New research explores how matter won out over antimatter after the Big Bang

 New research out of the big particle accelerator in Europe (CERN) is the first to show something called CP violation in the class of particles that include the proton and neutron - baryons. Baryons are particles that are made of combinations of 3 quarks; my students should know that protons are up-up-down and neutrons are up-down-down combinations, for example. 

CP violation is a phenomenon in particle physics that gets a little technical, but basically if differences in these 'symmetries' are found between what we call normal matter and antimatter (e.g. an antiproton has all the same properties of protons, only with a negative charge instead of positive), it can be a possible explanation for why matter won out over antimatter right after the Big Bang happened. 

This is also a good example of how science will never end, that there are always new things to explore and both big and small questions to try and answer by looking at Nature! Below is a representation of the Standard Model, and the particles responsible for the observable universe.

"Writing is Thinking" - Importance of continued human writing of scientific papers

 Nature, one of the premier peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world, had an editorial in June that specifically calls for and encourages scientists to do the writing of their papers that are submitted for publication, rather than have AI engines do the bulk of the writing. 

When we write, numerous sections of our brain are active, meaning there is a deeper level of thinking, analysis, reflection, creativity, and synthesis happening than when we do other activities. Very little of these processes happen when we ask an AI to do this for us. The editors argue that science will take a step backwards should this become the common, accepted practice, because the level of real human thinking will step backwards. 

Students, this is an early wake-up call to you, and do not fall into the trap of allowing ChatGPT or any other AI platform do the bulk of your work for you...engage your brain, think deeply about things, be creative and innovate new ideas and products! We need to exercise our brains just like muscles, if we don't want to see diminishment of what our amazing brains are capable  of doing! 

Teens and screen time addiction - how it affects mental health

 A huge concern many of us have had regarding the amount of time teens are on screens (primarily cell phones), is the effect on things like attention and motivation and engagement in school, but also the effect on one's mental health in general. This article summarizes a recently published study of America's teens. 

For those interested in this from a research perspective, if you dig into the actual study and the surveys used, perhaps you can do your own study(ies) regarding screen time more locally, and work with math teachers to do a statistical analysis - is your own school consistent with national results or not? What steps can your school do to help students with screen addiction, both for the short- and long-term? How do results vary with age and grade level? By gender and race, or socioeconomic status? Be thinking about how you can take research that has been done by others and in other contexts, and then build on it to make it a little different and original...then experience the real scientific process as you dig into it! 

Get MANY ideas for computational projects from Wolfram site!

 The Wolfram High School Science Research page, of course totally in the realm of computational science research, is magnificent for getting ideas from just about any field of STEM. Each project, listed since 2018, has code (Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha) and write-ups on the work. It is a wonderful inspiration for any high school student who is into coding and computational work! Well done! 

Animated STEM story for grades 1-3, introducing atoms all the way down to quarks

 The first is a STEM story I wrote some years ago, but just had the text. It is titled Little Sue and the Rock, and is a story for children in grades 1-3. The goal is to introduce to younger children the concept of atoms, and what atoms are made of. It goes through electrons, and a nucleus, and then that a nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. But then it introduces the fact that protons and neutrons are made of still smaller pieces called up and down quarks! Quarks are typically unknown even to high school science classes, and therefore high school students, which seems silly to me since I think it is fundamentally we present the most basic ideas of what the world is made of in simple, and accurate, terms. 

Computational Science Research: Climate modeling example

 This is one of my favorite TED talks, where Dr. Schmidt does the best job I've seen explaining what a climate model is, how they create the model, how they test the model, which leads to confidence in using the model to predict future climates based on different initial conditions one feeds into the model. Nicely done, and this is something I wish we could show all skeptics and naysayers, who simply do not understand the process and science that goes into this type of scientific research. 

Intro to developing research questions from everyday phenomena: Hydraulic jump

 This is a short video that demonstrates a simple way teachers can introduce a research-geared approach to simple, everyday phenomena. In this case, it is the hydraulic jump. We see this daily any time one turns on a sink faucet, and that stream of water hits a hard surface and flows out in a smooth, circular manner - but at some radius, the water level 'jumps' up and goes into turbulent flow. 

By having students spend 5 minutes pouring water on a hard surface, and thinking about and listing any and all possible variables or parameters that may have an effect on the jump, one can quickly come up with a double-digit list of possible experiments you can try, and investigate under more controlled conditions the effect of this or that on the jump: flow rate of water, height from which you pour the water, temperature of the water, falling on a horizontal surface vs an angled surface, if the water stream falls on just a smooth surface or if there is an object it hits and flows over, if there are two streams of water and the jumps interact, changing the surface the water lands on, and so on. All of these can be turned into research studies!