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.)
Please Forward Widely!
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.
Please vote for the BioBus and help other BioBus supporters vote too! You know, co-workers, family, roommates, insect larvae, microorganisms, etc. Tuesday at midnight is the deadline, and we’re hanging by a hair to second place in the semi-final round for the $10,000. I don’t want to lose it now that we’ve done so well all week! Thank you for everyone who has already voted and helped spread the word – the final round will be the last week of July (if we make it) and then we will need you to vote one last time.
In other news, we had a great time at Solar One’s CitySol on Sunday. We had many visitors, mostly young ones, and the New York Microscopical Society (NYMS) also joined us with some of their microscopes. We even managed to fish some zooplankton out of the East River – who knew anything was still alive in there!! Though nothing compared with the turtle that Colin from Solar One dredged up! I forgot my camera on the BioBus today, but I will post photos soon.
Dear BioBus Supporters:
I’ll keep this to the point – help us win ten thousand dollars by voting for the BioBus at ideablob.com.
After you vote, please spread the word and convince your friends, family, and co-workers to vote as well. If we have the most votes by the end of the week, we enter into the finals. Registering to vote takes under five minutes (especially if you skip the optional part). Easy links for sharing via Facebook and email are on the ideablob.com page itself.
Also, join the BioBus this Sunday from 11AM-6PM when we will perform public demonstrations for children at the CitySol festival at Solar One. Solar One is located on 23rd street on the East River.
Thank you for your support. – Ben
While it may still be raining like it’s April, it’s in fact late June, marking the end of the BioBus’ first full school year. What a ride it has been! The BioBus spent the Fall touring the mid-west and getting a bright new paint job in Jersey City. Then we made our first visit to the Bronx in December, which went so well that we ended up visiting 20 high schools and middle schools throughout the Bronx, in addition to schools throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Over 10,000 students visited the BioBus for our introductory Explorers course, and hundreds more received our in-depth Discoverers training. Our work was rewarded by astoundingly good feedback from students, teachers, parents, and the popular press, and we are already planning return trips to many of theses schools for next year, along with new schools.
I am particularly proud of this article in the Bronx Times.
Thanks to everyone who contributed time and money to make this year such a resounding success. In particular, thanks to our ‘Visiting Scientists’ from Columbia, Rockefeller, Albert Einstein, and NYU who brought their expertise to the BioBus throughout the year. I would also like to single out Olympus amongst our corporate donors for their donation of a second microscope.
Stay tuned for upcoming summer events, including our Family Fishing Festival at Harlem Meer in Central Park on June 27 and CitySol at SolarOne on July 12. In the meantime, tweet us on twitter, enjoy our photo gallery, and join our mailing list or our Facebook group.
Howdy folks! It’s good to be back here on the Bio Bus. It’s been an exciting year in Trombone Land… After my first tour with the BioBus, when we went out to Urbana Illinois, I spent almost 7 weeks touring the Western Hemisphere with ska band the Toasters. Ten thousand miles later, I am back on the Bus, now teaching at John Philip Sousa Middle School!
Dr. Ben and I are very excited, because this week is the beginning of a jam-packed semester. We will be going to six more schools around New York City, as well as appearing at the Grand Central Terminal Earth Day Festival.
Right now we are on our third cold day here in Baychester, Bronx. Monday was quite nice, but yesterday and today we have been running the wood stove at full blast and the bus has been quite comfortable. Our lunch breaks have been full of the local Jamaican food. Kids here at JPSMS are really smart, and have been looking at yeast cell cultures, more human cheek cells, and learning all about life!
We’ve got our third period class coming in a minute, so I’m going to sign off for now. I’ll leave you with a photo I took on my cell phone (!) through the microscope, looking at the yeast culture.
i took this picture on my cell phone, through the microscope!
A new article published today in PLOS One from Columbia University and Cell Motion Labs (the non-profit that runs the BioBus) gives new insights into how cells move. And, even if you’re not into the gory details of what a cell is doing when it spreads out like a pancake on the microscope, you might still be interested in just playing through the movies, like this one:
All PLOS journals are free, and you can even comment on and rate articles! So please support this work and open-science by going to the article, browsing around, and giving your two-cents.
Gaylen has done a bang-up job on the wheel well cover. Instead of making two steps as in Ray’s original design, we made just one on the bottom and left the curve of the wheel-well alone, which I think looks really nice and is perfectly functional. The wood was all reused – it came partly from the organ in grace church and partly from Gary’s original wheel well cover that I still had in storage. The structure holds an uncanny resemblance to a gigantic plant cell, and it would be fun to paint it like that! Next project up: better cabinets for the wet-lab.
The tour was a real success, but of course it is very nice to be back home in New York! The bus is back at Grace Church in Jersey city, in fact, just across the river from Manhattan. We are finishing up the painting here and also making some improvements to the interior based on our experience on the tour. In addition, this Sunday we will have BioBus Sunday as a way to give thanks to the church for its generosity in letting the bus park in the driveway while we paint it.
Sketch of Wheel Well Stand
Tomorrow, my friend Gaylen will help me add a step/seat on the left-front wheel well, based on the design by Ray Naula (at right). This will add to the useable space in the front of the bus. The wood is coming from the old organ in Grace Church that Donald is currently taking apart – it was made of beautiful hard-wood and will make a very sturdy, and handsome, addition to the lab.
One of the things I have found quite gratifying while working on the bus has been our ability to get many of the materials we need second-hand or sometimes even out of the garbage. It is incredible how much stuff we throw away that is perfectly good and useable, if you can just find the person who needs it! It is true that you can usually furnish your apartment just by spending a few days looking at the trash piles on the street. I’d like to take this opportunity to promote one of my favorite, slightly more organized, recycling resources, called Freecycle. On the NYC list, there are about 100 items people are giving away for free on the list every day – it is an amazing resource whether you are running a shoe-string non-profit or trying to help save the planet by reusing things that would end up in a land-fill, instead of buying them new.
Francisco
Francisco came by last night and did an amazing job cleaning the microscope and wet lab. Francisco is gifted in many things – he not just cleaned the bus, he started teaching me how I could keep the bus clean myself more easily! Typically the bus gets cluttered with tools and parts until I have students coming on board and I clean it just for these occasions. But I need to develop a system for storing things and keeping things neat so that the bus is always ready for action. Francisco also came up with a very neat idea about how to use the space in the computer lab at the back of the bus that is atop the vegetable oil tanks. This is a large platform, about 7 foot long and 6 feet wide, with about 5 feet between the platform and the ceiling. Francisco’s idea is to put cushions along the walls around the sides of the platform and add a low table in the center of the platform. Students would sit cross-legged or with their legs under the table. The number of students that could sit would range between 4 and 10, depend on whether they were big high schoolers or smaller kindergardeners. I think it is a really nice way to utilize the space, and I will also try to make the table adjustable height so that it can accommodate different sized people, as well as drop down all the way when the platform needs to be used as a bed.
It is getting cold again, and the wood stove is heating everything up nicely. I have gotten good at making smoke-free fires, and the stove is big enough to really heat up the entire bus. There are still places that need to be better insulated, but otherwise I am happy. I am still considering replacing the wood-stove with much more convenient and space-saving propane heat, but there are also good reasons not to do it. First, wood-heat is very cheap! Second, it is carbon-neutral. Third, it makes the bus have a really nice atmosphere. On the other hand, propane can be turned on and off instantly, and replacing the wood-stove with a propane heater would make enough room for another microscope station.
