganda element. Part of it is overt - the Soviets and Americans are in a race to master the whole miniaturization technology for military purposes (see silliness article again). The patient in the movie has the information on how to overcome the time limit (60 minutes, to the second apparently) and he's coming to the US with the secret. Of course he is then the target of an assassination attempt by Soviet operatives that leaves him with a brain injury, leading to the "fantastic voyage" to save him with a laser surgical procedure to remove a blood clot.

More understated (for it's time), is how the villain is depicted and contrasted with the good doctor who will do the actual operation. Our villain, obvious from the beginning with his bald head and British accent, is the paragon of the rational scientist. He has little time for waxing poetic about the human body and offers instead Darwinian explanations (the horror!) for the wonders of the human body. The good doctor has other ideas, and the other hero of the movie, sent along for security purposes and suspecting a saboteur on the mission, forms a bond with the doctor as they quote together passages from literature extolling the virtues of the almighty creator and his creation. Although his sympathies are suspect in the beginning of the movie, we know when he starts spouting this crap (the human mind is finite, incapable of comprehending the infinite), that he can't be a commie. He's on our side. It's the atheist who is easily corrupted without an absolute moral compass to guide him. Appropriate, then, that he is in fact the ship's navigator. The ship goes off course almost from the beginning and his plans for proceeding are at several critical junctures overridden by the rest of the crew. Communist atheism was also part of the revulsion Americans felt toward the Soviet Union and much of the rabid anti-communism from the right grew out of this fact. Then it's a short walk from Darwin to Stalin among the religious right and their intellectual co-dependents.

So I'll try to find a way to skip all the garbage and show some of the interesting bits.

Dancing Like Rabbits

I guess you know you are truly* old when you start worrying about how the kids today are dancing. Every generation it seems has its dance moves that the old folks deem way out of line with proper decorum and public decency. I know the whole "Elvis the Pelvis" prudery from the 50's - but honestly, the only way it could get any raunchier than today would be if the kids just strip and have actual sex out on the dance floor. So I REALLY worry about the next generation that has to one-up these guys!

Oh, yeah, I should mention I chaperoned the high school Valentine's Day dance last night. And in case you haven't seen it, just imagine dirty dancing without the dancing. The tension I felt as chaperone was difficult to handle. I basically decided that as long as they weren't groping one another with their hands and as long as everyone involved was a willing participant, I wasn't going to make up a rule on the spot that this kind of dancing would be unacceptable. That didn't make me any less uncomfortable watching it. In the future I suppose we need to get together and decide on some ground (or should I say "grind") rules for what is and is not tolerable among consenting high school students at a school function.

Further Reading

Students 'freak' out over dirty dancing ban

Students protest ban against dirty dancing (Connecticut)

*Hmm, I kept looking at truely and just didn't seem right, even though when I clicked on spell check it didn't show an error. So I looked at a dictionary and sure enough, truly. Now realize Bloglines formatting toolbar, including spell checker isn't working on my computer. Oy.

Masters Project

I'm determined to find a doable project this time, even if it isn't the most exciting. What I have proposed for now is to look at student understanding of DNA structure and replication using either, 1)Hands-on, 3D models or, 2) computer simulations. I haven't got any feedback yet from the instructor or my classmates, but I can't think of any reason it shouldn't be an acceptable study. I still need to do a literature search to see what's already been done and look for some cognitive science rationale for my hypothesis: both methods are important, a combination of the two will be more effective than either one alone.

From there it's a matter of finding the appropriate instructional materials and designing the assessments. I will have to decide whether to use my own home-made materials (Pasta DNA models) or purchase a commercially produced kit, such as this one. I'm leaning toward the commercial kit if only because the pasta lab gets a little tedious and is a bit removed from the standard visual models of what DNA looks like. Then, finding computer simulations that are comparably comprehensive and cover the same concepts will require some digging. All students will get the same introductory lessons from me before manipulating the materials/software. Wish me luck.

Mealworm Madness

Just finished up the mealworm lab with one class, and will probably scrap it for this year for my other classes. We were not able to get much in the way of useful data. I believe the major problem was the materials - a lot of little things went wrong that I need to correct. First, the cylindrical tubes made of a slippery (for mealworms) plastic caused the mealworms to bunch up together at the entrance, then spin their "wheels" as they tried to walk from one place to another. So each end of the tube, which contained the experimental conditions (such as light/dark, dry/moist, etc.) was just too difficult for the mealworms to get to, much less change their minds and head for the opposite side. They tended to go in whichever direction they were initially oriented in - understandably.

So back to the drawing board in terms of designing the experimental spaces - I will need to go back to a more boxy format with cardboard, which will also make it easier for the students to handle the mealworms. I will post the updated lab sheets when I get that done, meanwhile I've attached a note for teachers warning of the issues.

Addendum

I neglected to mention the insane amount of time I spent finding and modifying the tubes for this activity. Note to self - try on a small scale before investing in a whole class set of custom made materials!!!

A Note

This is probably the longest stretch I've gone without posting. It's been a challenging year in terms of finding the time - or perhaps more to the point, the focus and energy -- needed to keep up with work and then set aside time to reflect on it. In all honesty I've been a little down lately, feeling a bit lost and lethargic, spending too much time procrastinating and worrying, getting by from day-to-day. I try not to let it show, and can usually turn up the energy for class and have reasonably interesting lessons and discussions with students, but during the non-teaching intervals, I'm really using time inefficiently. I may even have to start practicing some of the time- and stress-management strategies I teach to my health classes. As it is, I'm finishing up my master's project this semester and may have no choice, since I will really be in trouble if I don't get back into the swing of it. Blogging is actually a decent indicator of how things are going - If I can keep up the postings, then it's usually because things are going well and I have positive things to write about. If things are going badly, I don't want to sit here and whine about it so I just stop posting. Let's see how it goes the next couple of weeks as the new semester really kicks in. Up next, a post about the mealworm lab I wrote up this summer that needs some work!