The Secret Science Club presents Marine Biologist Hans Walters, PLUS a special live-screening from Shark Week, Thursday, August 16, 8PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Shark researcher Hans Walters of the New York Aquarium discusses his wet-and-wild work tagging and tracking sharks and curates a live-screening of Great White Highway, a documentary debuting on the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week that follows intrepid marine scientists as they pursue the mysterious migrations of great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias).

Before & After
--Sample our toothsome cocktail of the night, the Land Shark
--Sway to fintastic grooves
--Stick around for the salty Q&A
--Win sharky door prizes

This cartilaginous edition of the Secret Science Club meets Thursday, August 16, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. 

No cover. Just bring your smart self!

*Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

Ten Secrets to Master Your Organic Chemistry Course

Organic chemistry is probably the most challenging of science courses that you are going to experience in your college career. The sheer volume of information which you have to study is overwhelming, and the failure rate is unusually high. Yet there is no way around this path if you are pursuing a career in the profession of health or science.

Although there are no miraculous solutions to acing this course without the required hard work and dedication, there are a number steps you can take, and methods you can implement to insure that you don't fall behind in organic chemistry. This will make it easier for you to stay on top of the material and ultimately on top of the academic curve.

1- Reading Your Textbook Prior to Lecture
Read your textbook right before lecture. You simply can't afford to arrive to class unprepared. If you hear the principles and mechanisms for the first time during class, you can be overcome as you frantically attempt to break down the material and grasp the basic key points.

Reading through the chapter ahead of time, regardless of whether you don't fully grasp everything, It ensures that you'll be able to have some knowledge of the material mentioned in lecture. After you are exposed to the information for the second time in lecture, your primary focus is shifted to comprehending the concepts which you found originally challenging in your readings.

2- Take Notes During Lecture
No matter if you are recording the lecture, or have a set of printed PowerPoint slides, you still ought to take notes during the session. This can help you stay focused, stop you from tuning out the professor, and may help you identify the little stresses placed on individual ideas or mechanisms. These will likely wind up being the very points tested in your approaching examination

3- Read Your Textbook Once More After Lecture
Now that you have a much better comprehension of the material, it is best to read the book again to make sure that you are comfortable with each topic discussed and mechanism tackled

4- Practice, Practice, Practice
Organic chemistry is not a course that can be soaked up through simple memorization. You should practice the principles, check your understanding of the ideas, and consistently go through each one of the mechanisms. The more familiar you are with each factor, the less the chance that you may be caught off-guard on the exam

5- Do More Than the Assigned Homework Problems
If you stick with just the 5 or 10 given homework problems, you are cutting yourself short. The additional problems located in your book are intended to test the same concepts, with a somewhat unique twist every time. When you practice these added problems you'll be better equipped to resolve unforeseen challenges on your upcoming exam. These kinds of additional questions may even be the very questions that may turn up in your test

6- Do Not Memorize
The worst thing you can do to mess up your organic chemistry capabilities is to just memorize reactions. When you memorize an exact reaction, you are only equipped to answer questions presented in the form memorized, consequently you will be caught off guard when the starting compounds or reagents are somewhat, or completely different from your flashcards. However, if you review the concepts, focusing on how the molecules behave, and the reason why the electrons attack, you will be capable of completing any related mechanism, regardless of how the reacting substances are presented

7- Study Groups
Any time you study by yourself you are restricted by your individual sources of know-how, notes, and study material. Whenever you study with a group you will be capable of assisting the other person with difficult ideas, and process mechanism challenges as partners. If you are weak in a particular matter, your study group will be able to address your concerns. And if you are secure with a subject matter, you will probably still learn it far better whenever you are required to apply it in easy terms to describe to a member of your study group who has trouble understanding this concept

8- Peer Tutoring
A lot of universities have a learning center with peer tutors to assist you with your organic chemistry course. Even though they are students on their own, these tutors have taken, and effectively completed organic chemistry, and will therefore be able to help you with the basic concepts and mechanisms

9- Office Hours
If your professor or TA has office hours, consider this a very skilled, very free tutoring session. Your teacher and TA are quite familiarized, not merely with organic chemistry, but also with the concepts and problem forms that will show up on your examination. They'll be able to assist you to fully grasp the facts by using problems similar to what you will later be tested on

10- Private tutoring
Though the above mentioned tips are extremely effective guidelines not to be dismissed, many students still find themselves having so many doubts with insufficient resources. Study groups are tied to the experience of the students concerned, and peer tutoring or office hour sessions are typically rather crowded.

Subject Specific Challenges to Making Science Labs Work

Most students do not go on to become scientists and for these students the main goal of science education should be to teach rigorous, evidence-based thinking and to convey a sense of wonder about the natural world. These goals can be met by any branch of science; there is no obvious reason why biology would be better than physics or Earth science would be more important than chemistry. Indeed, it is undoubtedly possible to point to curriculums and classes in all areas of science that do a wonderful job of teaching scientific thought. However, that doesn't mean that it is equally easy for teachers to meet these goals in every domain.

It is clearly important for students to have real, meaningful laboratory experiences in science classes. It is possible to have great labs in all branches of science but the challenges can be quite different. One of the big challenges in biology is that experiments often take an extended period of time. Frequently, getting results is simply not possible in a single, 45 minute class period. Even with 1.5 hour double periods, designing biology experiments that fit can be difficult. On the other hand, working with animals (and even plants, fungus, and protists) is inherently motivating and exciting for most students. Furthermore, many of the most important ideas in biology are less abstract and mathematical than the big ideas in physics and chemistry, and are therefore easier for many students to absorb.

In contrast, physics labs often get much quicker results than biology labs and can have the advantage of being visually dramatic. The difficulty for physics teachers is bridging the gap between the labs and the principles which they demonstrate. It's no secret that physics involves quite a bit of math and many students get so caught up in their struggles with the math that they are unable to see the ideas behind the formulas. One of the most successful solutions to this difficulty is conceptual physics classes, which are often successful in helping students understand the big ideas of physics.

Chemistry labs also tend to be quick enough to fit into class periods and they are often very exciting. Indeed, the most common request I get as a science teacher is for "explosions" which are almost entirely the domain of chemistry. With chemistry labs, the duel challenges are safety and connecting the macroscopic results with the microscopic reasons behind the results. Safety in chemistry labs is often best addressed by having well-designed, dedicated lab rooms in schools. When that is not possible, work-arounds using household chemicals instead of their more exciting and dangerous counterparts are sometimes possible. Connecting lab results with the actions of molecules is becoming easier for teachers as better and better computer simulations for chemistry education are developed.

Earth science is the fourth major branch of science and it is the most forgotten one. In some ways it is the broadest of the subjects; any study of earth science will inevitably touch on aspects of chemistry, physics, and biology. Designing earth science labs is quite challenging because it is impossible to actually manipulate landforms or weather in the classroom. For this reason, earth science labs rely strongly on models. Reliance on models can be a strength if it is used as an opportunity to really explore the place of models in science or it can be a weakness if simple models are used as stand-ins for complex systems without discussion.

Each branch of science has its own advantages and disadvantages from the point of view of a teacher designing a curriculum with a strong, relevant, and exciting laboratory component. For most students, it is not especially important which branch (or branches) that they study; rather it is important that they learn scientific thinking and evidence-based reasoning.

The Secret Science Club presents Mathematical Sociologist and Social Network Expert Duncan Watts, Wednesday, July 18, 8PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Every single day, people create, collect, and share 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Text. Tweets. Photos. Videos. Clicks. Links. Consumer transactions. Blog posts and comments. And so on . . . down, down, down the rabbit hole . . . While all this ballooning information creates storage nightmares for some, a new breed of computational social scientists is enthusiastically exploring Big Data and extracting surprising insights about human behavior. 

Duncan Watts—principal researcher at Microsoft’s new NYC-based laboratory, former sociology professor at Columbia University, and the author of Everything Is Obvious (*Once You Know the Answer)—is at the forefront of these studies, examining concepts ranging from influence and incentives to social contagion and stereotypes. He challenges over-simplified explanations about human interactions and asks: Why do common sense explanations often turn out to be wrong? Are your friends as similar to you as you think they are? Why do we like the music we like? How do ideas really spread?

Before & After

--Snag a signed copy of Duncan Watts’ brilliant new book, Everything Is Obvious
--Groove to machine-coded tunes

--Try our binary cocktail of the night, the Super-Smartini

--Stick around for the sensational Q&A

This real-time edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, July 18, 2012, at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. 

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. No cover. Just bring your smart self!

Think bigger! Secret Science Club presents “A Whale of a Night” with Comparative Anatomist Joy Reidenberg of Inside Nature’s Giants, Wednesday, June 20, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

Dr. Reidenberg discusses her work dissecting big animals from sperm whales to the giant squid and hosts a special screening of Inside Nature’s Giants

As a scientist, Joy Reidenberg is a rare specimen. She has probed the innards of everything from beetles to human beings, but she specializes in big—whales and their kin. In pursuit of knowledge (and cetacean parts), she’s been chased by sharks, gone through the Lincoln Tunnel with a dead dolphin leaning out her passenger window, and plummeted into the carcass of a beached blue whale to retrieve its 25-foot-long larynx. It’s all in pursuit of studying body structures in order to better understand vertebrate biomechanics and the evolution of life on our planet.

Star of the PBS series Inside Nature’s Giants and professor of anatomy and functional morphology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Reidenberg asks:

--How does the mammalian body work and what are some incredible adaptations seen in extreme environments? 

--How is whale song produced?

--Can studying and discovering animal adaptations lead to biomimetric medicines and future machines? 

--Who put the “gross” in gross anatomy?  

Before & After

--Sample our capacious cocktail of the night, the Blue Whale . . . it’ll blast your blowhole

--Sway to humongous grooves and the murmurs of mermaids

--Stick around for the colossal Q&A

This ginormous edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, June 20, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. No cover. 

The Secret Science Club presents Neuroscientist and IGNORANCE Author Stuart Firestein, Wednesday, May 16, 8 pm @ the Bell House, FREE!

Five hundred years ago, it was possible for one human brain to contain all the world’s scientific knowledge. Since then, the number of scientific papers has been doubling every decade—and it’s barely possible for an individual to master his or her own field of study. In the Information Age—when tens of millions of “answers” are at your fingertips—sometimes it’s the questions that we need to pursue. “Knowledge is a big subject,” says neuroscientist Stuart Firestein. “But ignorance is bigger.” 

Chair of the department of biological sciences at Columbia University, director of the Firestein Lab which researches the vertebrate olfactory system and its role in perception and memory, and author of the new book Ignorance, Stuart Firestein asks: What do humans have absolutely no clue about? How can acknowledging the unknown make us smarter? How will ignorance drive science and exploration forward?

Before & After
 --Saturate yourself in our cerebral grooves 
 --Try our quizzical cocktail of the night, the “WTF?” 
--Revel in the Q&A (emphasis on Q) 
--Snag a signed copy of Ignorance, Dr. Firestein’s brain-boggling new book!

The next brainy edition of the Secret Science Club meets Wednesday, May 16, 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. 

Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+.

 No cover. Just bring your smart self.

Think again! The Secret Science Club presents Leonard Mlodinow and SUBLIMINAL, Thursday, April 26, 8 PM @ the Bell House, FREE!

A large portion of your brain is devoted to unconscious activity. Bombarded as you are by 11 million bits of sensory information per second, it’s just more efficient for many neural processes to take place automatically. For example, you don’t decide something looks green or tastes sour—you just get the message that it is. However, as scientists continue to learn about the brain, they are discovering that hidden mental processes may be far more influential than previously suspected.

In his latest book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, physicist and best-selling author Leonard Mlodinow probes the brain’s most mysterious territory. 
Dr. Mlodinow asks:

--What types of (tricky) new experiments and technologies are neuroscientists and psychologists using to explore unconscious processes?
--How accurately do you perceive yourself and your motives? What really influences your choices? Does your order-loving conscious mind ever create cover stories to explain unconscious decisions?

--What are emotional illusions? How reliable and malleable are your memories? Do you ever unconsciously confabulate?

Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches at the California Institute of Technology. He wrote The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, co-wrote The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, and was once a staff writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Beam us up, Dr. Mlodinow!)

Before & After

--Try our dopamine-spiked cocktail, the Mind Meld

--Groove to synapse-stimulating sounds

--Snag a signed copy of Leonard Mlodinow’s awesome new book

--Stick around for the thought-provoking Q&A

This cerebral edition of the Secret Science Club meets Thursday, April 26 at 8 pm @ the Bell House, 149 7th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues) in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Subway: F or G to 4th Ave; R to 9th St. Doors open at 7:30 pm. Please bring ID: 21+. No cover. Just bring your smart self!