great blog post explaining why balancing reactions doesn't mean you have any understanding of what is actually taking place in that reaction. This calls into question the usefulness of teaching how to balance equations to middle school students
Good discussion from Molecular Biology Teacher about how he was able to create an group assignment that was still able to assess individual student's mastery of chemistry
Tahei Tahara and colleagues from
the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Wako, in collaboration with
researchers in Japan and Europe, have uncovered the presence of strongly
bonded water pairs at the air–water interface, rather than previously
hypothesized ‘ice-like’ surface structures.
Traditionally, science in the United States has been taught in isolated disciplines such as chemistry, biology and physics without clear connections being made between the subjects. The 8+1 effort encourages K-12 teachers to use the eight science concepts to build understanding within and between their courses as students advance through the grades.
Today's frontiers in science often occur at these disciplinary edges. Aided by the explosion in technology and scientific discoveries, new fields are arising that were hardly imagined a generation ago such as synthetic biology, digital organisms and genomics.
Molecules is an application for viewing three-dimensional renderings of molecules and manipulating them using your fingers. You can rotate the molecules by moving your finger across the display, zoom in or out by using two-finger pinch gestures, or pan the molecule by moving two fingers across the screen at once. These structures can be viewed in both ball-and-stick and spacefilling visualization modes.