Quanta Magazine: Illuminating Science

Weird things start to happen when you stare into someone's eyes for 10 minutes Giovanni Caputo recruited 20 young adults (15 women) to form pairs. Each pair sat in chairs opposite each other, one metre apart, in a large, dimly lit room. Specifically, the lighting level was 0.8 lx, which Caputo says "allowed detailed perception of the fine face traits but attenuated colour perception." The participants' task was simply to stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes, all the while maintaining a neutral facial expression. Teaching to the Beat of a Different Drummer Have you ever said or thought any of the following? “They just add all the numbers! It doesn’t matter what the problem says.”“They don’t stop to think! They just start computing as soon as they’re done reading the problem.”

powtoon Enter your email address below, and we'll send you an email allowing you to reset it. Forgot your password? We have sent you an email. What is this thing called science? As a scientist, Evelyn Fox Keller hated experiments. Today a professor emerita in the History of Science at MIT, she started out her scientific career in theoretical physics before jumping to molecular biology. What got her was the trivial volatility inherent in experimentation.

Desmos Art: A Definitive Guide to Computational Sketching If you’re of the type who enjoys playing around with graphing calculator, then you might be interested in the so-called Desmos Art. These are basically pictures and animations created in Desmos primarily through the clever use of equations and inequalities — among other features such as tables, animating sliders and regression models. Indeed, if you go to this official staff pick page, you should see that a whole bunch of creative artworks were already being created — anything from cartoon characters, landscape to logos and portraits. But here’s a problem: when you reach a Desmos artwork page, you get to see the end-result with all the equations and inequalities, without necessarily having any clue about how the sketching process comes about from the beginning to the end. Why does this weird-looking equation pop out from nowhere? How did the author know that is the leading coefficient to use?

Physical Review X Does Research on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics Fit into PRX’s Scope? October 24, 2014 The editors and Bill Poirier from Texas Tech University spotlight an original, thought-provoking paper by Hall, Deckert, and Wiseman on foundations of quantum mechanics, Phys. Rev. X, 4, 041013 (2014). Happenings from my real-life 21st-century mathematics classroom Fun Fact: That’s the Capital of Texas Highway, which takes you right to my house! Every time I try to sit down and compose a blog post about last week’s Apple Distinguished Educator Global Institute… I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to!

August 26, 2014: Do we live in a 2-D hologram? Press Release August 26, 2014 Do we live in a 2-D hologram? New Fermilab experiment will test the nature of the universe A unique experiment at the U.S. Math In The Real World: 400 Examples, Lessons, & Resources Read Math In The Real World: 400 Lessons From EconEdLink by TeachThought Staff