Friday, April 13, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Day 5: Last day of NSTSS.
The first lecture today was all about climate change and how it impacts on ecosystems. Like a lot of what we have seen this week, it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of a lot of scientific research. Firstly Dr Janette Lindsay showed us some of the evidence that has convinced climatologists that (a) the earth is warming, (b) CO2 concentrations are increasing, and (c) the former is mostly caused by the former. She showed us graphs of land and sea temperatures over the last 100 years and similar ones for CO2. She also took the graphs back to about a million years ago based on ice cores and tree rings, to show conclusively that anthropogenic climate change is real and needs to be addressed.
Then Dr Adrienne Nicotra let us in on her research into the impacts of climate change on alpine ecosystems, where the plants have nowhere to go if it gets too warm. Great stuff.
We then had a session about on-line learning, in particular how to use it for teacher professional development. Nothing startling in that, but the participants are at very different stages of their elearning journey, as it were, so a valuable session.
Next up was a hands-on exercise to explores some ideas about how investigations are conducted and how important they are in the new curriculum. Our group did manage to prove that cheap cat litter absorbs more water than the expensive stuff but it turns into mud, so you might not enjoy having to clean it up after your cat has used it.
Geoscience Australia was the destination for the afternoon session, and what a brilliant place it is. A place where too much geology is barely enough. The education centre has a 3D projection system to sho not only the location of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamies, but also their depths. Nicely shows subduction zones and other areas of plate interaction, even if it takes a bit of getting used to the wire-frame earth model they use. There are also lots of specimens, maps and other cool teaching aides in here and we all walked out laden with free stuff. We moved on to the tsunami warning centre and spoke to the duty seismologist whose job it is to monitor (with help from a sophisticated computer system) a large number of seismographs around Australia, our region and the wider world. They are looking for a big, shallow, earthquake happening offshore, as these are the ones that generate tsunamis. If they detect one, they get on the phone to the AGs department to coordinate a response. They also map most earthquakes that happen around Australia and put the details on their website (google geoscience australia earthquakes). They have a searchable database up there as well, from which a .kml file can dbe generated to plug into google earth. Very interesting.
Finally we went down into the bowels to have a look at SHRIMP, GA's mass-spectrometer dating machine? While we were there it was running a scan on some zircon crystals in rock from up in the gulf country. The results it was returning (need to be confirmed, but the machine spits out a number after every scan, does many scans on the one set of crystals and produces a regression) were in the order of 1.75 billion years old. Awesome. The machine looked a lot like the stuff we had seen in the antimatter lab
And particle accelerator earlier in the week (and works on similar principals - this is geophysics) and, sure enough, it turns out that the prototype had been developed and built at the ANU machine shop. The design has now been sold to a company in the ACT that makes them and sells them around the world. Yay us Aussies!
On the way back to the college, we stopped off at Questacon and ran amok in the various galleries and gifts hop. The staff stayed back after hours just for us (for free! You know how much teachers like hearing those words). Some brave souls dared the free-fall slide, some of us more than once. They also have a roller coaster simulator which is a lot of fun. Great place for young and old. Thanks Questacon!
We finished the week with dinner at the Tradies club in Dickson, where we had great food, great company and good fun socialising one last time. It's not for me to say whether everyone got to bed at a reasonable hour but a good time was had by all.
Saturday morning was a time for farewells, presentations and reflection. For my part, I had the best time I have had in years, met lots of great people, learned so much my brain hurts and recommend the NSTSS to anyone, primary or secondary, who has an interest in sciencE and science teaching. Special thanks to Peter and Geoff for organising it all, and to Aidan Byrne, Dean of science at ANU, for making it all possible. Goodbye to all NSTSSers, I'll see you on twitter and/or Facebook! And comment me, beeatches!
Then Dr Adrienne Nicotra let us in on her research into the impacts of climate change on alpine ecosystems, where the plants have nowhere to go if it gets too warm. Great stuff.
We then had a session about on-line learning, in particular how to use it for teacher professional development. Nothing startling in that, but the participants are at very different stages of their elearning journey, as it were, so a valuable session.
Next up was a hands-on exercise to explores some ideas about how investigations are conducted and how important they are in the new curriculum. Our group did manage to prove that cheap cat litter absorbs more water than the expensive stuff but it turns into mud, so you might not enjoy having to clean it up after your cat has used it.
Geoscience Australia was the destination for the afternoon session, and what a brilliant place it is. A place where too much geology is barely enough. The education centre has a 3D projection system to sho not only the location of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamies, but also their depths. Nicely shows subduction zones and other areas of plate interaction, even if it takes a bit of getting used to the wire-frame earth model they use. There are also lots of specimens, maps and other cool teaching aides in here and we all walked out laden with free stuff. We moved on to the tsunami warning centre and spoke to the duty seismologist whose job it is to monitor (with help from a sophisticated computer system) a large number of seismographs around Australia, our region and the wider world. They are looking for a big, shallow, earthquake happening offshore, as these are the ones that generate tsunamis. If they detect one, they get on the phone to the AGs department to coordinate a response. They also map most earthquakes that happen around Australia and put the details on their website (google geoscience australia earthquakes). They have a searchable database up there as well, from which a .kml file can dbe generated to plug into google earth. Very interesting.
Finally we went down into the bowels to have a look at SHRIMP, GA's mass-spectrometer dating machine? While we were there it was running a scan on some zircon crystals in rock from up in the gulf country. The results it was returning (need to be confirmed, but the machine spits out a number after every scan, does many scans on the one set of crystals and produces a regression) were in the order of 1.75 billion years old. Awesome. The machine looked a lot like the stuff we had seen in the antimatter lab
And particle accelerator earlier in the week (and works on similar principals - this is geophysics) and, sure enough, it turns out that the prototype had been developed and built at the ANU machine shop. The design has now been sold to a company in the ACT that makes them and sells them around the world. Yay us Aussies!
On the way back to the college, we stopped off at Questacon and ran amok in the various galleries and gifts hop. The staff stayed back after hours just for us (for free! You know how much teachers like hearing those words). Some brave souls dared the free-fall slide, some of us more than once. They also have a roller coaster simulator which is a lot of fun. Great place for young and old. Thanks Questacon!
We finished the week with dinner at the Tradies club in Dickson, where we had great food, great company and good fun socialising one last time. It's not for me to say whether everyone got to bed at a reasonable hour but a good time was had by all.
Saturday morning was a time for farewells, presentations and reflection. For my part, I had the best time I have had in years, met lots of great people, learned so much my brain hurts and recommend the NSTSS to anyone, primary or secondary, who has an interest in sciencE and science teaching. Special thanks to Peter and Geoff for organising it all, and to Aidan Byrne, Dean of science at ANU, for making it all possible. Goodbye to all NSTSSers, I'll see you on twitter and/or Facebook! And comment me, beeatches!
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Days 3 and 4 (plus some extra awesome from Tuesday)
After my post from tuesday we put on the good clothes and went to a formal dinner over the lake with the NYSF kids and a bunch of scientists from partner organisations. The kids had obviously been told to mingle and talk to us old folk because they would just walk right up and start talking. I met some truly inspirational kids from all over Australia and even a Canadian. One girl had come to Australia 2 years ago from Afghanistan, spoke 5 languages and told me she is going to be a neurosurgeon and also that she wants to learn spanish or French. Scarily smart, confident and no doubt will do exactly what she wants to.
Then we heard from a young man who had gone to MIT during his final year of school to do a research project with a bunch of other students from around the world.
Time for the main guest speaker: Professor Michelle Simmons from the Centre for quantum computing at UNSW. Whoah. Go here to find out what they do: http://www.cqc2t.org/home. Do yourself a favour and follow the link to the photo competition winners on the front page. Essentially, she told us about how the cqc2t was set up to push the limits of computer technology and develope a quantum computer for when moore's law runs out in the next ten years or so. They decided that they needed to shrink the transistor down to a single atom (currently they are about 35nm wide, an atom is about 0.1nm). She then proceeded to show us the 1 atom transistor they have just made (!!!!). She also told us about the atomic-scale wire they made, all accompanied by STM images of the actual things. Here's a picture of the wire: http://www.cqc2t.org/images/news/Weber-STM_wire1.jpg. Now I don't know about you, but images like that just blow me away. I can remember, not so long ago, being told, and then telling kids, that "atoms are so small that they can't be seen, even with the most powerful microscopes". STM images have been around for 15 years or so but I've never seen them with this clarity or resolution. Those are INDIVIDUAL ATOMS we are looking at right there. And they can use the STM to move individual atoms around at will and replace one atom on a sheet of silicon with a single atom of phosphorus to make the transistor. These are very clever people. Michelle made the point, in response to a question, that engineers are very smart people, if they encounter a problem, they will find a way around it, if nature will let them. I haven't seen much evidence that contradicts that statement lately. My head is still spinning from the sheer brilliance of what she shared with us, some of which had only just been published (the atom-thick wire was in the news last week and the single atom transistor is awaiting publication, so you heard it here first!).
Anyway, I've got two more days to cover, so best get on with it.
Wednesday: spent the morning at parliament house in the care of the PEO (education office). Pretty interesting but only parliament house when all is said and done. After lunch we got a lecture about chemical signalling in wasps and how some orchids use the same chemicals to trick male wasps into pollinating them by attempting to copulate with the flower. The wasps are fooled time and again and never learn it seems. Someone asked why the wasps keep doing it when they don't get anything out of the arrangement, it is all in favour of the flower. The response was, how do you know the wasp gets nothing out of it?
After that nice thought we went to the Canberra museum and gallery to view a fossil exhibition. First we saw a presentation from paleontologist Gavin Young, whose fossil fish feature in the exhibition. Great guy, incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgable. Most of the fossils were found near Canberra (at Wee Jasper, near Burrinjuck), and at a site in WA. Beautiful, complete, incredibly detailed fossils of Devonian fish species,including the most incredible eye bone. I should point out that these fish, like most Devonian species, were placoderms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placodermi), or armoured fish, and their skull bones were on the outside, as it were, so the eyes were enclosed in a bone that was able to rotate in the socket, with holes for the optic nerve, blood vessels and a cartilaginous stalk connecting the whole thing to the rest of the skull. Check out the exhibition here: http://www.museumsandgalleries.act.gov.au/cmag/Fossils02.html (there has to be a way to make hyperlinks in this blog but I will have to wait till I'm home and have a proper mouse etc to figure it out).
The other cool thing about this exhibition is that it included some incredible detail of internal structures that are on show for the very first time here. They are made possible by the scanning and 3D printing technology that we saw on Monday, developed at the ANU by Tim Senden and his team. It is incredible what they can now study about the internal structure of brain cases, eye sockets and jaws because of these developments.
Thursday:
First up was a session with the NYSF kids where they debated some issues to do with biotechnology. It was at the Finkel theatre, in the Jackie Chan science centre, part of the John Curtin School of Medical Research. Yes, that Jackie Chan. Google it.
It was during this session that I got the news that mys dog Dasha died overnight at the boarding kennel. Don't really know why but probably heat stress I guess. Found it a bit hard to concentrate on that session but I'm sure it was interesting.
After that I was in need of some coffee so I set off to find the Purple Pickel. First coffe I've had since arriving, since I haven't been game to try the questionable stuff that comes from the machine in the college dining room. It was a good one, too.
Now, this next session could end up being a long one, simply because it was seven types of awesome. Dr Charley Lineweaver is an astrophysicist and astrobiologist based at Mt Stromlo, frighteningly smart and another one who is so enthusiastic about his subject. I'm not going to be able to do his lecture justice but I'll try. The lecture was entitled "cool factoids about the big bang, black holes and aliens". He took everything we thought we knew about the universe, screwed it up into a ball, threw it out the window and replaced it with a picture that is both exhilarating and disturbing at the same time. Disturbing because he showed us that the very framework within which we ask some if our questions just isn't valid. For example, he told us that the universe is almost exactly 13.75 billion years old (I knew that, ok so far), but that it is spatially infinite. He then showed how our very concept of space and time is all wrong, it serves no purpose to ask questions like "what caused the big bang", "what was before the big bang" etc. these are just not questions that have any meaning due to things like Planck time, quantum foam, inflation and so on. He went on to show how you can't fall into a black hole, at least not from the perspective of an outside observer and that black holes all eventually evaporate and then pop. Finally he got onto the subject of life on other planets which he says is, statistically, inevitable. Then he said that it mightn't work like that though because life might be so quirky that it has a probability of zero. He also had a go at the "planet of the apes" hypothesis, that we humans might wipe ourselves out somehow, leaving an "intelligence" niche for the chimps (who presumably have been waiting patiently for their chance) to step in and take over. He pointed out that the earth is full of places that were isolated for long periods of time from the rest of the world (100 million years or so in the case of Australia) and yet intelligence that we would recognise never evolved on any of them, only in Africa. Good point. We like to think that the evolution of intelligence is inevitable but there is no reason whatsoever, beyond our own arrogance and egotism, why it should. It is only one possible way,and an incredibly expensive one, by which a species could evolve to take advantage of its environment.
I, and I am pretty sure everyone else, came out of that lecture with wonder in our eyes and our jaws scraping along the ground. Phenomenal ideas, presented with such clarity and enthusiasm. Brilliant. I recorded the lecture and I think I will listen to it over a few times without getting tired of it.
The visit to Tidbinbilla Deep Space tracking station was cool but pretty much run of the mill, although I did see some cool stuff on their website where I, or my students can go to https://www.zooniverse.org and help the astronomers by classifying galaxies, hunting for supernovae or dwarf planets. Lots of fun and should be engaging for kids as well as for me.
Well I have managed to catch up, so enough for now. More tomorrow or more likely on Saturday.
Then we heard from a young man who had gone to MIT during his final year of school to do a research project with a bunch of other students from around the world.
Time for the main guest speaker: Professor Michelle Simmons from the Centre for quantum computing at UNSW. Whoah. Go here to find out what they do: http://www.cqc2t.org/home. Do yourself a favour and follow the link to the photo competition winners on the front page. Essentially, she told us about how the cqc2t was set up to push the limits of computer technology and develope a quantum computer for when moore's law runs out in the next ten years or so. They decided that they needed to shrink the transistor down to a single atom (currently they are about 35nm wide, an atom is about 0.1nm). She then proceeded to show us the 1 atom transistor they have just made (!!!!). She also told us about the atomic-scale wire they made, all accompanied by STM images of the actual things. Here's a picture of the wire: http://www.cqc2t.org/images/news/Weber-STM_wire1.jpg. Now I don't know about you, but images like that just blow me away. I can remember, not so long ago, being told, and then telling kids, that "atoms are so small that they can't be seen, even with the most powerful microscopes". STM images have been around for 15 years or so but I've never seen them with this clarity or resolution. Those are INDIVIDUAL ATOMS we are looking at right there. And they can use the STM to move individual atoms around at will and replace one atom on a sheet of silicon with a single atom of phosphorus to make the transistor. These are very clever people. Michelle made the point, in response to a question, that engineers are very smart people, if they encounter a problem, they will find a way around it, if nature will let them. I haven't seen much evidence that contradicts that statement lately. My head is still spinning from the sheer brilliance of what she shared with us, some of which had only just been published (the atom-thick wire was in the news last week and the single atom transistor is awaiting publication, so you heard it here first!).
Anyway, I've got two more days to cover, so best get on with it.
Wednesday: spent the morning at parliament house in the care of the PEO (education office). Pretty interesting but only parliament house when all is said and done. After lunch we got a lecture about chemical signalling in wasps and how some orchids use the same chemicals to trick male wasps into pollinating them by attempting to copulate with the flower. The wasps are fooled time and again and never learn it seems. Someone asked why the wasps keep doing it when they don't get anything out of the arrangement, it is all in favour of the flower. The response was, how do you know the wasp gets nothing out of it?
After that nice thought we went to the Canberra museum and gallery to view a fossil exhibition. First we saw a presentation from paleontologist Gavin Young, whose fossil fish feature in the exhibition. Great guy, incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgable. Most of the fossils were found near Canberra (at Wee Jasper, near Burrinjuck), and at a site in WA. Beautiful, complete, incredibly detailed fossils of Devonian fish species,including the most incredible eye bone. I should point out that these fish, like most Devonian species, were placoderms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placodermi), or armoured fish, and their skull bones were on the outside, as it were, so the eyes were enclosed in a bone that was able to rotate in the socket, with holes for the optic nerve, blood vessels and a cartilaginous stalk connecting the whole thing to the rest of the skull. Check out the exhibition here: http://www.museumsandgalleries.act.gov.au/cmag/Fossils02.html (there has to be a way to make hyperlinks in this blog but I will have to wait till I'm home and have a proper mouse etc to figure it out).
The other cool thing about this exhibition is that it included some incredible detail of internal structures that are on show for the very first time here. They are made possible by the scanning and 3D printing technology that we saw on Monday, developed at the ANU by Tim Senden and his team. It is incredible what they can now study about the internal structure of brain cases, eye sockets and jaws because of these developments.
Thursday:
First up was a session with the NYSF kids where they debated some issues to do with biotechnology. It was at the Finkel theatre, in the Jackie Chan science centre, part of the John Curtin School of Medical Research. Yes, that Jackie Chan. Google it.
It was during this session that I got the news that mys dog Dasha died overnight at the boarding kennel. Don't really know why but probably heat stress I guess. Found it a bit hard to concentrate on that session but I'm sure it was interesting.
After that I was in need of some coffee so I set off to find the Purple Pickel. First coffe I've had since arriving, since I haven't been game to try the questionable stuff that comes from the machine in the college dining room. It was a good one, too.
Now, this next session could end up being a long one, simply because it was seven types of awesome. Dr Charley Lineweaver is an astrophysicist and astrobiologist based at Mt Stromlo, frighteningly smart and another one who is so enthusiastic about his subject. I'm not going to be able to do his lecture justice but I'll try. The lecture was entitled "cool factoids about the big bang, black holes and aliens". He took everything we thought we knew about the universe, screwed it up into a ball, threw it out the window and replaced it with a picture that is both exhilarating and disturbing at the same time. Disturbing because he showed us that the very framework within which we ask some if our questions just isn't valid. For example, he told us that the universe is almost exactly 13.75 billion years old (I knew that, ok so far), but that it is spatially infinite. He then showed how our very concept of space and time is all wrong, it serves no purpose to ask questions like "what caused the big bang", "what was before the big bang" etc. these are just not questions that have any meaning due to things like Planck time, quantum foam, inflation and so on. He went on to show how you can't fall into a black hole, at least not from the perspective of an outside observer and that black holes all eventually evaporate and then pop. Finally he got onto the subject of life on other planets which he says is, statistically, inevitable. Then he said that it mightn't work like that though because life might be so quirky that it has a probability of zero. He also had a go at the "planet of the apes" hypothesis, that we humans might wipe ourselves out somehow, leaving an "intelligence" niche for the chimps (who presumably have been waiting patiently for their chance) to step in and take over. He pointed out that the earth is full of places that were isolated for long periods of time from the rest of the world (100 million years or so in the case of Australia) and yet intelligence that we would recognise never evolved on any of them, only in Africa. Good point. We like to think that the evolution of intelligence is inevitable but there is no reason whatsoever, beyond our own arrogance and egotism, why it should. It is only one possible way,and an incredibly expensive one, by which a species could evolve to take advantage of its environment.
I, and I am pretty sure everyone else, came out of that lecture with wonder in our eyes and our jaws scraping along the ground. Phenomenal ideas, presented with such clarity and enthusiasm. Brilliant. I recorded the lecture and I think I will listen to it over a few times without getting tired of it.
The visit to Tidbinbilla Deep Space tracking station was cool but pretty much run of the mill, although I did see some cool stuff on their website where I, or my students can go to https://www.zooniverse.org and help the astronomers by classifying galaxies, hunting for supernovae or dwarf planets. Lots of fun and should be engaging for kids as well as for me.
Well I have managed to catch up, so enough for now. More tomorrow or more likely on Saturday.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Day 2: A bit of this and that
Today started with a trip to the University of Canberra Forensic Science lab. They have links with the AFP and the local tafe and this is one of the top forensics labs in the country, we were told. Dr Tamsin Kelly is a chemist and does forensic toxicology - drug testing, mostly, so we got to do a bit of that on some unknowns, none of which was worth slipping into the pocket, I should add. By using particular reagents we were able to determine the substance pretty easily in each case.
As a side note, I would have to say that UC looks tired and shabby compared to most of the places we've been looking at so far at ANU. I don't wish to insult anyone and they no doubt do good work there despite the conditions but they seriously need some money for renovating.
Anyway, after that we came back to the college here and had a chat with Professor Ian Chubb, Australia's Chief Scientist. He has been asked to advise the PM on ways to stop the decline in young people taking science on at school, uni and as a career, and he was after some ideas from us science teachers. Per-service training and PD for science teachers were top of the list, unsurprisingly given the audience. He is a sharp, thoughtful man so I'm sure the PM will get good advice. What she does with it is another matter.
The afternoon was spent across the road from here at CSIRO's Black Mountain facilities. I was in a group that went to the shiny, new Plant Phenomics facility and had a tour around there. They are working out sways to increase crop yield and food production and are working on, among other things, changing the way rice photosynthesises so it is more efficient. Some really cool kit in there and a group of dedicated, enthusiastic people (a common thing around here, I am finding).
Finally we went over to the Discovery centre where we got our hands dirty splicing a gene that produces green fluorescence in jellyfish into E. coli. It was fun using the micropipette and stuff and doing some prac for a change, even if we might not get to see if our cultures will light up (they need to incubate overnight and we will be too busy to go back and have a look).
Right now I have to get ready for the grand dinner where we will mix with the students who are here for NYSF and some scientists. Gotta put the penguin suit on. More tomorrow.
As a side note, I would have to say that UC looks tired and shabby compared to most of the places we've been looking at so far at ANU. I don't wish to insult anyone and they no doubt do good work there despite the conditions but they seriously need some money for renovating.
Anyway, after that we came back to the college here and had a chat with Professor Ian Chubb, Australia's Chief Scientist. He has been asked to advise the PM on ways to stop the decline in young people taking science on at school, uni and as a career, and he was after some ideas from us science teachers. Per-service training and PD for science teachers were top of the list, unsurprisingly given the audience. He is a sharp, thoughtful man so I'm sure the PM will get good advice. What she does with it is another matter.
The afternoon was spent across the road from here at CSIRO's Black Mountain facilities. I was in a group that went to the shiny, new Plant Phenomics facility and had a tour around there. They are working out sways to increase crop yield and food production and are working on, among other things, changing the way rice photosynthesises so it is more efficient. Some really cool kit in there and a group of dedicated, enthusiastic people (a common thing around here, I am finding).
Finally we went over to the Discovery centre where we got our hands dirty splicing a gene that produces green fluorescence in jellyfish into E. coli. It was fun using the micropipette and stuff and doing some prac for a change, even if we might not get to see if our cultures will light up (they need to incubate overnight and we will be too busy to go back and have a look).
Right now I have to get ready for the grand dinner where we will mix with the students who are here for NYSF and some scientists. Gotta put the penguin suit on. More tomorrow.
When too much physics is barely enough
Ok, so this one isn't about laptops or elearning or any of that. I'll be back in that world soon enough and may even feel moved to blog about it, but in the meantime: What I did (or to be more precise, am doing) on my holidays!
I was lucky enough, or maybe good enough, to get to travel to Canberra for the National Science Teachers Summer School (NSTSS) this week. There are 45 of us from all over Australia and from a variety of primary and secondary schools and we are staying at the ANU for a week of science. And today was Physics day.
Anyone who knows me could tell you that, although I like my tech, it is science that really lights me up. I teach physics for a living so you can imagine my excitement at seeing the program for today: Lasers and quantum optics in the morning, followed by 3 sessions at the physics department. And then to cap it off, an evening at questacon where we were connected with CERN in Switzerland to talk to, and ask questions of, a particle physicist who works on the LHC. We shared the experience with the kids who are here for the NYSF so we also got to here their questions and share their excitement. Rolf from CERN is a very smart guy and a great educator in his own right and explain lots of different aspects of the work they do there with great clarity and enthusiasm. I loved it.
The three sessions at the ANU physics department were about new microscopes and computer imaging, antimatter research and the work they do in their particle accelerator, the largest in the southern hemisphere. They were all brilliant and made more so by the enthusiasm of the scientists who took the time to explain it all to us. They are all world-class researchers working at the cutting edge of their respective fields and they are having a fantastic time as well. The first guy showed us an x-ray microscope that is the first in the world and is being marketed for millions. It allows images to be made of the internal structure of materials for the first time ever and, among many other applications, is being used to reveal previously unknown details of fossils.
The antimatter lab was the coolest place in terms of gadgets: two antimatter beam lines (sounds like a death ray!) with detectors and coils and all. And the particle lab was also full of cool gear including a new machine they are building to investigate a particular type of atomic structure just to see if they can.
Makes me want to go back to school, get some more qualifications and move to Canberra.
I have lots more to see and do tomorrow and I might blog about it again, you never know. In the meantime you can follow my twitter updates (#nstss).
I was lucky enough, or maybe good enough, to get to travel to Canberra for the National Science Teachers Summer School (NSTSS) this week. There are 45 of us from all over Australia and from a variety of primary and secondary schools and we are staying at the ANU for a week of science. And today was Physics day.
Anyone who knows me could tell you that, although I like my tech, it is science that really lights me up. I teach physics for a living so you can imagine my excitement at seeing the program for today: Lasers and quantum optics in the morning, followed by 3 sessions at the physics department. And then to cap it off, an evening at questacon where we were connected with CERN in Switzerland to talk to, and ask questions of, a particle physicist who works on the LHC. We shared the experience with the kids who are here for the NYSF so we also got to here their questions and share their excitement. Rolf from CERN is a very smart guy and a great educator in his own right and explain lots of different aspects of the work they do there with great clarity and enthusiasm. I loved it.
The three sessions at the ANU physics department were about new microscopes and computer imaging, antimatter research and the work they do in their particle accelerator, the largest in the southern hemisphere. They were all brilliant and made more so by the enthusiasm of the scientists who took the time to explain it all to us. They are all world-class researchers working at the cutting edge of their respective fields and they are having a fantastic time as well. The first guy showed us an x-ray microscope that is the first in the world and is being marketed for millions. It allows images to be made of the internal structure of materials for the first time ever and, among many other applications, is being used to reveal previously unknown details of fossils.
The antimatter lab was the coolest place in terms of gadgets: two antimatter beam lines (sounds like a death ray!) with detectors and coils and all. And the particle lab was also full of cool gear including a new machine they are building to investigate a particular type of atomic structure just to see if they can.
Makes me want to go back to school, get some more qualifications and move to Canberra.
I have lots more to see and do tomorrow and I might blog about it again, you never know. In the meantime you can follow my twitter updates (#nstss).
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