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Keystone
Weekly This week's Key Points:
*Web Pick of the Week* and *Awesome Science!* Web Pick of the Week Introduced Species http://www.epa.gov/maia/html/intro-species.html It's springtime, and your students will be spending more time outdoors and very likely observing different plants and animals. Now would be a perfect time to raise the subject of introduced species (also known as alien, exotic, injurious, invasive, nonindigenous, and nonnative species) and the impacts they have upon the native environment. Your students might want to do some research and find out about some of the plants and animals in your area, and whether they're native or introduced. And if they were introduced, find out how and why. You can tie this research to discussions of where the plants and creatures in your classroom came from, and what might happen if they were released into the outdoors. The website above offers an excellent overview of the issue, and these articles below share specific tales of the ecological disruption nonnative invaders have caused.
Hawaii's troubles:
Northern snakehead fish in Maryland:
Zebra mussels in American waterways:
Awesome Science! Evidence of Seasons on Neptune http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0006D94B-4E7C-1EC5-8E1C809EC588EF21 A progressive increase in the brightness of the planet Neptune suggests that, like Earth, the distant planet has seasons. Observations of Neptune made during a six-year period with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope by a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory show that the planet is exhibiting a significant increase in brightness. The brightness seems to be corresponding to a seasonal change in sunlight, like our seasons on Earth. Neptune takes 165 years to orbit the sun, so a single season on Neptune could last more than forty years. See the link above for more information and a photo.
The Final Weekly This will be the last Weekly of the year. We hope that the rest of your school year goes beautifully, and that you all enjoy the summer!
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The Franklin Institute is the Demonstration Site for the
Eisenhower
Mid-Atlantic Consortium, providing science and math
resources for teachers.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641. © 2003. All rights reserved.
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