There is an increasing demand for an interdisciplinary approach to teaching, but providing inspiring and achievable lessons is no easy task. Chemistry teacher Gianluca Farusi explains how he used two Italian Renaissance paintings to delve into the chemistry of pigment extraction and the physics of…
The worldwide web is a wonderful source of information, but sometimes the sheer amount of content can be overwhelming. Where do you start looking? In each issue of Science in School, we will suggest useful websites for particular purposes.
Nano: the Next Dimension is a short television documentary featuring several leading physical scientists discussing nanotechnology and its applications - amongst these are Nobel laureates Jean-Marie Lehn and Sir Harry Kroto.
When is a chemistry textbook not a chemistry textbook? The answer to this riddle is The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison. Most people would think that a book about the toxicity of the elements arsenic, antimony, mercury, lead and thallium would be fairly heavy going, but this book reads more…
Dean Madden from the National Centre for Biotechnology Education at the University of Reading, UK, describes how DNA was discovered - and how it can be simply extracted in the classroom.
The incidence of diabetes is on the rise, in both the developed and developing worlds. Klaus Dugi, Professor of Medicine at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, discusses the causes, symptoms and treatment of diabetes.
Scientists working at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) and the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France, have discovered a crystal that appears to defy the laws of physics. Giovanna Cicognani from ILL reports.
Films about science or even pseudo-science can be powerful tools in the classroom. Heinz Oberhummer and Markus Behacker from the Cinema and Science project provide a toolkit for using the film Deep Impact.
Would you know how to turn a bucket into a seismograph, how to make a scale model of a DNA double helix from cans and bottles, or how to simulate a human eye with the help of a shampoo bottle? Barbara Warmbein from the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, finds out.
