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!
BioBus on National TV
November 13th, 2009
Mission Accomplished
October 23rd, 2009Ric 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.
Humming to the Music
October 19th, 2009There was a few minutes today on the shop floor at Farber Specialty Coach when the normal caucophony of machine hums, rattles, whines, and buzzes, fell into harmony with the songs booming on the PA – first to Led Zeppelin and then to what sounded like Aerosmith.
I spent the day with a file, sand paper, and baking soda, and a few jugs of distilled water, doing some maintenance on our battery bank. These are the batteries that allow us to save up solar power for use on a rainy day, and really it is time to buy a new set, but that would run about twelve hundred dollars that we don’t have right now. Our bank is made of eight Trojan T-105 deep cycle batteries, known as the most reliable, long lasting deep cycle batteries around – given proper care. And we’ve taken real good care of this set, regularly cleaning corrosion off of terminals, checking water levels, and equalizing the cells. But after over 5 years of hard use – freezing cold weather, lots of vibrations from a bouncing bus, and at least 500 charge-discharge cycles, these batteries are ready to start a new life as lead paper-weights (actually, the lead will be recycled for use in new batteries). But they can still store up enough energy for an entire school day without complaining too much, so for the moment they’ll have to do.
Of course, the guys at Farber we’re hard at work today. They put down a wood sub-floor, laid down and glued in the new blue rubber floor, finished new cabinets for the wet lab, and got about half-way through the new bench-top in the computer classroom. Check out the pictures below. Tomorrow is the final day, and I can’t wait to see how everything comes together – it is already starting to look amazing.
Gathering Grease
October 18th, 2009Often 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.
Hunting in Ohio
October 17th, 2009Enjoyed a beautiful day today on a woodsy farm East of Columbus, after over two straight weeks of being tethered to the BioBus. I am in a really good mood these days because the tour has been an incredible success. Beyond the fact that we’re getting the royal treatment with Farber’s extreme over, we’ve also received another story in the press, this time from a reporter who visited us at Coventry High School in Akron on Thursday. So, it was nice to celebrate a bit by getting some R&R.
Most of the morning I spent in a meadow on the farm, the lows of cattle occasionally rising above the sound of a gentle breeze and patter of light rain. There was little time for daydreaming however – I spent my time under the tutelage of Donovan Farber, learning how to shoot a composite hunting bow. Donovan’s friend owns the farm, and it abuts an area of old forest, habitat to a number of animals, including deer, turkeys, and wild boar. I really enjoyed target practice with the bow – I haven’t practiced archery since I was 8 at summer camp. I didn’t do too badly, though I had to stop after a short while because my muscles gave up! Bows have gotten bigger since I was a kid.
The strongest feeling I had all day was drawing out an arrow embedded 8 inches into our foam practice target. For a split second, as I grasped the arrow shaft and it slid slowly from the styrofoam block, I envisioned kneeling above a freshly killed animal, bloodied, dying. The image itself, while disturbing, also fascinates me. Where would this come from? I have never hunted in my life, I certainly have never pulled an arrow from anything living (or dead - when I was 8 we used wood targets and the arrows never penetrated more than a half inch). Where would such a strong vision come from? Is it possible some evolutionary memory is embedded inside me from my hunter ancestors? Rationally, I guess it’s more likely I’ve just watched Lord of the Rings one too many times. But that flash, with a feeling somewhere between triumph and repulsion, is still with me hours later.
Donovan and I then forded a small stream and the trail up a hill, carrying a climbing stick and deer stand with us, as well as a number of containers and tubes for sample collection. We spent the afternoon erecting the climbing stick (a type of ladder for climbing trees) and attaching Donovan’s deer stand (a seat a hunter uses to sit in a tree). Donovan will return next weekend and spend 6 or more hours a day perched 15 or 20 feet up in the tree, silently waiting for deer to wander by on the nearby path. If he kills one, he will butcher it and use the meat for food over the winter months. While he hadn’t managed a kill last year, he says it is worth it just to sit in the woods for for long periods at a time, watching and listening.
After the stand was up, Donovan took a practice shot, and I collected some soil samples from the forest leaf litter. I am trying to figure out how to collect the slime mold Dictyostelium from the wild, after growing it from mail order with my intern Ryan all summer. It was getting late, so we headed back down the hill, collecting a few water samples and driving back to Columbus while the sun set orange and blue under late breaking rain clouds. On Monday, when I get back to the Farber shop and the BioBus, I’ll get to see what I found.
Speaking of the BioBus – you wouldn’t believe what it looks like right now! Friday morning, we removed almost everything from the interior, and by Friday afternoon the improvements were already visible. Check out the photos below, and keep checking this blog (http://blogs.biobus.org/) for our progress.
Thanks for reading, and please keep leaving your comments and sending me mail – I love hearing from you!
Ben
Channel 1 Features the BioBus
October 15th, 2009Check 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.
Cleaning Up
October 14th, 2009Someone mentioned that I ‘clean up well’ on television. I’m trying to take that as a complement! But today was a very exciting day as far as cleaning up goes – the BioBus is about to receive its first major face lift since Science House donated all those fancy LCD screens.
Ric and I visited the Farber Specialty Vehicles warehouse in Columbus today and were treated to the first round of Pimp My Ride – BioBus style. About 10 Farbers and their associates came onto the BioBus and began a frenzy of measuring, drawing, and brain storming, working with Ric and I to start the process of making some major improvements to the interior, including an expansion of the microscope lab and installation of stadium seating in the computer lab.
Got to get to bed – have a long day of teaching tomorrow in Akron, where we are now. But I’ll be back in Columbus tomorrow to start the work on the BioBus, and I will make sure to keep you updated on the progress!
Goodbye, Urbana! See you next year!
October 13th, 2009-
- Dr. Ben shows Shelby how to see the really, really small stuff!
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- Our friendly students at the Countryside School
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.
One Eye
October 11th, 2009About 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.)
Urbana Homecoming
October 10th, 2009Pulled into Urbana yesterday evening – had a delicious dinner with my family, and enjoyed a much needed full night of sleep in my old bedroom. We’ve received the warmest hospitality we could hope for all along our trip, but of course it feels wonderful to be home.
Yesterday we spent the day at Cold Spring School, a K-8 Indianapolis public school and we tried something we hadn’t tried before - we were visited by two 8th grade, 7th grade, and 6th grade classes, and we taught a different curriculum module to each grade level. I know – wild and crazy! We explored temperature with the 8th graders, cell biology with the 7th grade, and used Daphnia to study ecology with the 6th grade students. We managed the different lessons well, and I think Ric and I are really hitting our stride teaching on the BioBus. We were joined throughout the day by pre-service science teachers from Butler College as well as observers from our hosts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and it was nice to have their feedback.
The highlight of this day came from Ben Palicki, the Cold Spring teacher who organized our visit. After one of his classes finished the temperature curriculum, he was hopping up and down with excitement! “I can teach the students theory out of books, but when they actually see what’s happening on the microscope, they just get it.” This is exactly what we hope to do – help reinforce what teachers are doing in their classroom by providing hands-on demonstrations of concepts. Success!
After-school, our wonderful hosts from the Indianapolis Museum of Art brought us back to the museum, where we had a really nice discussion about how to integrate the BioBus into the new 100-acre nature park they are developing. We also discussed interesting new ways to integrate art and science on the BioBus, for instance making connections between the important role light plays in both painting and microscopy. It seems that every place we visit we make more and stronger connections, and I am sure the BioBus will be back to the mid-west, perhaps sooner rather than later.
Heading off now to the Orpheum Children’s Science Museum to work with the Girls Do Science Club and then open up to the public. It is a great feeling to be back home, with a chance to give back to the community that helped make me who I am – the best homecoming I could ask for.
Signing Off, Ben