A Free Digital Biology Textbook Is Now Fully Hatched

Posted on June 30, 2014September 30, 2018 by admin

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has been leading an ambitious project over the past few years to create a free high school biology textbook custom-built for the digital age. It’s called Life on Earth.

In 2012 the team released a sample chapter, and they’ve been releasing more since then. Reviewing the project early on for Download the Universe, anthropologist John Hawks had mixed feelings. He praised its beauty and the pleasure derived from toying with its fancy features, while also questioning how well students will learn from the format.

Now the whole project is complete. You can download the entire book for free here. You’ll need an iPad for the full effect, although I’m currently thumbing through it on iBooks on my laptop. In addition, they’ve put some extra materials together for teachers in iTunes U, which you can access from the book link. I’m curious to know what people think. Continue reading “A Free Digital Biology Textbook Is Now Fully Hatched” →

Catching Up: Brains, Writing, and Hot Hands

Posted on June 27, 2014September 30, 2018 by admin

The past couple weeks have been a scramble for me (the end of the school year tends to crash like a rogue wave into the lives of parents). During that time, I’ve written a couple new “Matter” columns for the New York Times, both of which concerning how our brains work:

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That’s So Random: Why We Persist in Seeing Streaks

Posted on June 26, 2014May 24, 2020 by Lori Jia

The New York Times, June 26, 2014

Link

From time to time, athletes get on a streak. Suddenly, the basketball goes through the net every time, or a batter gets a hit in every game. This blissful condition is often known as the hot hand, and players have come to believe it is real — so much so that they have made it a part of their strategy for winning games.

“On offense, if someone else has a hot hand, I constantly lay the ball on him,” wrote the N.B.A. legend Walt Frazier in his 1974 memoir, “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool.”

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The Zoo In the Mouth

Posted on June 25, 2014September 30, 2018 by admin

There’s a philosophical quandary breeding in your mouth. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have searched for the right way to classify living things. We call living things with feathers “birds,” but we can also divide birds up into smaller groups, like pigeons and storks. We can drill down even further, to different species of pigeons. But it doesn’t feel right to classify birds all the way down to every individual feathered creature on Earth. The fundamental unit of life’s biodiversity has long been the species. Charles Darwin named his book The Origin of Species for a reason.

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This Is Your Brain on Writing

Posted on June 20, 2014May 24, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, June 20, 2014

Link

A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.

That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction.

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