“If you are not interested in how evolution came about, and cannot conceive how anyone could be seriously concerned about anything other than human affairs, then do not read it: it will only make you needlessly angry,” wrote John Maynard Smith about The Selfish Gene.
Anna Gawthorp describes the creation of the ambitious Science Learning Centres network to help UK teachers, technicians and classroom assistants to make UK science education world-class.
Naheed Alizadeh from Imperial College, London, UK, explains how and why the INSPIRE project is trying to make inspirational science lessons, clubs, and master classes regular features of the state school timetable in the UK.
In September 2006, after a pilot phase, a new national curriculum for science was introduced for students aged 14-16 in England and Wales. Jenifer Burden explains how the new curriculum seeks to address both the scientific needs of all citizens, and the additional needs of future scientists.
In this autobiographical book, Maurice Wilkins presents the chronological story of the discovery of DNA structure in 1953. As The Third Man of the Double Helix, Wilkins is well placed to describe the complex scientific background and people involved in the breakthrough that earned him and fellow…
Rhythms of Life is a successful attempt to present what is currently known about time cycles in living creatures. It is a book about biological clocks, that is, the biological mechanisms that enable all organisms from bacteria to worms, plants, birds and mammals, including humans, to ‘tell’ the…
The success of an academic discipline has a lot to do with the attractiveness of its founding ideas and discoveries. These in turn reach the next generation of practitioners through textbooks.
Films about science or even pseudo-science can be powerful tools in the classroom. Jenna Stevens from the CISCI project provides a toolkit for using the film Erin Brockovich in chemistry and ecology lessons.
The worldwide web is a wonderful source of information, but the sheer amount of content can be overwhelming. Where do you start looking for science news? In each issue of Science in School, we will suggest useful websites for particular purposes.
Does Anything Eat Wasps? is a user-friendly, easy-to-read collection of questions and short answers that covers a wide range of science topics, from galaxies colliding in outer space to the amount of fat necessary to render a human bulletproof. These questions and their corresponding answers were…
