Education General

Preparing graduate students and postdocs for diverse careers Changes in the workforce are challenging academia to prepare scientists to be adaptable and adept at communicating across boundaries. To meet these demands, the Plant Science Research Network (PSRN, plantae.org/PSRN) is shifting the focus…

Earlier this year I gave a Plantae seminar on "Images for Impact" - simple, free tips about how to source and create images to use in your science writing and communicating. Here is the text of the handout I created to accompany the seminar. You can get this as a PDF here. You can download the…

Setting something to music is a well-known method for supporting learning (think about the alphabet song that you learned as a child). Gregory J. Crowther has assembled a searchable database of science-themed songs, along with lesson plans and suggestions for how to use songs in your teaching.…

An NPR interview with Alan Alda about his efforts to help scientists learn to communicate. "People are dying because we can't communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another," he writes. "It sounds like an exaggeration, but I don't think it is. When patients can't relate to their doctors…

Here's a fascinating plant in honor of Fascination of Plants Day #PlantDay By Tim Low, published in Australian Geographic AUSTRALIA HAS A PARASITE believed to be the largest in the world, a tree whose greedy roots stab victims up to 110m away. The Christmas tree (Nuytsia floribunda) has blades…

Cross-posted from Kelsey Wood with permission. Kelsey is a PhD student at U.C. Davis. How to make a DNA bracelet, from any organism and any gene! I study plant-pathogen interactions, so I chose to make a sequence from a wild tobacco gene that is important for plant defense against pathogens. What…

Amazing - over 1.5 million views in less than 24 hours - this is a popular video series! Here is a list of sources from the YouTube page: SOURCES: #What is natural: GM insulin: http://bit.ly/2ncHaW5 Genetic engineering for thousands of years: http://bit.ly/2eCHKfi http://bit.ly/2mLCvPm CRISPR: http://bit.ly/2ncI2uN #…