#40286: — 09/15  at  06:14 PM

Drama! Death! Demolished Danios! Rupturing yolk sacs!

Who says biology isn't exciting??? With videos like that, I'm surprised more people don't change their proffesion!

#40295: — 09/15  at  07:31 PM
You should have seen the daphnia we got to play with last year. After we finished the experiment the teacher handed us bottles of caffiene and nicotine and told us to have fun shooting the little buggers up. I had a female with a full brood pouch. I replaced nearly all the water with caffiene...her setae and heart went racing, she spurted around the petri dish, began ejecting her young at high velocity (they died on contact with the caffiene) and then she got reaaallll quiet...This girl Becky did her damnedest to try and make one explode. She was alternating between shots of caffiene and nicotine into the dish.

#40311: — 09/15  at  08:37 PM
Sure, explosions are good for a quick thrill, but biology has SEX. What's better than that for instilling a sustained, throbbing interest in science?

#40331: — 09/15  at  10:48 PM
Last year my 8th grader did a research report on evolution with a subtitle of "Everyone has an opinion". He had to do an interview, which turned out to be a university biologist whose daughter was on my daughter's soccer team.

It was a nice interview... and later when I told him my understanding what kind of research he did (mice brain damage with specific assaults, neurobiology)... my son actually thought it was interesting. He was excited by science!

He is also excited by the annual Engineering Fair... so we shall see where that leads him in the next few years.

From 8th grade until my first few weeks of college I was dead set to become an oceanographer. Then I learned what was really required... so I switched to engineering. As one oceanographer told me at the Ocean Dept.'s Open House: "I see you went for the money!". Ah, yeah...

#40332: — 09/15  at  10:50 PM
Last semester my group for developmental lab was taking pictures of some vulvaless C. elegans mutants, while focusing the image of one on the computer screen it burst with all its offspring leaking out. That was pretty dramatic and had all four of us jump back in horror after see such a sight. Actually that was a good class for getting pictures that are slightly disturbing. I offered to send my sister the pictures of the chick embryos exposed to nicotine and the controls to show her boyfriend while she was convincing him to stop smoking.

#40337: Alon Levy — 09/16  at  01:11 AM
No, if you ask me what is most exciting about physics is not the explosions - that's what chemistry is for - but discovering and understanding how elemntary particles have symmetries corresponding to a certain intricate group. In biology, what is most exciting is finding how a certain trait, mental or physical, evolved.

#40374: — 09/16  at  08:55 AM
That was worse than watching "Passion of the Christ".

#40376: — 09/16  at  08:59 AM
Sorry, I can't yield on this one yet, but I'll refine the argument: Physics has the best table-top explosions. Oh, and we also have the Van De Graaf generator, favorite toy of sadistic teachers everywhere. I once had a teacher who would keep his hand near one, but not on it, just to feel the pain, before connecting and pointing at the nearest student, scaring the crap out of them, and sparking them pretty well if they were close enough. Chemists and biologists can probably one-up the sadism scale, but typically that can lead to lawsuits. High voltage electricity, properly controlled, doesn't leave a mark.

BTW, where are all the chemists? From my days as a grad student, the annual sodium drop in the river was one of the best attended events during the first week of classes..

#40382: — 09/16  at  09:45 AM
Chemists? Who knows where they are, but I do know of evidence of a sodium party:
http://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/011.2/index.html

Trackback: Who put the blast in the blastoderm? Tracked on: PhaWRONGula (72.9.234.70) at 2005 09 16 09:53:11
Will Darwin's nog on that blog do it Like the embryos in grog do it? Let's do it; Let's all explode...