Posted: 09 Jan 2010 11:53 PM PST

BOISE, Idaho –Would you rather learn science in Biology 101 or work a crime scene and study fingerprints, DNA, maggots and blood spatter? Rhees Stilinovich and David Dionato spent a day examining blood types and DNA at a crime scene.

"A person's blood type can put them at the scene," Stilinovich said. "But their DNA can link them to the crime."

Stilinovich, 16, and Dionato, 17, are not cops on TV. They are kids in Eagle, part of a class that is getting students excited about science by processing a crime scene, using maggots to determine time of death, fingerprinting, analyzing blood spatters, determining race and gender based on skeletal remains, DNA testing and ballistics.

Didonato analyzed the blood spatters.

"With a knife wound, for example, a blood spatter indicating a downward trajectory means the attacker was probably right-handed, because with a left-handed person the spatter would be more horizontal," said Didonato, who plans to major in criminal justice at Boise State University and then wants to go to work for the Ada County Sheriff's Office.

"I have my whole life planned out," he said. "I want to retire a captain with the Sheriff's Office."

But student Blake Oren said that while crime scene investigation is a possibility for a career, he likes the class because it "expands your horizons."

The course is the brainchild of Eagle High School biology teacher Misty Sterk. About another 60 students will take the class next semester and the hope is to turn forensic science into a yearlong course next school year.

Sterk became intrigued with forensic medicine while she was a student at the University of Colorado. She saw daily reports on the investigation into the JonBenet Ramsey murder in 1996 and the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.

She said her first job with the 60 students who signed up for her class this semester has been to emphasize that a career in forensic science is nothing like what they see each week in the various incarnations of the "CSI" television series.

"Interest in the course was clearly inspired by the television show. So my first objective was to show them that crimes are not solved in 60 minutes, minus commercials," Sterk said.

To help students apply what they have learned, Sterk created a "forensic closet," where she recreates crime scenes. Students must interpret the evidence. One scenario involved the outline of a person's body. Blood was on the abdomen. Nearby was a knife, a cell phone, a woman's shoe and a crumpled note from a man asking the deceased to meet him at the scene.

The student's solution: the man was planning to break up with his girlfriend to be with the victim. But the soon-to-be ex-girlfriend found the note and beat him to the scene, leaving a shoe behind after using the knife to kill the victim. The cell phone, they deduced, meant the victim had been talking to the man she planned to meet, or was trying to call for help after being attacked.

"I didn't tell them anything," Sterk said. "They figured it out on their own."

To prepare for her class, Sterk sought help from local law enforcement.

The Boise Police Department provided a lesson in ballistics by having her fire everything from a handgun to an assault rifle.

"I'd fire and then ask, 'Did I hit it?' And Detective (Bill) Bones would say, 'Open your eyes and see,' " Sterk said.

No firearms will be used in her classroom instruction, Sterk said. Instead, Sterk said students will learn about how shots fired into a windshield produce different patterns, and how to determine which shot was fired first.

Don Frickey, a criminologist and latent print expert with the Ada County Crime Lab in Boise, schooled Sterk on fingerprinting and restoring serial numbers that have been filed off stolen goods.

Sterk learned how to process a crime scene from Detective Jaime Barker of the Ada County Sheriff's Office, who taught her about blood spatter patterns, type of weapon used, crime scene management, diagramming the scene, prioritizing and documenting evidence.

Barker told Sterk that "every crime scene has a story to tell," she said. "Every victim has a story to tell. And every suspect has a story to tell. When all three of those match up, you've found the truth."

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Research finds some birds kill chicks that aren't theirs - Poughkeepsie Journal

Posted: 10 Jan 2010 02:38 AM PST

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — In a world of birds that shirk parenting by laying eggs in each others' nests, University of California Santa Cruz researchers have observed in the wild one species that can recognize and kill the freeloading chicks it was tricked into raising.

The American coot, an aggressive marsh bird, uses the firstborn in each set of coot hatchlings as a template, said lead researcher Dai Shizuka of the UCSC department of ecology and evolutionary biology. If other hatchlings in a batch match, they are accepted. If not, the parasite chicks can be violently ousted.

It's a costly gamble for females that make more eggs than they can care for and hatch more chicks than they can possibly feed.

"Most parasitic chicks don't make it because of egg or chick rejection," said Shizuka, a recent doctoral graduate . However, "you lose out if you don't play the game. Everyone's trying to sneak one past each other."

Most of the time, the firstborn hatchling belongs to the coot parents, but in experiments done with Bruce Lyon, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the school, Shizuka placed a foreign coot as the firstborn, and the parent still used it as a template, rejecting instead its own hatchlings.

The research doesn't explain how coots distinguish the firstborn, maybe through song or feather patterns, but it places them on the opposite wing of birds that can't tell a foreign chick, causing them to waste food on something that has a different size, shape and often species.

The findings are surprising but solid, said Stephen Rothstein, professor of zoology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies one of the lopsided parasitism cases, the brown-headed cowbird, often larger and earlier-hatching than the host's chicks. In the case of the cowbird, the host often loses all its babies, he said, so the parasitism is more harmful, but "here you have a case where the discrimination task is more difficult."

But why kill, rather than shun a seemingly defenseless chick? Wesley Hochachka, assistant director of bird population studies at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, said coots are likely protecting their own.

"If you're snubbing a kid, it's going to follow you and going to be loud about it. It could draw attention to you, and something that might want to eat your kids," he said.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

School districts wrangling with changing role of textbooks - Jefferson City News Tribune Online

Posted: 10 Jan 2010 06:55 AM PST

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Children and Biology Lessons... - Salon

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 08:26 AM PST

I wrote the following about a year ago. It is the tale of my children and the duck eggs. Yes, I'm sure that the eggs were laid by the ducks.

~*~*~*~*~

This evening the kids brought me a present... and informed me that the chicken had laid an egg. That particular statement elicited a raised eyebrow and a biology lesson.

You see the lone chicken out in the coop is a rooster. Yep, Male, a cock, lacking in ovaries... but according to my children the chicken laid that egg. I'm positive of his gender because... erm... I went out to the coop and checked to make sure that chicken really is a rooster.

I'm not discussing how one goes about determining the sex of a chicken. Your imagination is likely "good enough" for that project.

There are a whopping two females in the coop... and they are Muscovy ducks... complete with wrinkles. Yes, I also checked the sex of the ducks... Webbi is a girl and Daisy is a girl. Donald, Scrooge, Huey, Dewey and Louie are all boys.

Yes, you determine the sex of a duck the same way you do a chicken. Your imagination will have to suffice there too.

Ain't that ducky? My ducks are laying eggs. Are the eggs going to prove to be fertile? I won't know that until 28 days after I put the first bunch in the incubator... and I won't do that with this particular egg. This particular egg is going to be fed to someone for breakfast. Why? Because it got too cold to be a viable egg, even assuming that it might possibly be fertile.

Yep, even my youngest can now tell you how to determine the sex of a fowl... she can tell you where babies come from in minute detail too. If you are fluent in sign language and have a REALLY good sense of humor that is.

*Shakes her head*

~*~*~*~*~

About a week later I had to repeat the biology lesson. With significantly older children who should have known better.

~*~*~*~*~

It's only Monday... and I have already encountered enough people that have the collective brain power of a pot plant so that I'm hoping my week looks up a bit.

First there was the child who thought I was serious when upon being asked if I was born in the barn I replied "YES and every time I hear a jackass bray I get homesick!"...

Then there was the pair of 17 year old males who looked at my duck eggs sitting on the counter and tried to convince me that the chicken had laid them. Repeat biology lesson from last week in which I demonstrated that the lone chicken in the coop is a rooster...

Then that pair of 17 year old rocket scientists tried telling me that ducks give birth to live babies... Expand biology lesson...

And then there was the fellow who looking at a recent pic of me says "So what do you look like?"... Now that wouldn't have raised so much as an eyebrow if not for the fact that when I sarcastically said "Quasimodo" he asked me who Quasimodo was...

Is it the weekend yet?

How many Triffids have YOU run into this week?

200px-Triffid_3

The pic is a herd of Triffids... The triffid is a highly venomous fictional plant species from the 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and also later appears in Simon Clark's novel The Night of the Triffids.

~*~*~*~*~

~Shakes her head~

Aren't children and triffids wonderful?

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Biology

Sunday, January 10, 2010

“Class turns Biology 101 into intro ‘CSI’ - Missoulian” plus 3 more

“Class turns Biology 101 into intro ‘CSI’ - Missoulian” plus 3 more

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