Students continue the research begun in the associated lesson as if they were biomedical engineers working for a pharmaceutical company. Groups each perform a simple chemical reaction (to precipitate solid calcium out of solution) to observe what may occur when Osteopontin levels drop in the body. With this additional research, students determine potential health complications that might arise from a new drug that could reduce inflammatory pain in many patients, improving their quality of life. The goal of this activity is to illustrate biomedical engineering as medical problem solving, as well as emphasize the importance of maintaining normal body chemistry.

The students will learn about recent meteor strikes and the effects they can have. They will then examine their significance in the history of the planet, and what they do to the surface of a planet when forming a crater. The students will then experimentally determine how the size and impact velocity of a meteorite determine the size of the crater.

This course, which spans a third of a semester, provides students with experience using techniques employed in synthetic organic chemistry. It also introduces them to the exciting research area of catalytic chiral catalysis.
This class is part of the new laboratory curriculum in the MIT Department of Chemistry. Undergraduate Research-Inspired Experimental Chemistry Alternatives (URIECA) introduces students to cutting edge research topics in a modular format.

Introduction to Sociology 2e adheres to the scope and sequence of a typical, one-semester introductory sociology course. It offers comprehensive coverage of core concepts, foundational scholars, and emerging theories, which are supported by a wealth of engaging learning materials. The textbook presents detailed section reviews with rich questions, discussions that help students apply their knowledge, and features that draw learners into the discipline in meaningful ways. The second edition retains the book’s conceptual organization, aligning to most courses, and has been significantly updated to reflect the latest research and provide examples most relevant to today’s students. In order to help instructors transition to the revised version, the 2e changes are described within the preface.

This seminar is designed to be an experimental and hands-on approach to applied chemistry (as seen in cooking). Cooking may be the oldest and most widespread application of chemistry and recipes may be the oldest practical result of chemical research. We shall do some cooking experiments to illustrate some chemical principles, including extraction, denaturation, and phase changes.

Students gain first-hand experience with the steps of the scientific method as well as the overarching engineering design process as they conduct lab research with the aim to create a bioplastic with certain properties. Students learn about the light mechanism that causes ultraviolet bead color change, observe the effect of different light waves on a phosphorescence powder, and see the connection between florescence, phosphorescence and wavelength. Students compose hypotheses and determine experimental procedure details, as teams engineer variations on a bioplastic solid embedded with phosphorescence powder. The objective is to make a structurally sound bioplastic without reducing its glowing properties from the powder embedded within its matrix. Groups conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses of their engineered plastics, then recap and communicate their experiment conclusions in the form of a poster, slides and verbal presentation. As an extension, teams make their own testing apparatuses. As a further extension, they combine all the group results to determine which bioplastic matrix best achieves the desired properties and then “manufacture” the optimum bioplastic into glowing toy figurine end products! Many handouts, instructions, photos and rubrics are provided.

This seminar explores experiments in education and discusses how education and learning might be done, through reading and discussion. This seminar is not a survey of experiments in education, but rather, its goal is to determine how learning should happen and what kinds of contexts allow it to happen.

Students create large-scale models of microfluidic devices using a process similar to that of the PDMS and plasma bonding that is used in the creation of lab-on-a-chip devices. They use disposable foam plates, plastic bendable straws and gelatin dessert mix. After the molds have hardened overnight, they use plastic syringes to inject their model devices with colored fluid to test various flow rates. From what they learn, students are able to answer the challenge question presented in lesson 1 of this unit by writing individual explanation statements.

This seminar focuses on the cognitive science of moral reasoning. Philosophers debate how we decide which moral actions are permissible. Is it permissible to take one human life in order to save others? We have powerful and surprisingly rich and subtle intuitions to such questions.
In this class, you will learn how intuitions can be studied using formal analytical paradigms and behavioral experiments. Thursday evening, meet to learn about recent advances in theories of moral reasoning. Overnight, formulate a hypothesis about the structure of moral reasoning and design a questionnaire-based experiment to test this. Friday, present and select 1-2 proposals and collect data; we will then reconvene to analyze and discuss results and implications for the structure of the moral mind.
This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

Given an assortment of unknown metals to identify, student pairs consider what unique intrinsic (aka intensive) metal properties (such as density, viscosity, boiling or melting point) could be tested. For the provided activity materials (copper, aluminum, zinc, iron or brass), density is the only property that can be measured so groups experimentally determine the density of the "mystery" metal objects. They devise an experimental procedure to measure mass and volume in order to calculate density. They calculate average density of all the pieces (also via the graphing method if computer tools area available). Then students analyze their own data compared to class data and perform error analysis. Through this inquiry-based activity, students design their own experiments, thus experiencing scientific investigation and experimentation first hand. A provided PowerPoint(TM) file and information sheet helps to introduce the five metals, including information on their history, properties and uses.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Human activity is driving an increase in the amount of atmospheric reactive nitrogen. California grassland growth is typically limited by the amount of available nitrogen. Thus, more available nitrogen leads to more plant biomass, which means more carbon is deposited in the soil. Both the increase in nitrogen itself and the increase in carbon affect soil microbes. To better understand these impacts, a recent study examined microbial metabolic functioning in experimental grassland plots in California. These plots had been maintained for 14 years with increased nitrogen deposition mimicking the predicted levels for the end of the 21st century. This increased deposition led to an increased abundance of fast-growing bacterial species, as well as an increased capacity to use easily accessible, or labile, carbon sources. In contrast, the community's capacity to degrade recalcitrant carbon sources was unchanged or even decreased by elevated nitrogen..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Vision is the primary sense of many animals and much is known about how vision is processed in the mammalian nervous system. One distinct property of the primary visual cortex is a highly organized pattern of sensitivity to location and orientation of objects in the visual field. But how did we learn this? An important tool is the ability to design experiments to map out the structure and response of a system such as vision. In this activity, students learn about the visual system and then conduct a model experiment to map the visual field response of a Panoptes robot. (In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the "all-seeing" watchman giant with 100 eyes.) A simple activity modification enables a true black box experiment, in which students do not directly observe how the visual system is configured, and must match the input to the output in order to reconstruct the unseen system inside the box.

Quantum mechanics--even in the ordinary, non-relativistic, "particle" formulation that will be the primary focus of this course--has been a staggeringly successful physical theory, surely one of the crowning achievements of 20th century science. It's also rather bizarre--bizarre enough to lead very intelligent and otherwise sensible people to make such claims as that the universe is perpetually splitting into many copies of itself, that conscious minds have the power to make physical systems "jump" in unpredictable ways, that classical logic stands in need of fundamental revision, and much, much more. In this course, we intelligent and sensible people will attempt to take a sober look at these and other alleged implications of quantum mechanics, as well as certain stubborn problems that continue to trouble its foundations.
Along the way, we will take plenty of time out to discuss philosophical questions about science that quantum mechanics raises in new and interesting ways: e.g., what it means to attribute probabilities to physical events, what the aims of scientific inquiry are (does it aim at something true, or merely at something useful?), what the role of observation is in constructing a scientific theory, what it means to say that there is an "objective" physical world, whether something as basic as logic can be viewed as an empirical discipline, whether there can be meaningful scientific questions whose answers cannot possibly be settled by experiment, and more.

For photosynthesis to occur, a plant needs sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. To see photosynthesis in action, we will observe how a green plant (elodea) uses sunlight to take in CO2 and release O2 (control). In addition, we will deny sunlight to another specimen, to observe how photosynthesis does not occur without sunlight. Follow the procedures below to complete this experiment.

In a class demonstration, the teacher places different pill types ("chalk" pill, gel pill, and gel tablet) into separate glass beakers of vinegar, representing human stomach acid. After 20-30 minutes, the pills dissolve. Students observe which dissolve the fastest, and discuss the remnants of the various pills. What they learn contributes to their ongoing objective to answer the challenge question presented in lesson 1 of this unit.

This lesson is the second of two that explore cellular respiration and population growth in yeasts. In the first lesson, students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in yeast-molasses cultures. Based on questions that arose during the first lesson and its associated activity, in this lesson students work in small groups to design experiments that will determine how environmental factors affect yeast population growth.

This course introduces theoretical and practical principles of design of oceanographic sensor systems. Topics include: transducer characteristics for acoustic, current, temperature, pressure, electric, magnetic, gravity, salinity, velocity, heat flow, and optical devices; limitations on these devices imposed by ocean environments; signal conditioning and recording; noise, sensitivity, and sampling limitations; and standards. Lectures by experts cover the principles of state-of-the-art systems being used in physical oceanography, geophysics, submersibles, acoustics. For lab work, day cruises in local waters allow students to prepare, deploy and analyze observations from standard oceanographic instruments.

Many of today's popular sports are based around the use of balls, yet none of the balls are completely alike. In fact, they are all designed with specific characteristics in mind and are quite varied. Students investigate different balls' abilities to bounce and represent the data they collect graphically.

Students see and learn how crystallization and inhibition occur by making sugar crystals with and without additives in a supersaturation solution, testing to see how the additives may alter crystallization, such as by improving crystal growth by more or larger crystals. After three days, students analyze the differences between the control crystals and those grown with additives, researching and attempting to deduce why certain additives blocked crystallization, showed no change or improved growth. Students relate what they learn from the rock candy experimentation to engineering drug researchers who design medicines for targeted purposes in the human body. Conduct the first half of this activity one day before presenting the associated lesson, Body Full of Crystals. Then conduct the second half of the activity.

Given a hypothetical civil engineering scenario, student pairs are tasked to apply their knowledge of the rock cycle, rock types, rock weathering and the engineering design process to model a potential method to create a sandy beach from three rocky island shorelines. For their abrasion weathering models, they use wide-mouth lidded jars and three types of candies that serve as the testing “rocks.” They simulate both low- and high-energy weathering environments. After completing the simple weathering techniques and analyzing their observations of the results, they conclude by recommending to the island developer which rocky shoreline would be the easiest, simplest, and most cost-effective from which to create a sandy beach. A worksheet and pre/post quiz are provided.