This activity is designed to engage a wider range of students. Using the principles of ‘science capital’, it makes the issue of Vitamin D deficiency highly accessible and relevant to students’ everyday experience. Rickets and other bone diseases in young people have risen 400%, Some scientists are recommending teenagers take vitamin D supplements, particularly in autumn and winter. […]
Mosquitoes are the world’s most dangerous killer. The diseases they transmit, malaria, Zika and dengue fever, cause more than a million deaths per year. Some scientists have suggested exterminate all dangerous mosquito species. One method is to release genetically modified (GM) male mosquitoes which prevent further breeding. In this project, students investigate whether exterminating mosquitoes is a good […]
As the number of smartphone users worldwide exceeds 2 billion, and as users update their devices with ever-increasing frequency, there are growing concerns about the impacts of smartphone manufacture and disposal on the environment and human health. In this activity, students use knowledge about Earth resources, as well as applying their working scientifically skills, […]
BREAKING NEWS! The first baby with DNA from three parents has just been born in Mexico. The mother carries the genes for a deadly syndrome that had already caused four miscarriages and her first two children to die. Scientists spliced the egg of a third donor parent together with the mother’s mitochondria and fertilised it with the […]
O mosquito pode ser um assassino perigoso. As doenças transmitidas por determinados mosquitos, Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, Malária, causam mais de um milhão de mortes por ano. Alguns cientistas têm sugerido exterminar todas as espécies perigosas de mosquito. Um dos métodos utiliza mosquitos machos geneticamente modificados que interrompem o ciclo de reprodução. Neste projeto, os […]
The extraction of gas from shale rock – hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – is widespread in the USA. Whilst some countries in Europe have banned fracking following concerns that substances used in the process pollute water, others want to exploit shale gas reserves to provide new – and cheap – sources of natural gas. In […]
December 2015 was the wettest month in the UK since records began and devastating floods affected thousands of people. Scientists believe climate change may have caused this extreme weather. In this sequence students apply their knowledge to create an apocalyptic weather report. Then they learn the skill of examining consequences, and judge solutions for limiting the temperature […]
Sports records are continually being broken – balls hit harder, javelins thrown further and bicycles travelling faster – but are these improvements down to the athlete or the engineering? In this activity students apply their knowledge of frictional forces to design a racing bicycle to help team GB smash more records on the cycling track […]
Now that scientists have discovered that sugar is like an addictive drug, pressure is building for action to reduce the amount of sugar that children and young people consume in sugary drinks. In this activity, students consider the evidence for causal links between sugar consumption, obesity and disease. They then weigh up arguments for and […]
As people live longer the demand for new organs to replace failed ones increases. One possible solution is to build new organs in a dish from cells taken from the patient’s own body. Students use evidence from case studies to work out if this is possible and then to decide whether this new technology offers […]