A Cure for Covid?

It can be important to be precise! Data can help cut through misinformation, but only if we are careful with our language and our numbers. Many are talking about Hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for COVID-19, when in fact it is only being tested to help stop the spread of the virus after a known exposure. Thankfully, data can help us answer whether or not it is actually doing this.

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Blake BlazeComment
Driving while Black or Brown: Exploring institutional racism through the lens of data

How can data recorded during traffic stops in the state of Missouri that includes racial information about those being stopped help us to understand the extent to which institutional racism is evident in traffic enforcement practices in that state and beyond?

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Do you have to pay to be a winner?

Professional sports leagues have to maintain competitive balance in order to uphold the values of the sport that fans cherish. This is often difficult to do when these sports teams also exist to make a profit and winning can greatly affect a team’s bottom line.

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Blake BlazeComment
Measuring Water Quality with Biodiversity

There are many ways to measure environmental quality and the health of an ecosystem. The use of biological assessment is often both a practical and powerful way to measure the health of an ecosystem. One commonly used biological assessment used the measure the health of streams and small rivers around the world is sampling benthic macroinvertebrates

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Coin Flip Chi-Square

The Chi-Square Goodness of Fit test is often the gateway to inferential statistics in high school. It appears in both the AP Biology and AP Statistics curricula and is one of the few statistical tests for which the test statistic can be easily calculated by hand even for datasets with a large number of samples.

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Potato Osmosis Lab

Molecules are constantly in motion as a result of a cell's stored kinetic energy, which causes them to bump into each other and move in random new directions. Diffusion is the movement of molecules from an area of where there are many (high concentration) to an area where there are fewer (low concentration).

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The Coronavirus Outbreak

The Novel Coronavirus virus, specifically known as 2019-nCov, is responsible for a flu-like respiratory illness and has already to spread to 75,728 people and resulted in the deaths of more than 2,128 worldwide. While the vast majority of those confirmed cases have been within China, countries around the world are on high alert as confirmed cases have been reported in at least 26 other countries.

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To bee or not to bee aggressive

Does the environment in which a bee was raised determine its aggressiveness?

Honey bees are highly social creatures that live in large colonies of about 40,000 individuals and one queen. Every member of the hive works together to benefit the colony. Some of the tasks adult bees perform include making honey, nursing young, foraging for food, building honeycomb structures, and defending the colony.

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When whale I see you again?

In what ways does the abundance and/or sex ratio of male and female humpback whales change over the course of the year in the Western Antarctic Peninsula? People have hunted whales for over 5,000 years for their meat, oil, and blubber. In the 19th and 20th centuries, pressures on whales got even more intense as technology improved and the demand for whale products increased.

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Sexy smells

How do female juncos determine the quality of potential mates?

Animals collect information about each other and the rest of the world using multiple senses, including sight, sound, and smell. They use this information to decide what to eat, where to live, and who to pick as a mate. Choosing a mate is an important decision that requires a lot of information, such as how healthy a potential partner is, and information about their genes. Mate quality can affect how many offspring an animal has and if their genes will get passed on to the next generation.

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Mass Shootings and Gun Ownership Around the World

When the tragedy of a mass shooting repeats itself in cities across the United States, we find ourselves asking why it happens. While gun violence is not a uniquely American problem, more mass shootings occur in the United States than in any other country on earth. And they keep happening. What can explain this? Data can provide insights into the underlying factors that may be responsible for gun violence in the United States.

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Snapshot of Biodiversity

Since it can be difficult and time consuming to observe wild mammals, researchers use camera traps to record data on the populations of interest. Camera traps are motion-activated cameras that photograph any animal that passes in front of the camera. The photos are then reviewed to identify which species were captured on camera and how frequently they were recorded in the photos. These data can then be used to answer research questions about biodiversity in the surrounding area and inform the Maijuna’s conservation management plan.

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