The BioBus Daily News

Is the BioBus good?

Could someone please add a comment that the BioBus uses waste vegetable oil, which is definitely good?

The Scientist Magazine has a really thoughtful article in their current issue about mentoring minority students and researchers. I’m beginning development of a full-fledged mentorship program for the many talented and driven students I meet on the BioBus.  Articles like this one have been helpful in shaping my thoughts, and I would greatly appreciate anyone who has other articles, resources, or know people who you think are running really top-notch science mentoring programs, to please send the info my way. Thanks!

Oh, and check out this cool movie of a Daphnia’s Heart Beating that students made recently on the BioBus. We just received a generous donation of a pretty high speed laptop that should make future movies a little less jumpy!

The BioBus along with 8 students from the Community Health Academy of the Heights (CHAH) were featured in two, three minute long T.V. segments that aired live on the Japanese national network NHK yesterday. Below are some photos I took from the scene – as soon as the piece goes onto the web I will be sure to post it here. While I understand only a handful of words of Japanese, Ms. Udo, the anchor, explained to us what the segment was about. “Japanese scientists spend all of their time in the lab,” she explained. “We hope that the BioBus will give them some inspiration to get out of the lab and do their own outreach to the community.” Thank you, Ms. Udo and the entire NHK staff for your attention and for an unforgettable experience. I hope to see a BioBus full of Japanese scientists this time next year!

Ric and I rounded out the BioBus 2009 Mid-West tour back in NYC today at Angelo Patri Middle School in the Bronx. We had a great day with 4 different classes – the first classes on the BioBus in its new configuration. The refurbished BioBus not only looks really nice, but is much more functional. We have room for many more students in both the front and the back of the bus, and everyone is more comfortable. Also, I know have a big whiteboard space at the front to use in my lessons. I will post some pictures of actual students on the BioBus soon, but below are some unpeopled shots of the interior.

Another exciting development – I might be on live Japanese television next week. Did I mention we’re big in Japan? (Sorry, lame joke, but I’ve always wanted to say that.) It will probably be either this coming Thursday or the Thursday at between 5 and 6pm. So, if you are a school-age student or you know any school age students who would like a mini-lesson on the BioBus at that time and want to be famous in Japan, let me know.

Often people ask me – is it difficult to find grease to put into the BioBus fuel tanks? Well, Sunday I spent the day wandering around Columbus. Started out downtown, where I confirmed the rumors of good breakfast at First Watch, a nice relaxed joint in German Village. I then headed North to the Buckeye Hall of Fame, meeting Donovan and his girlfriend’s father to watch the Browns lose to the Steelers – the football waas bad, but the conversation was good. Next I headed to the COSI ScienceCcenter, a science museum in downtown Columbus, which was on my itinerary last year but was skipped because I was busy working on the grease system.

COSI is great, and busy too! One of the coolest exhibits was where you get to play with a real time digital effects processor – someone else stands on stage and you get to make them look grainy, gigantically big, and walking through a snowstorm. Big foot! Not sure if Werner Herzog would approve, but it was fun. Stopped by the museum shop to pick up a mineral set to look at under the microscopes on the BioBus, and talked to some of the staff about possible collaboration the next time the BioBus is in town. They were very excited about the idea.

Columbus is in the process of building a river walk, and they are making very nice progress. A neat new pedestrian bridge, nice paths, parks, and sculpture are coming together to bring folks to the water – something I love and that I admire a lot in a city. I hope that NYC continues its public redevelopment of water-front. It is bizarre that in much of NYC you can easily forget you live on a small island surrounded by water. I watched another nice sunset while sitting on the side of the river – Columbus seems to have an inordinate number of beautiful sunsets.

The only negative side of the river-front development in Columbus is that it adjoins the business section of downtown Columbus, which is, as expected, totally lifeless on a Sunday evening. So I hopped back in the van lent to me by the Farber’s and drove further north on High Street to a neighborhood adjacent to Ohio State. Seeing a cool looking Thai restaurant, I stepped in, and being alone, sat at the bar. I quickly entered into a conversation with what turned out to be two local business owners, including Chor, the owner of the restaurant.

The food was great, and Chor is very excited for me to come back for the 80 gallons of clean vegetable oil behind her restaurant. Score! I replaced a seal in the grease pump head, so that’s working again, and 80 gallons of veg should get me all the way back to NYC.

Can’t wait to see what progress Farber makes tomorrow, I’ll be sure to post the pics as they come in.

Check out Channel 1’s super cool piece on the BioBus that came out today. Channel 1 is a high school news network that reaches millions of high school students and their teachers every day. We’ve been getting lots of nice messages from folks across the country who saw the piece, from Debra in Texas to Scott in Arizona to Nancy in Tennessee. We might have to make the next tour national! Also, you can vote for the BioBus as your favorite eco-ride – but don’t worry, $10,000 is not at stake this time.

Ric and I were in Akron today for the final day of teaching on this tour at Coventry High School. It was a really nice day, especially because the students are on a block schedule, which means I had extra time with relatively small groups of students. Ms. Phillips, our host teacher at the school, made sure everything went smoothly, and even lent us her car to go grab some lunch! We also discovered that the eggs of the pregnant cyclops picture in an earlier post has hatched into about a dozen babies. I am so proud. Also, I’m looking forward to reading the article about the BioBus that should appear soon in the Akron Beacon Journal.

Some bad news – while we found a really great dumpster full of waste grease behind the Chinese Buffet across from the high school, after a few minutes of pumping the motor on our grease sucking rig started to malfunction. So we currently don’t have enough grease to make it back to NYC. However, I have 6 days in Columbus while the Farber Specialty Coach folks work on remodeling the BioBus interior, perhaps I’ll be able to get things patched up and find some local grease for the ride home.

Finally, sadly, the fellowship is broken – Ric rode back to NYC today. He had originally planned to return with the BioBus, but since I extended the trip by a week to stay at the Farber shop, that turned out to be impossible. We made a great team on this tour and accomplished everything we hoped for and more. We’re already looking forward to the next adventure, but seeing that the snow is already starting to move in, that won’t likely happen until the Spring.

Dr. Ben and I had a wonderful time in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois!  On Monday, Ben was interviewed live on morning television for the local news channel.  Today we taught eight classes at Leal Elementary school, where Ben’s brother Alex attended classes as a kid!  After that, we headed over to Countryside School in Champaign where we saw almost 60 kids.  We spent all day looking at Daphnia and talking about the energy cycle / food chain.  We had some really nice sun and made a lot of electricity in our solar panels!

Now we are headed back East, where we will make a stop at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and again at Farber Custom Coach in Columbus, OH before heading to a school in Akron on Thursday.  We are looking forward to getting some new equipment for interior improvements to the bus from the generous folks at Farber.  For now, though, it’s the open roads of Southern Indiana, and travelling always makes me wax poetic..

The highway stretches before us like an artery in this great organism called America, trucks and cells passing silently in the night.  The nation – the world, even – is like some living, breathing beast; each person within is but a single piece of the creature.  Each cell has its job to do.  Liver cells, kidney cells – these remain stationary, performing their function time and time again.  But blood cells, lymph cells, and other types of motile cells take to the road, moving through the highways of the organ systems, transmitting goods, food, supplies, nutrients.  The neural pathways connect us almost instantaneously over great distances, keeping us in touch with friends and family and allowing business to occur despite spacial differences.  The lack of a centralized ” brain” does not prevent our world from functioning – indeed, it gives us strength.  We are many brains and we are one; with redundancy upon systemic redundancy, our survival is ensured.

The study of life always amazes me.  The parallels that can be drawn, from inorganic molecules all the way up to the most complex animals, seem infinite in either direction.  Just as you and I have organs in our bodies, every single cell within those organs has organelles of its own.  Those organelles, in turn, are made up of different types of specialized molecular structures, each of which is made up of unique atomic structures.  Consider a city as a living thing – each factory, each home, each school and office building and grocery store is an organ.  Those organs are made up of living cells.  And just as the cells within our bodies create extracellular materials with which to work, we create the buildings and tools that allow us to function as a society.  There are so many levels of life.

When one paints a picture of life with this broad view in mind, it is difficult not to love and respect all living things.  As I said today to the students at Leal, all living things depend on the other.  Your kidneys can’t function when your liver fails, and your heart can’t pump if your lungs aren’t working.  When the deserts flood the rainforests dry up, and even the insects wouldn’t be happy without the spiders that eat them.  We are all part of a whole; mutual respect is necessary.

R.

About to head back to the Orpheum for our second day there, but I wanted to share this cool picture. Virginia, one of the Visiting Scientists helping us on the BioBus in Urbana, took it yesterday. It is a crustacean that we found in our container of lake water. Can any one identify this whiskery wanderer? Those are eggs on its back. (Hint – it only has one, like the creature Odysseus fought on his way home.)

It’s official – just saw on NY1 that this scruffy scientist is NY1’s New Yorker of the Week. I’ve been on the phone with excited New Yorkers for the past 2 hours solid, ever since the segment aired.

Ryan, BioBus High School Intern

Filming took place at the Belmont Library in the Bronx this past Wednesday afternoon. The event represented exactly why I started the BioBus – bringing scientists, educators, and the public together around exciting science. The BioBus pulled up in front of the library, and I, along with 6 volunteers ranging from a middle-school student to a retired member of the New York Microscopical Society, setup our microscopes. Then, along with  a hundred or so library patrons and community members, we proceeded to have ourselves a grand time exploring the microscopic world around us. By the end of the day, after going a full 90 minutes longer than scheduled, we packed up, euphoric. I think the most important thing the NY1 piece shows is how much fun everyone was having!

Mosquito Larva

Again and again I am struck by the excitement ordinary people have when given the chance to use their own hands in the search for knowledge. Equally impressive is the comraderie it engenders with their fellow explorers. Who knew a mosquito larva could be so beautiful and interesting to look at? One of the highlights of the day came when two students started eagerly searching through the grass for bugs and rocks to look at with the microscope, having realized that amazing things are oft hidden in the most unexpected places.

There are literally hundreds of folks to thank for getting the BioBus to this milestone, including many of you who are reading this post. But today special thanks goes out to Martin Halla, BioBus Volunteer Web Developer, and Justin Yuen, BioBus Volunteer Web Designer. Forgoing food and sleep, they rolled out our new website in time for the NY1 segment. I take full responsibility for it still being a bit rough around the edges – but it is a big improvement over our old site, and, since it is based on Word Press, will be much easier to keep current. Thank you Justin and Martin.

And remember: food + music + biobus = fun.