If everyone was the same, life would be boring! Try this lesson, which uses the Bluey episode "Mini Bluey" as the kickoff to a classroom conversation about the importance of being yourself. The lesson includes printables for three activities in which kids complete a same or different worksheet with a partner, write compliments to each other, and draw what they're good at.
Mini Bluey Episode Summary: When Dad complains about how dissimilar Bluey and Bingo are, Bluey hatches a plan to make them more alike and happily introduces Mini Bluey!
Watch the episode here! (Click here to watch in Australia.)
Over the next few months, scrolling on your phone may look a little different. That’s because Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has been facing more pressure over claims that its platforms harm young people, and both citizens and the legal system have been demanding a change that has landed Meta in a lawsuit.
A judge in New Mexico did not hold back on criticizing harmful content, declaring Meta’s platforms a "public nuisance" and comparing the company to a factory creating toxic pollution. Yikes. The court also called out Meta for design features like infinite scroll, notifications, and recommendation algorithms that encourage people to stay online longer.
Meta was ordered to put a whopping $567 million into a five-year fund addressing harms. That’s on top of $375 million awarded earlier in the same case! But believe it or not, that’s not a ton of money for the company. The important part is not the money itself, but the indication that people are demanding change and getting companies to listen. Meta isn’t just being asked to pay a fine but to actually make changes, like restricting contact with adults, limiting notifications, and placing limits on how long people under 18 can spend on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta strongly disputes the ruling and plans to appeal, but the case has already set a larger question into motion about if tech companies should be held responsible not only for what users post but also how their platforms are designed.
You’ve probably never thought about combining math and art class, but maybe now, you will! This teacher shares his new approach to math, where he uses colors to represent different numbers.
He assigned 10 numbers to 10 different colors — zero is white, one is black, two is red, and so on. That means combinations of numbers become combinations of colors. The result is an equation that’s educational and pretty at the same time!
What starts as multiplication or patterns quickly begins to look more like art class than math class. But behind the colors is real number sense, memory tricks, and a whole new way of thinking about equations. Turns out math might be a lot more visual — and creative — than most people realize.
“Beautiful on the inside” may be weirdly appropriate for bugs, considering the 3D map of the male fruit fly brain and nervous system more closely resembles a museum-worthy mosaic or a bowl of fruity cereal than the tiny nuisance you’re used to seeing flying around your apples. Scientists recently created this colorful detailed map by slicing and analyzing every nerve cell with an electron microscope — that’s a microscope that uses accelerated electrons instead of visible light to produce images that can be both extremely magnified and incredibly clear at the same time.
The same team previously mapped a female fly brain a couple of years ago and compared the male and female brains to see that roughly 95% of their brain wiring was similar, while about 5% differed.
But those small differences make for some big differences in behavior, including courtship, aggression, detecting competitors, and producing a “love song” by beating the wings.
It's not news (to these scientists, at least) that just two genes were linked to these behaviors, but comparing these 3D maps helped them learn more about the connection between those genes and the specific brain circuits producing the behavior.
Researchers hope the same logic around connecting genes to brain wiring to behavior can eventually be applied to other animals and maybe even humans! This might help scientists investigate conditions with strong genetic influences, including schizophrenia and autism.
Beekeeper Nick was confused when his bees kept dying off. He kept his hives being stocked with food, so why did he still lose around 75% of the colony? The answer was in what was (or wasn’t) in his bees’ food.
In the wild, bees take what they need from flowers to make honey, and then feed off this honey in the winter. When we take this honey for ourselves, beekeepers replace it with supplementary food in the form of sugar and water, and scientists now say that bees can’t subsist off of just sugar and water, as the simple combination was missing key nutrients. Your parents probably said the same thing about why you can’t just have cake for dinner!
After years of testing different foods for bees, scientists have finally discovered how to make the core ingredient, called “sterole.” Oxford scientists have been developing the best foods for bees, and have found that the bees who consumed the food with sterole were healthier, and had up to 15 times more baby bees! This breakthrough is incredibly important — it means bees can still thrive without floral pollen, which would also help our food security, since bees are so important for pollinating crops.
If everyone was the same, life would be boring! Try this lesson, which uses the Bluey episode "Mini Bluey" as the kickoff to a classroom conversation about the importance of being yourself. The lesson includes printables for three activities in which kids complete a same or different worksheet with a partner, write compliments to each other, and draw what they're good at.
Mini Bluey Episode Summary: When Dad complains about how dissimilar Bluey and Bingo are, Bluey hatches a plan to make them more alike and happily introduces Mini Bluey!
Watch the episode here! (Click here to watch in Australia.)
Over the next few months, scrolling on your phone may look a little different. That’s because Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has been facing more pressure over claims that its platforms harm young people, and both citizens and the legal system have been demanding a change that has landed Meta in a lawsuit.
A judge in New Mexico did not hold back on criticizing harmful content, declaring Meta’s platforms a "public nuisance" and comparing the company to a factory creating toxic pollution. Yikes. The court also called out Meta for design features like infinite scroll, notifications, and recommendation algorithms that encourage people to stay online longer.
Meta was ordered to put a whopping $567 million into a five-year fund addressing harms. That’s on top of $375 million awarded earlier in the same case! But believe it or not, that’s not a ton of money for the company. The important part is not the money itself, but the indication that people are demanding change and getting companies to listen. Meta isn’t just being asked to pay a fine but to actually make changes, like restricting contact with adults, limiting notifications, and placing limits on how long people under 18 can spend on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta strongly disputes the ruling and plans to appeal, but the case has already set a larger question into motion about if tech companies should be held responsible not only for what users post but also how their platforms are designed.
You’ve probably never thought about combining math and art class, but maybe now, you will! This teacher shares his new approach to math, where he uses colors to represent different numbers.
He assigned 10 numbers to 10 different colors — zero is white, one is black, two is red, and so on. That means combinations of numbers become combinations of colors. The result is an equation that’s educational and pretty at the same time!
What starts as multiplication or patterns quickly begins to look more like art class than math class. But behind the colors is real number sense, memory tricks, and a whole new way of thinking about equations. Turns out math might be a lot more visual — and creative — than most people realize.
“Beautiful on the inside” may be weirdly appropriate for bugs, considering the 3D map of the male fruit fly brain and nervous system more closely resembles a museum-worthy mosaic or a bowl of fruity cereal than the tiny nuisance you’re used to seeing flying around your apples. Scientists recently created this colorful detailed map by slicing and analyzing every nerve cell with an electron microscope — that’s a microscope that uses accelerated electrons instead of visible light to produce images that can be both extremely magnified and incredibly clear at the same time.
The same team previously mapped a female fly brain a couple of years ago and compared the male and female brains to see that roughly 95% of their brain wiring was similar, while about 5% differed.
But those small differences make for some big differences in behavior, including courtship, aggression, detecting competitors, and producing a “love song” by beating the wings.
It's not news (to these scientists, at least) that just two genes were linked to these behaviors, but comparing these 3D maps helped them learn more about the connection between those genes and the specific brain circuits producing the behavior.
Researchers hope the same logic around connecting genes to brain wiring to behavior can eventually be applied to other animals and maybe even humans! This might help scientists investigate conditions with strong genetic influences, including schizophrenia and autism.
Beekeeper Nick was confused when his bees kept dying off. He kept his hives being stocked with food, so why did he still lose around 75% of the colony? The answer was in what was (or wasn’t) in his bees’ food.
In the wild, bees take what they need from flowers to make honey, and then feed off this honey in the winter. When we take this honey for ourselves, beekeepers replace it with supplementary food in the form of sugar and water, and scientists now say that bees can’t subsist off of just sugar and water, as the simple combination was missing key nutrients. Your parents probably said the same thing about why you can’t just have cake for dinner!
After years of testing different foods for bees, scientists have finally discovered how to make the core ingredient, called “sterole.” Oxford scientists have been developing the best foods for bees, and have found that the bees who consumed the food with sterole were healthier, and had up to 15 times more baby bees! This breakthrough is incredibly important — it means bees can still thrive without floral pollen, which would also help our food security, since bees are so important for pollinating crops.