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What is The Real Meaning of Christmas?

By Guest PostDecember 22, 2011Culturebest seller, Bible, biblical material, biblical stories, biblical text, brian j turner, christian background, christmas, curriculum materials, david spriggs, during phase 1, eleanor holmes, esther reed, exeter, key stage 3, king james version, project, rob freathy, stories in bible, university of exeter, visual artist, world

There are thousands of stories in the Bible and a visual artist in Exeter is currently on a 30-year mission to paint the whole lot.

The University of Exeter is incorporating some of what will eventually be a series of up to 3,000 artworks by Brian J Turner into new school curriculum resources that explore how biblical stories are read and interpreted.

The Art of Narrative Theology in Religious Education project is being led by Drs Esther Reed and Rob Freathy from the Department of Theology and Religion and the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter. The aim of the project is to get school pupils to investigate biblical stories and how people, whether from a Christian background or not, interpret and use them to make sense of their world and their role within it, particularly how they can live a good life. (more…)

An Abandoned Home Becomes a Shining Star

By Guest PostDecember 22, 2011Educationbilingual education, educational community, mexican community, psychoeducational test, school experience

Todd Fletcher, an associate professor in the UA College of Education, puts his heart and soul into a life-changing community center that provides the perfect training ground for teachers.

Devoted to helping teachers improve the school experience for students, particularly special education English learners, Todd Fletcher is a man on a mission. (more…)

Facebook Helps Researchers See How Friendships Form

By Guest PostDecember 21, 2011Culture, Technologyadvertising, basic building blocks, classical, diffusion, emotional health, Facebook, friends, friendship, harvard university, influence, internet, internet and society, internet relationships, jason kaufman, jazz, kevin lewis, marco gonzalez, mechanisms, national science foundation, network, obesity, online social network, patterns of social segregation, relationships, reproduction of inequality, role, society, sociologists, statistical methods

*Long-term study analyzes social selection and peer influence in online environments*

New research funded by the National Science Foundation and published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by three Harvard University sociologists examines how we select our friends and the role that friendship plays in transmitting tastes and new ideas.

Relationships are basic building blocks of society, and understanding who befriends whom can therefore provide insight into patterns of social segregation, mechanisms for the reproduction of inequality, social support (including mental and emotional health), and access to job opportunities. Some have even viewed these relationships as a means to influence behavior whether to control obesity or target advertising. But is it really that easy, even on the Internet, to make friends with people who have different cultural upbringings, different interests, different backgrounds and different tastes in movies, music and books? (more…)

Sorghum a Sweet Treat for Zoo Animals

By Guest PostDecember 21, 2011Naturebiofuel production, sugarcane of desert, sweet sorghum, sweet sorghum stalks, zoo animals

Scraps from sweet sorghum harvested for biofuel production enrich the diets of elephants, monkeys, parrots and other animals in Tucson’ Reid Park Zoo.

This holiday season, animals in Tucson’s Reid Park Zoo get to munch on a rare treat: scraps from the University of Arizona’s research into renewable energy sources. (more…)

Got Mo-tivation?

By Guest PostDecember 21, 2011Generalbones, canada, championships, commercial airline, curmudgeon, death sentence, disease, electric wheelchair hockey, inactivity, Mantra, michigan state university, mitch albom, mo gerhardt, motivational speaker, negativity, pelvis, positive attitude, positive energy, symptoms of muscular dystrophy, vocabulary, wheelchair

EAST LANSING, Mich. — To help keep the symptoms of muscular dystrophy at bay, doctors say patients should maintain a positive attitude and be as active as possible; complete inactivity can make the disease worse. Lucky for Mo Gerhardt, negativity and inactivity aren’t in his vocabulary.

Gerhardt, who exudes positive energy, is an academic adviser at Michigan State University, color commentator for the MSU women’s basketball team, motivational speaker, a multiple medal winner in international powerhockey (electric wheelchair hockey) and author of the new book, “Perspective from an Electric Chair.” (more…)

Closest Type Ia Supernova in Decades Solves a Cosmic Mystery

By Guest PostDecember 21, 2011Sciencecosmic mystery, dark energy, expansion of universe, light curve, thermonuclear supernova

Early close-ups of a Type Ia supernova allow Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues to picture its progenitor and infer how it exploded

Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia’s) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar “standard candles” astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy – and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize, “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.” The light from thousands of SN Ia’s has been studied, but until now their physics – how they detonate and what the star systems that produce them actually look like before they explode – has been educated guesswork. (more…)

MU Unveils 3-D Visual Immersion Laboratory

By Guest PostDecember 20, 2011Science3 d, active shutter, bimal balakrishnan, design studio curriculum, designing buildings, experiential tool, glasses, high definition projection screens, icon lab, iel, ilab, immersive 3 d technology, immersive environments lab, model, penn state university, rooms, smart board, Technology, three dimensional space, university of missouri

*New “iLab” will allow undergraduate students to design projects in a 3-D environment*

COLUMBIA, Mo. – One of the most difficult tasks architects and interior designers face when designing buildings and rooms is visualizing exactly what their projects will look like when they are finished. Now, the University of Missouri architectural studies department has developed the Immersive Visualization Lab (iLab) to help students visualize their designs more accurately. Bimal Balakrishnan, an assistant professor of architectural studies in MU College of Human Environmental Sciences, says the iLab will be one of few labs in the country to allow undergraduate students to get hands-on experience using immersive 3-D technology to complete and test their designs as part of their design studio curriculum.

“Most university immersion labs are reserved primarily for graduate students to use for research purposes,” Balakrishnan said. “While the MU iLab will be used for research, it will also serve as an excellent teaching and experiential tool for undergraduate students.” (more…)

NASA Discovers First Earth-Size Planets Beyond Our Solar System

By Guest PostDecember 20, 2011Scienceearth size planets, rocky worlds, solar system, sun like star

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our sun. (more…)

Author Archives: Guest Post

Todd Fletcher, an associate professor in the UA College of Education, puts his heart and soul into a life-changing community center that provides the perfect training ground for teachers.