Shake a tail feather

"The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick."

That is what Charles Darwin wrote when first thinking about the showy and elaborate tail feathers of the male peacock. If traits that aided in survival were selected for and were more likely to be passed on to the next generation, how was it that evolution by natural selection could produce something like the brightly colored and elaborate tail feathers of a peacock?

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Aaron ReedyliveComment
Plastic, not so fantastic

In 2015, over 381 million tonnes of plastic was produced globally. That is equivalent to the mass of two-thirds of the world population! Take a look around and see how many plastic items you can find. All of those water bottles, straws, and plastic grocery bags add up and their waste is making a large negative impact on our oceans and wildlife.

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Jennifer HawleyliveComment
Reaction Rate Lab

It is sometimes important to know how quickly a particular chemical reaction occurs. We can discern this information by measuring either the amount of reactant(s) consumed over time or the amount of product(s) produced over time.

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Jamie CastleComment
This activity is a slam dunk

Your students can easily make the graph in seconds and spend their time thinking about which is the better measure of central tendency, mean or median, to describe the salary of an NBA player. You can use our discussion questions (included in the dataset description) or write your own.

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Aaron Reedy
Early Spring in Kyoto?

Each spring the cherry blossoms, “sakura” in Japanese, put on a natural spectacle that has been of major importance to Kyoto, Japan going back at least as far as the 9th Century. Since that time, records have been kept to document the “full flowering date” when the blossoms are at their peak on the cherry trees.

This has made for a very strong dataset to indirectly look at climate change and look for any effect on the timing of season. Explore this dataset to look for any patterns in the data that may reveal a change in the timing of spring in Kyoto, Japan.

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A long term crisis

Visualizing the last 30 years of the US Opioid Epidemic. The Center for Disease Control manages a database with every cause of death for each death reported across the country. With regard to the causes of death related to drug overdose, the CDC has reliable data going back to 1989, which we used for this activity.

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