The Brooklyn College Science Center offers several interesting activities, and within the Building a Microscope and Identifying Cells activity, kids get to learn how microscopes work and the science behind them. First, the activity calls for students to read about the properties of light, including lenses, refraction, magnification, reflection, colors and spectrum, and calculating the speed of...

The Cells Alive Web site (last mentioned in the October 25, 1996 Scout Report), offered by Quill Graphics, contains several activities to help students understand the basics of cellular biology. The animal cell cycle and cell mitosis animations are especially excellent visual learning tools, clearly showing what takes place during these events and giving well-written descriptions of each stage....

The Scout Report last profiled the Cells Alive website a number of years ago, and since then a number of new features have been added. The site was created by scientist Jim Sullivan, and it includes images, animations, and descriptions that tell about the function of various cells. On the site visitors can browse through three main sections: "Contents", "Interactive", and "Galleries". In the...

The Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD), developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and currently maintained at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, is an annotated collection of eukaryotic POL II promoters intended to assist experimental researchers as well as computer analysts in the investigation of eukaryotic transcription signals. Promoters are included in EPD if...

In the summer of 2004, the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco unveiled their very ambitious and interesting microscope facility. Over the past few years they've spent a considerable amount of time and money on this project, and they've also created this fine website to offer those far away from the Bay area some access to this project. First-time visitors will want to click on the "Features"...

How do college professors get their students excited about science? One possible way is through the effective use of scientific images, such as slides, enlarged images, and so on. This essay on just that subject was originally published in "Life Sciences Education" and was authored by Fiona L. Watson and Barbara Lom of Davidson College's department of biology and program in neuroscience. In this...

A cell happens to be the smallest unit of life, but there's a tremendous amount of activity going on within this very fascinating place. The talented people at the National Science Foundation (NSF) are well aware of this fact, and they have created this illuminating and interactive visual feature to help people learn about the cell's different components. On the homepage, visitors are presented...

Getting ahead in the field of biology is important to young scholars, and staying on top of the material is important to their teachers. The Annenberg Media group has created this thirteen part video course for educators, and recently they placed the complete set of videos online here. The programs include interviews with expert scientists, detailed animations that provide a micro-level view of...