In this video segment from Cyberchase, the CyberSquad replaces a piece of track to get the Madre Bonita Express to the Mother's Day harvest.
This video adapted from the Valdez Museum & Historical Archive, explores what happened during the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 through original footage, first-person accounts, and animations illustrating plate tectonics.
This animated essay from the American Experience Web site explains the difference between alternating and direct electric current and offers in-depth explanations about the role played by a battery, light bulb, wire, and generator. Grades 6-12.
In this video adapted from ATETV, learn how Bristol Community College promotes internships and co-ops to prepare students for work in technology-related careers.
Children learn how seasonal weather changes affect everything, from the behavior of animals to the way we dress and play.
This video segment adapted from First Light explains why the highest peak in the Pacific, Mauna Kea, is an ideal site for astronomical observations. Featured are new telescope technologies that allow astronomers to explore the universe in more depth.
This lesson will help the students understand that science theories change in the face of new evidence, but those changes can be slow in coming.
In this video, an environmental technologist visits an abandoned coal mine in Kentucky to talk about how a remediation system (a series of settling ponds and treatment cells) is neutralizing the acid drainage flowing from the mine and keeping it from damaging a creek downstream.
For years, our oceans have been hard at work absorbing the carbon dioxide that humans create through burning fossil fuels. Find out what effect that extra CO2 is having on our seas.
In this video segment, the ZOOM cast demonstrates how to use cabbage juice to find out if a solution is an acid or a base.
In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, two cast members demonstrate what happens when vinegar is added to baking soda inside a container. The resulting chemical reaction produces enough carbon dioxide to launch their paper rocket skyward.
Recommended for: Grades K-5
A car propelled by the reaction between lemon juice and baking soda has more in common with rockets and jet aircraft than one might think. In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, two cast members demonstrate the power of rocket-propelled vehicles and how to exploit the force produced by the carbon dioxide gas. Grades 3-8.
It would seem that bottles of lemon juice and rockets have only their basic shape in common. However, as two cast members from ZOOM demonstrate in this adapted video segment, when baking soda is added to the mix, a plastic bottle can act very much like a real rocket. Grades 3-8.
Students examine some of the behaviors and physical characteristics that enable organisms to live successfully in their environment.
Finches on the Galapagos Islands have evolved to exploit almost every possible niche. This diagram shows the range of food sources available on the island and the different beak shapes adapted to exploit each of them.
Students practice carefully lining up decimal places while calculating sums of decimals that total more than one.
Hear about how respect for Earth can help us attain a more sustainable lifestyle in the face of climate change in this video segment adapted from United Tribes Technical College.
Our brains control every movement we make. Most of us take for granted our ability to pick up a cup or change the television station. However, for people who have lost a limb or become paralyzed, the inability to do these things means a loss of freedom and independence. This video segment from Greater Boston describes how neuroscientists and bioengineers have teamed up to create a system that allows people who have lost motor functions to control electronic devices through their thoughts alone. Grades 6-12
Why did sex evolve? The likely answers, in this essay for the Evolution Web site by science journalist Matt Ridley, may surprise you.
Recommended for: Grades 9-12 ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.
How does an airplane stay aloft when upside down? This media-rich essay from the NOVA Web site offers an explanation based on Newton's third law of motion. Grades 6-12. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.
In this video from Nature, geological detectives use ancient diamonds to learn more about Earth's inner layers.
This video segment adapted from Big River: A King Corn Companion shows how agricultural chemicals from the Midwest that travel downstream in water runoff create a vast marine dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Learn how agricultural technology is changing farming, and one student's life, in this video adapted from Pathways to Technology.
See one adult student's experience attending community college, studying agricultural technology, and discovering career opportunities, in this video adapted from Pathways to Technology.
In this video segment from TV 411, two Atlanta Hawks players plan a driving route to reach the Basketball Hall of Fame. They use map scales to estimate their travel distances. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.
Do you need proof that driving is a dangerous activity? More Americans have died in car crashes over the past 100 years than in all the wars the U.S. has ever fought combined. More than 40,000 Americans die each year on the nation's highways, most as the result of high-speed collisions. In this video segment adapted from NOVA, learn how engineers developed the air bag, an important automobile-safety device now found in most cars.
Recommended for: Grades 3-12
Students investigate air and how it is something that occupies space, has mass, and exerts pressure.
Without highly controlled jet propulsion, rockets and other aircraft would zip through the air as unpredictably as so many untied party balloons. In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, two cast members find out how slowing the amount of air expelled from a balloon and changing the direction of that air can affect the balloon's behavior. Grades 3-8 ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.
In this video segment adapted from ZOOM, cast members make their own hovercraft and demonstrate how the air leaking out of a balloon can make a plastic plate hover above a table.
This video from First Alaskans Institute spotlights the Alaska Native community of St. Paul and its hands-on commitment to care for the land and animals on which it depends.
In this video adapted from Storyknife Productions, Alaska Native pilots share how they use traditional knowledge to read the landscape and predict the weather.
In this video adapted from KUAC-TV and the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska Native students contribute to research on how their environment is changing as a result of global warming.
In this media-rich lesson, students prepare classroom science fair projects that demonstrate the application of traditional knowledge to a scientific topic.
In this video adapted from Alaska Sea Grant, discover why multiple tsunamis resulted from the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964.
This video from the series Faces of America details the process of documenting family history and tracing lineage back through maternal and paternal lines.
In this Evolution Web feature, test your skills at judging who's who on the tree of life while you learn about the tools and methods of cladistics.
These images from the Smithsonian Institution depict Nancy Knowlton's work with snapping shrimp in Panama. Knowlton found that the closing of the isthmus -- dividing the Pacific Ocean from the Caribbean -- resulted in new species of shrimp.
In this video from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, explore the subject of altruism, the idea of people doing good things without expecting anything in return.
This video segment from the Secret of Life School Video: "Genetic Medicine: Tinkering with Our Genes" explores the potential for gene therapy to cure diseases like Alzheimer's.
An estimated 15 million Americans will suffer from Alzheimer’s by 2050. QUEST visits with researchers at San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes who have found that a gene may hold the key to a cure for this debilitating affliction.