News & Events | Data Nuggets

10.6.16

Gene expression in stem cells

Adam working in the lab at Colorado State University.

The activities are as follows:

Every cell in your body contains the same DNA. How is it that genetically identical skin, brain, and muscle cells can look very different and perform very different functions from each other? Cells differentiate, or become different from one another, by turning certain genes on and off. This process is called gene expression. For example, when you spend time in the sun your skin cells turn on the gene for pigment, which protects your cells from bright sunlight. In the winter when there is less sunlight, your cells turn off this gene. This process your body uses to turn genes on and off is the same one it uses to develop from one cell into the many different cell types that make up your body. Stem cells have the ability to turn into any other type of cell in the body, an ability known as pluripotency. Your body retains some stem cells for your entire life.

Some genes are only turned on in specific types of cells because they have specialized jobs for those cell types, like muscle or brain cells. Other genes are more like managers, controlling which genes are turned on and off. The activity of these manager genes may be more common in stem cells because they could control which type of cell the stem cell will become. In recent years, scientists discovered they could reprogram specialized cells back into non-specialized stem cells, simply by turning on several manager genes. They call these reprogrammed cells induced pluripotent, or iPS.

Adam working under the hood, reprogramming specialized cells into induced pluripotent stem cells for his experiments.

Adam was working as a biologist in Colorado when he learned that many cool medical advances in regenerative and personalized medicine will happen when we figure out which genes are turned on, and which are turned off, in pluripotent stem cells. In his research, Adam wanted to look at gene expression for two genetically identical cell lines, those that have specialized and those that have been reprogrammed to be iPS stem cells. He was interested to see which genes are expressed by both types of cells and which genes are only expressed in one type of cell.

He decided to work with fibroblast cells because they are easy to grow in the lab. Fibroblasts cells are mainly responsible for production and maintenance of the extracellular matrix (including joints, ligaments, tendons and connective tissues), which is critical in holding the body’s tissues together. From reading the work of other scientists, Adam learned how to transform fibroblast cells into iPS stem cells. This knowledge lead him to two genetically identical types of cells – (1) specialized fibroblast cells and (2) unspecialized iPS cells. When fibroblast cells are transformed into unspecialized iPS cells, their function changes and they become responsible for wound healing and generating new tissues, acting like a reserve set of cells. Because fibroblast and iPS cells perform very different functions, Adam thinks it is likely that each cell line will expresses genes that are specific to its individual function.

Adam looked at expression in 10 different genes that are thought to have important functions for fibroblast or iPS cells. Adam measured the expression for each gene by looking at RNA abundance of each gene in the different cell types. RNA is the intermediate between DNA (the genetic blueprint) and protein (the functional worker of the cell). Adam chose to look at RNA, because it is often representative of how much protein is present in a cell, which is very difficult to measure directly. Adam analyzed three replicates for each cell type. He replicated in order to get a more accurate representation for each cell type. This is important in case the samples were in slightly different conditions, like warmer or cooler temperatures, which could alter gene expression. This experiment allowed Adam to figure out which genes are turned on in iPS cells, allowing him to better understand how stem cells work.

iPS cells display different gene expression and physical appearance than HFF cells: Figures A and B are low magnification images of two different iPS cell colonies. iPS cells are usually small, round, and like to grow in circular-like colonies. Figures C is a low magnification image of HFF cells. HFF cells tend to appear long and slender almost like trees. Generally, HFF cells like to grow near each other, but not in colonies. Figure D is a higher magnification image of the black box in figure C, showing a group of HFF cells growing in close proximity with each other.

Featured scientist: Adam Heck from Colorado State University. Written with Sandra Weeks from the Poudre Valley School District.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.6

The gene expression data found in this activity was gathered from the following paper – citation and link below:

Neff, A. T., Lee, J. Y., Wilusz, J., Tian, B., & Wilusz, C. J. (2012). Global analysis reveals multiple pathways for unique regulation of mRNA decay in induced pluripotent stem cells. Genome Research, 22(8), 1457–1467.

10.5.16

Raising Nemo: Parental care in the clown anemonefish

Clown anemonefish caring for their eggs.

The activities are as follows:

When animals are born, some offspring are able to survive on their own, while others rely on parental care. Parental care can take many forms. One or both parents might help raise the young, or in some species other members of the group help them out. The more time and energy the parents invest, the more likely it is that their offspring will survive. However, parental care is costly for the parents. When a parent invests time, energy, and resources in their young, they are unable to invest as much in other activities, like finding food for themselves. This results in a tradeoff, or a situation where there are costs and benefits to the decisions that must be made. Parents must balance their time between caring for their offspring and other activities.

The severity of the tradeoff between parental care and other activities may depend on environmental conditions. For example, if there is a lot of food available, parents may spend more time tending to their young because finding food for themselves takes less time and energy. Scientists wonder if parents are able to adjust their parental care strategies in response to environmental changes.

Photo of Tina (left) with other members of her lab. The glowing blue tanks around them all contain anemonefish!

Tina is a scientist studying the clown anemonefish. She is interested in how parental care in this species changes in response to the environment. She chose to study anemonefish because they use an interesting system to take care of their young, and because the environment is always changing in the coral reefs where they live.

Anemonefish form monogamous pairs and live in groups of up to six individuals. The largest female is in charge of the group. Only the largest male and female get to mate and take care of the young. Both parents care for eggs by tending them, mouthing the eggs to clean the nest and remove dead eggs, and fanning eggs with their fins to oxygenate them. A single pair may breed together tens or even hundreds of times over their lifetimes. But here is the cool part – anemonefish can change their sex! If the largest female dies, the largest male changes to female, and the next largest fish in line becomes the new breeding male. That means that a single parent may have the opportunity to be a mother and a father during its lifetime.

Parents will fan the eggs to increase oxygen by the nest, or mouth them to remove dead eggs and clean the nest.

On the reef, anemonefish groups also experience shifts in how much food is available. In years with lots of food, the breeding pair has lots of young, and in years with little food they do not breed as often. Tina presumed that food availability determines how much time and energy the parents invest in parental care behaviors. She collected data from 20 breeding pairs of fish, 10 of which she gave half rations of food, and 10 of which she gave full rations. The experiment ran for six lunar months. Every time a pair laid a clutch of eggs, Tina waited 7 days and then took a 15-minute video of the parents and their nest. She watched the videos and measured three parental care behaviors: mouthing, fanning, and total time spent tending for both males and females. Some pairs laid eggs more than once, so she averaged these behaviors across the six months of the experiment. Tina predicted that parents fed a full ration would perform more parental care behaviors, and for a longer amount of time, than parents fed a half ration.

Watch video of the experimental trials, demonstrating the mouthing and fanning behaviors:

Featured scientist: Tina Barbasch from Boston University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.4

About Tina: I first became interested in science catching frogs and snakes in my backyard in Ithaca, NY. This inspired me to major in Biology at Cornell University, located in my hometown. As an undergraduate, I studied male competition and sperm allocation in the local spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum. After graduating, I joined the Peace Corps and spent 2 years in Morocco teaching environmental education and 6 months in Liberia teaching high school chemistry. As a PhD student in the Buston Lab, I study how parents negotiate over parental care in my study system the clownfish, Amphiprion percula, otherwise known as Nemo. More here!

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9.19.16

Collaborations with K-12 teachers first inspired Data Nuggets, and continue to today

This post is by MSU postdocs Liz Schultheis and Melissa Kjelvik. See the original article on the BEACON webpage (reproduced below):

Liz modeling the process of science within a Data Nugget.

Back when we were biology graduate students, the GK-12 program at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) exposed us to science education for the first time. When we signed up to work with K-12 teachers and go into schools as the “classroom scientist” we knew there would be benefits, such as time to hone our science communication skills, a venue to share our research with broad audiences, and of course saving us the hour and a half drive to MSU’s main campus to TA. However, we had no idea what we had really gotten ourselves into.

We were each assigned a partner teacher whose classroom we would visit a few times a week, and who would mentor us as we attempted to share our research with students for the first time. The experience of standing up in front of 30 sixth graders was intimidating at first. Yet, it was necessary to realize how hard it was to simplify and explain a topic, while also making it engaging for an audience who may never have thought about these ideas before. The teachers’ infectious enthusiasm boosted the passion we had for our research. They pushed us to describe why the things we were doing day-to-day mattered for the big picture. They were willing to stand in the back of the classroom and wave their arms when students checked out because we’d used too much jargon or started to nerd-out. These teachers had such a clear passion for improving student learning; they constantly stepped out of their comfort zone to try new ways to improve their teaching and integrate the latest effective science teaching strategies into their classrooms. Working with these teachers and their students quickly became our favorite time of the week.

These same teachers originally inspired Data Nuggets; they shared that their students were struggling to make sense of data in most applications, but especially data from classroom inquiry projects that turned out messy or did not follow predictions. Students should not feel they have failed when their data has variation around the mean or does not support their hypothesis. Typically, students are only exposed to research and data published in textbooks, leading to the misconception that all science is a completed product with well established ideas and clear results. To get students to think like scientists, they need to be exposed to the process of science itself and how scientists work to develop, test, and refine their ideas. As early-career scientists, we knew that along the way, experiments often fail or yield unexpected results.

Melissa running a professional development workshop for high school math and science teachers.

For continued support, we turned to BEACON, whose education objectives align with the Data Nuggets vision. Using these seed funds, we were able to work with Louise Mead and other BEACON scientists to develop Data Nuggets that connect students to real data and the motivation and passion of the scientists behind the research. Today we have 46 Data Nuggets (and counting) up on our website, freely available to teachers and students, many written by women and early career scientists.

As we wrapped up as graduate students, we realized there was so much more we wanted to do to improve and expand Data Nuggets. The support from BEACON allowed us time to fully develop our ideas and submit an NSF DRK-12 grant with Louise. As BEACON postdocs we are excited to have time to integrate all these great ideas into Data Nuggets. The main objective of the collaborative NSF DRK-12 grant, between MSU and Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS), is to assess whether Data Nuggets increase students’ quantitative reasoning abilities, along with their understanding of, and engagement with, science. In preparation for this efficacy study, we are currently revising each Data Nugget and integrating new ideas and feedback from our collaboration.

High school math and science teachers working to complete a Data Nugget during a professional development workshop.

This summer we worked with 4 teachers – Marcia Angle, Cheryl Hach, Ellie Hodges, and Kristy Campbell. Marcia and Cheryl have been with us since the beginning, and were among those who first helped us develop Data Nuggets. They were thrilled to see that we continued to develop Data Nuggets and were happy with how far they’d come since the original inception. This summer we had many insightful conversations about students’ struggles with certain scientific practices, including data interpretation and constructing explanations. The teachers shared their different teaching strategies, and researched new ones, in order to write guides to help other teachers cover these difficult topics. As a group we read through student responses to Data Nuggets piloted in the spring. This was a powerful way to think deeply about the areas students could improve, and ways for us to provide more context in our teacher guides to encourage rich classroom discussions. Along with BEACON postdoc Alexa Warwick, the teachers developed a grading rubric to help teachers score Data Nuggets and identify areas where their students need more practice. While reading student responses, the teachers collectively noticed that students had a difficult time using evidence to support their claims, so they worked on a new tool to ease students into this process. They presented this tool, along with other strategies, at professional development workshops for the KBS K-12 partnership teachers and all Kalamazoo Public Schools high school science teachers.

This year we are finalizing preparations for our Data Nugget efficacy study, taking place in 2017. Preliminary observations in classrooms, and feedback from teachers, indicate Data Nuggets effectively increase students’ quantitative and scientific literacy while engaging them with the story behind the research and building a connection to scientists. However, as scientists, we are of course not satisfied with anecdotal evidence and want data to support our claims! We are excited for the upcoming study to determine the ways in which Data Nuggets might contribute to a strong science education curriculum!

8.29.16

How do brain chemicals influence who wins a fight?

The activities are as follows:

In nature, animals compete for resources. These resources include space, food, and mates. Animals use aggression as a way to capture or defend these resources, which can improve their chances of survival and mating. Aggression is a forceful behavior meant to overpower opponents that are competing for the same resource. The outcome (victory or defeat) depends on several factors. In insects, the bigger individuals often win. However, if two opponents are the same size, other factors can influence outcomes. For example, an individual with more experience may defeat an individual with less experience. Also individuals that are fighting to gain something necessary for their survival have a strong drive, or motivation, to defeat other individuals.

Researchers Andrew, Ken, and John study what role an animal’s brain plays in regulating behavior when motivation is present. They wanted to know if specific chemicals in the brain influenced the outcome of a physically aggressive competition. Andrew, Ken, and John read a lot papers written by other scientists and learned that there is a brain chemical that plays an important role in regulating aggressive behavior. This chemical is called serotonin and is found in the brains of all animals, including humans. Even a small amount of this chemical can make a big impact on aggressive behavior, and perhaps the outcome of competition.

The researchers decided to do an experiment to test what happens to aggression during competition as serotonin levels in the brain increase. They used stalk-eyed flies in their experiment. Stalk-eyed flies have eyes on the ends of stalks that stick out from the sides of their heads (Pictures 1 & 2). They reasoned that brain serotonin levels in stalk-eyed flies influence their aggressive behaviors in battle and therefore impact the outcome of competition. If their hypothesis is true, they predicted that increasing the brain serotonin in a stalk-eyed fly would make it more likely to use aggressive behaviors, and flies that used more aggressive behaviors would be more likely to win. Battling flies use high-intensity aggressive attacks like jumping on or striking an opponent. They also use less aggressive behaviors like flexing their front legs or rearing up on their hind legs.

Two stalk-eyed flies rearing/extending forearms in battle. Photo credit: Sam Cotton.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers set up a fair test. A fair test is a way to control an experiment by only changing one piece of the experiment at a time. By changing only one variable, scientists can determine if that change caused the differences they see. Since larger flies tend to win fights, the flies were all matched up with another fly that was the same size. This acted as an experimental control for size, and made it possible to look at only the impact of serotonin levels on aggression. The scientists also controlled for the age of the flies and made sure they had a similar environment since the time they were born. The experiment had 20 trials with a different pair of flies in each. In each trial, one fly received corn mixed with a dose of serotonin, while another fly received plain corn as a control. That way, both flies received corn to eat, but only one received serotonin.

Each pair of flies was placed in a fighting arena and starved for 12 hours to increase their motivation to fight over food. Next, food was placed in the center of the arena, but only enough for one fly! The researchers observed the flies, recording three types of behaviors for each opponent. High intensity behaviors were when the fighting flies touched one another. Low-intensity behaviors were when the flies did not touch each other, for example jump attacks, swipes, and lunges. The last behavior type was retreating from the fight. Flies that retreated fewer times than their opponent were declared the winners. After the battles, the researchers collected the brains of the flies and measured the concentration of serotonin in each fly’s brain.

Featured scientists: Andrew Bubak and John Swallow from the University of Colorado at Denver, and Kenneth Renner from the University of South Dakota

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 9.2

There is a scientific paper associated with the data in this Data Nugget. The citation and PDF for the paper is below.

Bubak, A.N., K.J. Renner, and J.G. Swallow. 2014. Heightened serotonin influences contest outcome and enhances expression of high-intensity aggressive behaviors. Behavioral Brain Research 259: 137-142.

An article written about the research in this Data Nugget: John Swallow: Co-authors study on insect aggression and neurochemistry

Video showing two stalk eyed flies battling in the fighting arena.

Video showing how the long eyestalks of males form!

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8.20.16

Beetle battles

Erin has always loved beetles! Here she is with a dung beetle in Tanzania, during a graduate school class trip.

The activities are as follows:

Male animals spend a lot of time and energy trying to attract females. In some species, males directly fight with other males to become socially dominant. They also fight to take over and control important territories. This process is known as male-male competition. The large antlers of male elk are an example of a trait that has been favored by male-male competition. In other species, males try to court females directly. This process is known as female choice. The flashy tails of male peacocks are a good example of a trait that has been favored by female choice. Lastly, in some species, both male-male competition AND female choice determine which males get to mate. In order to be successful, males have to be good at both fighting other males and making themselves attractive to females. Erin is a biologist interested in these different types of mating systems. She wondered if she could discover a single trait that was favored by both male-male competition and female choice.

Two dung beetle males fighting for ownership of the artificial tunnel. Why is the photo pink? Because beetles mate and fight in dark, underground tunnels, Erin carried out all of her experiments in a dark room under dim red-filtered light. Beetles can’t see the color red, so working under red-filtered light didn’t affect the beetles’ behavior, and allowed Erin to see what the beetles were doing.

In horned dung beetles, male-male competition and female choice are both important in determining which males get to mate. Females dig tunnels underneath fresh piles of dung where they mate and lay their eggs. Beetles only mate inside these underground tunnels, so males fight with other males to become the owner of a tunnel. Males that control the tunnels have a better chance to mate with the female that dug it. However, there is often more than one male inside a breeding tunnel. Small males will sneak inside a main tunnel by digging a connecting side tunnel. Additionally, the constant fights between large males means that the ownership of tunnels is constantly changing. As a result, females meet many different males inside their tunnels. It is up to them to choose the male they find the most attractive, and with whom they’ll mate. In this species of dung beetle, males try to persuade females to mate by quickly tapping on the females’ back with their forelegs and antennae. Previous research has found that females are more likely to mate with males that perform this courtship tapping at a fast rate. Because both fighting and courtship tapping take a lot of strength, Erin wondered if the trait of strength was what she was looking for. Would stronger male dung beetles be favored by both male-male competition and female choice?

To keep beetles alive in the lab, Erin set up a bucket with sand, and placed one pile of dung in the center. Female beetles dug tunnels below the dung.

To test her hypothesis, Erin conducted a series of experiments to measure the mating success, fighting success, and strength of male dung beetles. First, Erin measured the mating success of male beetles by placing one male and one female in an artificial tunnel (a piece of clear plastic tubing). She watched the pair for one hour, and measured how quickly the males courted, and whether or not the pair mated. Second, Erin measured the fighting success of males by staging fights between two males over ownership of an artificial tunnel. Beetle battles consist of a head-to-head pushing match that results in one male getting pushed out of the tunnel, and the other male remaining inside. To analyze the outcome of these fights, Erin randomly selected one male in each pair as the focal male, and scored the interaction as a “win” if the focal male remained inside the tunnel, and as a “loss” if the focal male got pushed out of the tunnel. In some cases, there was not a clear winner and loser because either both males left the tunnel, or both males remained inside. These interactions were scored as a “tie”. Finally, Erin determined each beetles’ strength. She measured strength as the amount of force it took to pull a male out of an artificial tunnel. To do this, she super-glued a piece of string to the back of the beetle, had it crawl into an artificial tunnel, attached the string to a spring scale, and then pulled on the scale until the beetle was pulled out of the tunnel.

Featured scientist: Erin McCullough from the University of Western Australia

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.8

Additional resources related to this Data Nugget:

There is one scientific paper associated with the data in this Data Nugget. McCullough, E.L. and L.W. Simmons (2016) Selection on male physical performance during male–male competition and female choice. Behavioral Ecology
Alignment of this activity to NGSS Standards can be found on the NSTA website here.

About Erin: I am fascinated by morphological diversity, and my research aims to understand the selective pressures that drive (and constrain) the evolution of animal form. Competition for mates is a particularly strong evolutionary force, and my research focuses on how sexual selection has contributed to the elaborate and diverse morphologies found throughout the animal kingdom. Using horned beetles as a model system, I am interested in how male-male competition has driven the evolution of diverse weapon morphologies, and how sexual selection has shaped the evolution of physical performance capabilities. I am first and foremost a behavioral ecologist, but my research integrates many disciplines, including functional morphology, physiology, biomechanics, ecology, and evolution.

8.18.16

Professional Development Workshop @ KBS Summer Institute 8/18/16

Advice on how to use the Claims-Evidence-Reasoning framework in your classroom intentionally. Session presented with two Michigan science teachers, Marcia Angle and Cheryl Hach.

Session Description: In our session we will talk about the transition of science education away from memorization of facts and more towards the application of applying critical thinking and quantitative reasoning. We will discuss the importance of scaffolding student learning centered on the scientific principles of investigation, student discourse, and will unveil our new graphic CER organizer that we designed to support student writing when it comes to Claim, Evidence and the oh so difficult Reasoning portions of science writing. We use Data Nuggets throughout the session to model how you can integrate our CER tool into the classroom and increase the amount of data analysis and interpretation done in your classroom. This session is for upper elementary, middle and high school teachers whose students struggle with quantitative skills and CER writing. Our little nuggets can do great things!

8.17.16

Feral chickens fly the coop

Red Junglefowl are the same species as chickens (Gallus gallus). On Kauai island, they have mated with feral chickens to produce hybrids (photo by Tontantours).

The activities are as follows:

When domesticated animals that humans keep in captivity escape into the wild, we call them feral. You may have seen feral animals, such as pigeons, cats, or dogs, right in your own backyard. But did you know that there are dozens of other feral species all over the world, including goats, parrots, donkeys, wallabies, and chameleons?

Sometimes feral species interbreed with closely related wild relatives to produce hybrid offspring. Feral dogs, for example, occasionally mate with wolves to produce hybrid pups which resemble both their wolf and dog parents. Over many generations, a population made up of these wolf-dog hybrids can evolve to become more wolf-like or more dog-like. Which direction they take will depend on whether dog or wolf traits help the individual survive and reproduce in the wild. In other words, hybrids should evolve traits that are favored by natural selection.

Photograph of a feral hen on Kauai, with her recently hatched chicks (photo by Pamela Willis).

You might be surprised to learn that, like dogs, chickens also have close relatives living in the wild. These birds, called Red Junglefowl, inhabit the jungles of Asia and also many Pacific islands. Eben is a biologist who studies how the island populations of these birds are evolving over time. He has discovered that Red Junglefowl on Kauai Island, which is part of Hawaii, have recently started interbreeding with feral chickens. This interbreeding has produced a hybrid population of birds that are somewhere in between red junglefowl and domestic chickens.

One of the biggest differences between chickens and Red Junglefowl is their breeding behaviors. Red Junglefowl females lay only a handful of eggs each year and only in the spring. Domestic chickens can lay eggs during any season and sometimes up to 300 or more eggs in one year! Eben wanted to know more about the breeding behaviors of Kauai’s feral populations. In many cases, natural selection favors individuals who produce more offspring during their lifetimes. Because domesticated chickens can lay eggs year-round, Eben thought that the feral population would be evolving to be more like domesticated chickens. He predicted that feral hens would breed in all seasons.

To test his hypothesis, Eben’s research group collected hundreds of photographs and videos of Kauai’s hybrid chickens. Tourists delight in photographing Kauai’s wild chickens and uploading their media to the internet. Fortunately for Eben, their cameras and cell phones often record the dates that images are taken. Eben looked at media posted on websites like Flickr and YouTube to find documentation of feral chickens throughout the year. This allowed him to see whether chicks are present during each of the four seasons. He knew that any hen observed with chicks had recently mated and hatched eggs because the chicks only stay with their mothers for only a few weeks.

Featured scientist: Eben Gering from Michigan State University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.6

To learn more about feral chickens and Eben’s research, check out the popular science articles below:

New York Times Article, “In Hawaii, Chickens Gone Wild”
Nature Article, “When Chickens Go Wild”
MSU Today, “How Did the Chicken Cross the Sea?“
BEACON, “Feral chickens are a-changing: updates on the rapid evolution of Kauai’s hybrid Gallus gallus”

Mini documentary you can watch in class. The video gives a brief history of chickens on the island of Kauai, and shows mother hens with their chicks:

Cock a Doodle Doo from John Goheen on Vimeo.

Students can watch the same videos that Eben used to collect his experimental data. They can find these videos by searching YouTube for “feral chickens Kauai” and many examples will come up, like this video:

About Eben: One of the most exciting things I learned as a college student was that natural populations sometimes evolve very quickly. Biologists used to think evolution was too slow to be studied “in action”, so their research focused on evolutionary changes that occurred over thousands (or even millions) of years. I study feral animal populations to learn how rapid evolutionary changes help them survive and reproduce, without direct help from us.

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8.15.16

Professional Development Workshop with NY Master Teachers 8/8/16

Workshop Description: In this workshop we demonstrated how to use our current Data Nugget resources in the classroom. We took an in depth look at the big themes present in these activities, including distinguishing hypotheses from predictions, using claim-evidence-reasoning structure to help students construct explanations, and modeling the process of science followed in real research. Finally, we shared our exciting plans for testing the efficacy of Data Nuggets at increasing student quantitative literacy, understanding of science, and motivation to pursue careers in science.

Participants: Judy Selig, Matthew Schuchman, Paula Fernes, AnneMarie Giles, Lisa Brosnick, Trevor Tripp, Eun Mi Heo, Annie Chien, Linda Rose, Karin Marcotullio, Darlene Nichols, Michelle Van Steele, and Amanda Huszar.

6.1.16

The Arctic is Melting – So What?

A view of sea ice in the Artic Ocean.

The activities are as follows:

Think of the North Pole as one big ice cube – a vast sheet of ice, only a few meters thick, floating over the Arctic Ocean. Historically, the amount of Arctic sea ice would be at a maximum in March. The cold temperatures over the long winter cause the ocean water to freeze and ice to accumulate. By September, the warm summer temperatures cause about 60% of the sea ice to melt every year. With global warming, more sea ice is melting than ever before. If more ice melts in the summer than is formed in the winter, the Arctic Ocean will become ice-free, and would change the Earth as we know it.

Student drills through lake ice

This loss of sea ice can have huge impacts on Arctic species and can also affect climate around the globe. For example, polar bears stand on the sea ice when they hunt. Without this platform they can’t catch their prey, leading to increased starvation. Beyond the Arctic, loss of sea ice can increase global climate change through the albedo effect (or the amount of incoming solar radiation that is reflected by a surface). Because ice is so white, it has high albedo and reflects a lot of the sunlight that hits it and keeps the earth cooler. Ice’s high albedo is why it seems so bright when the sun reflects off snow. When the ice melts and is replaced by water, which has a much lower albedo, more sunlight is absorbed by the earth’s surface and temperatures go up.

Scientists wanted to know whether the loss of sea ice and decreased albedo could affect extreme weather in the northern hemisphere. Extreme weather events are short-term atmospheric conditions that have been historically uncommon, like a very cold winter or a summer with a lot of rain. Extreme weather has important impacts on humans and nature. For example, for humans, extreme cold requires greater energy use to heat our homes and clear our roads, often increasing the use of fossil fuels. For wildlife, extreme cold could require changes in behavior, like finding more food, building better shelter, or a moving to a warmer location.

Student releases weather balloon

To make predictions about how the climate might change in the coming decades to centuries, scientists use climate models. Models are representations, often simplifications, of a structure or system used to make predictions. Climate models are incredibly complex. For example, climate models must describe, through mathematical equations, how water that evaporates in one region is transferred through the atmosphere to another region, potentially hundreds of miles away, and falls to the ground as precipitation.

James is a climate scientist who, along with his colleagues, wondered how the loss of arctic sea ice would affect climates around the globe. He used two well-established climate models – (1) the UK’s Hadley Centre model and (2) the US’s National Center for Atmospheric Research model. These models have been used previously by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict how much sea ice to expect in 2100.

Featured scientists: James Screen from University of Exeter, Clara Deser from National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Lantao Sun from University of Colorado at Boulder. Written by Erin Conlisk from Science Journal for Kids.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 10.2

This Data Nugget was adapted from a primary literature activity developed by Science Journal For Kids. For a more detailed version of this lesson plan, including a supplemental reading, videos, and extension activities, visit their website and register for free!

There is one scientific paper associated with the data in this Data Nugget. The citation and PDF of the paper is below.

Screen J.A., Deser C., Sun L. 2015. Projected changes in regional climate extremes arising from Arctic sea ice loss. Environmental Research Letters 10: 084006.
The same paper, written at a middle/high school reading level by Science Journal for Kids, can be found here.

You can play this video, showing changes in Arctic sea ice from 1987-2014, overhead at the start of class (no sound required). Each student should write down a couple of observations and questions.

5.17.16

Data Nuggets at the National Academies Special Topics Summer Institute on Quantitative Biology

Data Nuggets will be presented at the National Academies Special Topics Summer Institute on Quantitative Biology on June 20th.

To see the event on Facebook, click here.

The Data Nugget “9 piece” team – developing new activities to bring real data into undergraduate classrooms! From left to right: Melissa Kjelvik, Jodi Forrester, Elizabeth Schultheis, Vedham Karpakakunjaram, Michelle Fisher, and Aditi Pai (not pictured: Kristine Grayson, Jim Smith, Bob Mayes)All the participants at the QUBES/BioQuest working group!