They invited the BioBus there to work with two of their student groups, and we had a lot of fun checking out various crustaceans and protists. Check out one of the movies the students made of a paramecium, where you can see lots of beating cilia and chunky organelles inside:

And if you have time, please join us later today (Saturday, Feb 20) at the Williamsburg Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The BioBus will be there from 12-1:30 putting on a special program for Green Apple Kids, but people of all ages are welcome to stop by!

Gabriella's Beautiful Micrograph

While there, we had some very nice visitors. First Tim, an NYU ecology student, Susan, a teacher at the Columbia School, and Joan and her daughter Gabriella, a student at the Earth School, came for a tour of the bus. Gabriella already had her microscope operator’s license, and she jumped right in, showing us the different parts of the microscope and then taking some very nice images of DNA and cytoplasm of some cells. One of her images is shown here.

Colin then gave me a tour of the park, which, as I mentioned, has a beach! It is really beautiful and when the tide is low the beach is even bigger and nicer, according to Colin. When we got back to the bus, John, a teacher at City-As-School, along with a group of his students, were checking out the bus. They had been on a walking tour of the city, and heard the rumor that the BioBus was in town, so they stopped by. We had a really nice conversation about the history of the project and then toured the lab and watched some cell movies. If I am lucky some of those students might do an internship with the BioBus, which would be very neat. I was really impressed by how nice that group of students were, I really hope that some of them get involved with the project.

Colin and Tim Looking at the Receding Cloud Front

Tomorrow I will be driving to Columbus, where I am going to do some work on the bus at a family run bus garage there. Felling a little sad to leave my home here in Urbana, but I am to have some memories in the form of some great micrographs and photographs. Here is the star of the afternoon, an amoeba from the Boneyard Creek. There is also a diatom moving around next to it – that is the long canoe shaped cell. 

Amoeba Crawling with Pseudopods

Protozoa, bacteria, and algae at ~400x magnification

The last group of students from Leal just left the bus and Ric and I starting to pack up. Over the last two days, 18 of 19 of the Leal classrooms came through for a total of more than 400 students. All sorts of exciting single and multi-cellular life forms showed themselves to us under the microscope, and we had a great time watching bacteria, protozoa and even some small animals swim,  crawl and wriggle by. We learned that everything alive is made of cells and that bacteria are the smallest cells. Also, one of the fourth grade classes from yesterday came back through today for a look at fluorescent cytoskeletons and DNA on our fluorescence microscope.

Ric and I also got a chance to practice our spanish with some of the spanish language classes while looking at  ”las cellulas del rio.” I still forget to roll my ‘r’ sometime, and Ric is definitely a better speaker than me! ‘El rio’ in question was The Boneyard, a creek (OK, not quite a river) that runs through the center of Urbana, only a few blocks from the school. I am very grateful to Yvonne and Spencer for all of their organizing work, as well as all the PTA and teachers for raising money for the visit. 

Microscope Lab setup at Leal