April | 2010 | Field Trip Explainers

“You know how assassin caterpillars kill you by making you bleed from all the holes in your body…like your nose and ears and eyes? Well, where specifically in the eyeball does the blood come out of when you bleed to death?”

This is the question I was asked yesterday by an inquisitive elementary school student while I was dissecting a cow eye ball for his class.

Every time I dissect an eyeball I expect the “normal” questions (“Where did you get the eyeball?”) and have an idea of how to answer these queries (“I’m a ninja who steals them from cows each night”…kidding…”Butchers give them to us because some people love to eat meatballs but not eyeballs”). But this I was not prepared for. I had never heard of assassin caterpillars and sometimes it’s strange to be put in the position of explaining to little kids why bleeding can cause death.

Questions like this, however, are my favorite, as they knock me out of my comfort zone, make me think on my feet, pique my curiosity to do further research, and expand my mind to new ideas. Here’s a great article on these caterpillars that contain a powerful toxin with “anticoagulant properties currently being explored by the pharmaceutical industry for use in human blood clotting problems”.

April 5, 2010

Cure for Math-o-phobia

by ryan

When I was in high school and college, I wasn’t that into chemistry and biology but the one subject that I really couldn’t stand was math. I always saw it as only memorizing formulas and I reacted against the idea that each problem only had one right answer.

As an explainer I’ve been exposed to various trainings, exhibits and playgrounds that have expanded my view on math and made it more interesting and relevant to my life. On Friday we had a training with a math teacher from Canada (and I’m sorry i don’t remember his name) and he shared a perspective that offered a good way for math-o-phobics like myself to relate to the subject.

He presented math as a way to think of solving problems from what is the biggest tree to the most efficient ways to fit cars in the parking lot to how to measure the curve of Lombard street. And in these problems his focus was not on the ‘right’ answer but in the process of figuring out the way to look at the problem. And in that sense its more of a tool for looking at the world and understanding things in our everyday lives. We only spent a short time in the training but for the rest of the day we tried to figure out the answer to this problem…

How many times in a day do the hands of a clock make a right angle?

Hint : you may have to use the chalkboard at the final final to figure it out.