Maybe you were like me when the RLS ads first started showing on television, not believing that RLS was real, thinking that it was a fabricated condition to sell more pharmaceuticals. Or conversely, maybe you suffer from RLS and became impatient with non-believers like me. I am now convinced that RLS is a real condition that we can use in the classroom when we study brain and nervous system function.

The demonstrations that Dr. Megavolt gives in this episode are an ideal way to get your high school kids "charged up" about physics. I used this clip as a catch to get kids interested in the topic of magnetism and electricity. After twenty years of teaching physics I can safely say that the Tesla coil is the number one science demo kids want to see. So I want to give a few pointers, and suggestions about how to use these safely in the classroom.

In the World War 2.0 segment, various banks, police and government organizations, and businesses throughout Estonia were subjected to a variety of attacks via the Internet. Specifically, Estonia was attacked by a botnet – a set of computers all controlled by an outside computer attempting to access a single server and flood it with requests. As noted in the article, a similar attack against the United States, grown proportionately, would effectively cripple the country.

In his demonstration of captcha’s, those ubiquitous pattern recognition challenges we face when we need to authenticate ourselves as humans on the internet, Luis von Ahn describes challenges computers have with images. He talks specifically about two very tough problems, optical character recognition (OCR) and labeling images with words. By presenting humans with activities such as solving captchas to create a new yahoo account or image labeling games such as ESP, von Ahn is orchestrating a grand teaching experiment -- teaching computers about image recognition through many millions of hours of online work and play.

Wow. This segment of WIRED SCIENCE brings home the great strides we have made in tissue culture and organ repair. This information fits into our biology classes in several places—when we talk about immunology, when we talk about cancer, and when we talk about body systems.

For this installment of the "In Your Classroom" blog, I would like to share with you two examples of projects related to remote data collection. The example projects are a high school robotics project using LEGO Mindstorms robots, Vernier sensors, and video instant messaging technology to collect data on "Mars" and an elementary school project using the same technology for a simulated marine biology expedition.

Wired Science's "GeekDad: UFO" video includes a fun and educational segment showing a step-by-step method on how to build a hovercraft with your students. It is something that every physics teacher should have in their arsenal of fun toys that teach physics. So what follows below are a few construction tips, some helpful advice, and some teaching strategies on how to use them.

Listening to the interview with Paul Kedrosky, I was immediately struck with two ideas I currently use in my classes/department. Although very different in their setup, purpose, and methodology, they are both excellent at producing quality student work.

"The Grapes of Math" segment brought forward a couple of wonderful math ideas. The first one that I thought of was the use of modeling data. The use of yeast in the fermentation process of making wine is an example of a substance being used to speed something up. How does yeast work? How fast does it work?

Recently, I was fortunate enough to be awarded an Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholarship to travel to Japan to observe the Japanese school system, its classrooms, its buildings, its teachers, and its students. I was able to see several elementary, middle school, high school, and even university students in their educational settings. At the elementary building, I received a gift of 100 paper cranes, folded by the students of the school I was visiting. This art of paper folding has been around for generations in Japan.

In watching this video, I thought of the wonderful engineering that goes on in constructing many things. Seeing the junk yard and the materials NASA is trying use to replicate or mimic the Saturn rocket, made me think of the movie "Apollo 13" when the engineering leader brought in the square piece of piping, told his staff they had to make it fit into a round hole, and gave them all the items they had to use.

The segment on "cloning" provides a timely opportunity to introduce students to bioethical decision-making. We are inundated almost daily by new advances in science which necessitate such decisions. From agricultural applications, such as genetically modified foods and pesticide resistant crops, to more personal relevancies, such as genetic testing, new reproductive technologies and stem cell research, we need to be able to sort our way through these choices. Some of these issues are societal, some are personal. All are difficult.

Like many who watched this segment, I remember home chemistry kits of the kind described. I did not have a chance to experiment with them as I was the youngest in my family and the kit belonged to the oldest. By the time I was old enough to explore the kit's box, its contents had long been depleted during many exciting scientific and engineering explorations.

Watching the clip, "Deep Brain Stimulation," with a class provides opportunities to explore brain function from several different perspectives. First, students might want to know what causes these movement disorders. Are they all inherited, like the essential tremor suffered by Morris Porter?

The "ShotSpotter" segment in episode five was a fascinating one, in that it is an excellent example of Math, Physics, and Technology in action. The "ShotSpotter" technology is becoming increasingly embraced; an example of this is an interesting video news story on the city of San Francisco showing how they used this technology.

In my classroom, there are no lasers to determine three-dimensional objects. Unfortunately the monies allotted to school districts just do not cover such costs. However, in our geometry classes we tackle the concept of three, versus two-dimensional objects. When we begin the units covering area, surface area, and volume of geometric figures - you know the ones, formula after formula for kids to memorize - we try investigating their properties and values in a whole new way. Instead of teaching kids all the surface area and volume formulas for all the 3-d shapes, we build our own city.

The Wired House segment offered a great look at what could be the future of living. Taken as a whole, the Living Homes are far outside the price range of most. However, we can look at certain components of the Living Home from the standpoint of what is available today.

The plasticity of the brain never ceases to amaze me, and this program underscores the ability of the brain to fill in missing functions. In a biology class we have numerous opportunities to emphasize this capability when we cover the brain and nervous system.

This is a wonderful show to introduce meteorites in an Astronomy class.  I have used it with my own students and they were absolutely in awe with the program.  The thought of having a career as a meteorite hunter driving around the plains of Kansas in a four wheeler for money is pure kid fantasy.The thrill of Adam's discovery of the meteorite several feet under the soil makes everyone's day!

The "WIRED Science" segment on the Da Vinci robotic operating system offers us an excellent opportunity to explore some robotic classroom activities. While I do NOT have any links or ideas to share related to robotic dissection labs for Biology class, I do have plenty of links and idea to share related to robotics in the classroom. If robots are the wave of the future in the operating room, robots are the wave of the present in classrooms. There are many many amazing learning opportunities to be found through present classroom technology.

I can really relate to this GeekDad! I have two sons who have been doing robotics since the sixth grade. They have gone through Lego League and the FIRST robotics competition. Our garage is littered with resistors, capacitors, and assorted other electronic knick knacks from failed experiments. So it is a delight that I can write about some of the wonderful sites and videos out there to actively engage your students in robotics just like the Maru family does in this episode.

Bridges. We see them everywhere and everyday. They are engineering wonders with loads of mathematics and science behind their structure. From amazingly beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, to ones that are cumbersome looking yet very effective, bridges can be found in many different shapes and sizes. Yet no matter what they look like, they all must serve the same basic purpose. To get something or someone from point A to point B, by going over something that would otherwise make the 'journey' impossible/impractical.

The discussion of digital audio vs. analog audio is an interesting one, and one without a clear answer. Part of the difficulty is with the fact that, quite often, we don't really know a lot about either subject. The recording of analog audio has a long history, beginning in the late 1800's with Thomas Edison recording his famous recital of "Mary Had A Little Lamb."

Blood. We take it for granted until we need it. In biology classes we talk about the oxygen carrying properties of hemoglobin in physiology, about inheritance of blood types in genetics, about surface antigens in immunology. Hemoglobin seems to be everywhere in our classes.

First, let's wrestle with some numbers. 6,800 feet. That is the approximate depth to which researchers drop when they go to work looking for neutrinos. Before we even start to think about neutrinos and what they are and how on earth we are going to explain this to our students, let us focus on the place of the research. Imagine being a particle physicist or astrophysicist and this is where you show up to work each day. You pull into the SNOLAB parking lot, put on your mine traversing garb, walk to the 30 mph elevator (holy fast Batman!) and dive 6,800 feet toward the center of the earth. Before you get out, you note that while you may think you are almost to the center of the earth, you'd have to travel about 5.5 days at 30 mph to actually get to the center which is about 21 million feet below the surface.

"Sounds of Silence" is a perfect introduction to a unit on sound in the physics classroom. Kids always want to know about human extremes and this is a way to tease them into learning about concepts of frequency, period, and velocity. I like to begin my sound unit by hooking up a function generator to a large speaker and amplifier.

As I began writing this blog, I thought about the ramifications of all the trash and debris floating in our oceans and the potential dangers it is causing. The numbers are astounding and alarming at the same time. I began to think of the sheer amount of trash floating in the ocean and the space it must cover. Immediately I thought of what a great estimation problem this could generate for students in classrooms.

When I first encountered the Face Reader, I was taken with the use of the ESP (Emotional Social Prosthesis) to help children with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism which may have a genetic component. Such intervention and help parallels that for children who suffer from metabolic disorders, such as phenylketonuria (PKU) which is clearly genetic. In those cases, alteration of diet prevents the mental retardation which results if the condition is untreated. Similarly, the use of the ESP for children with Asperger's syndrome holds the promise of easing isolation and helping in social situations.