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Inventive minds gather in Port Jeff for maker faire

by Alex Petroski - June 12, 2017

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On a sun-splashed Saturday afternoon, members of the community young and old had the chance to get outside and exercise their imagination at the third Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. The popular event, hosted by the Port Jefferson Maritime Explorium June 10, saw demonstrations using robots, interactive activities, exhibits and performances from various “makers” at the Village Center and outside at Harborfront Park.

The Port Jeff maker faire is a scaled down version of the larger Maker Faire brand, which hosts worldwide events similar to the one in Port Jeff. According to the Maritime Explorium’s website, more than 100 makers and 2,000 participants attended the 2016 Mini Maker Faire, and even more were projected to show up this year, although final totals were not readily available.

Some of the makers on display included Funtown Studios, which brought an interactive fireball sculpture; robotics teams from the Sachem and Smithtown school districts; electricity and magnetism demonstrations by representatives from the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe in Shoreham; an underwater robotic demonstration by SeaPerch; representatives from Stony Brook iCREATE, an innovation facility designed to encourage “innovation and entrepreneurial nature” of the Stony Brook University campus community; and many more.

Before the 2016 faire, Stephanie Buffa, a volunteer board member at the Explorium, explained the importance of the message of the event and the museum as a whole.

“Everything is at our fingertips,” she said in a phone interview. “If you’re sitting at the dinner table and somebody asks a question, you ‘Google’ it. It’s so easy to get answers that way…it’s so easy to get caught up in all of these pre-packaged things that we forget to sort of, do it yourself. You can be creative in so many ways. You don’t have to be a good artist and be able to draw beautiful pictures to be creative and to make things.”

Lauren Hubbard, founding president and former executive director of The Maritime Explorium, who is listed as a producer of the faire, said the day was a success, though attendance numbers are not available as of yet. She said in a phone interview the goal of the event is to show local people of all ages they have the creativity to be makers.

“It’s really about highlighting the entrepreneurial spirit,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity for young people to see how that process happens, how to create something completely new.”

A lesson in sugar, short and sweet (part one: the players)

by TBR Staff - April 10, 2017

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I have had the privilege of teaching high school science (biology, chemistry and physics) for the last thirty years. For the last ten years, I’ve had the additional privilege and responsibility of developing and teaching an elective we simply call “Food Science.” It’s not your usual health class dietary guidelines, nor does it rehash the familiar mantras of counting calories and exercising to balance intake. Instead, we study the cultural, historical, scientific, political and economic contexts of our food system and how that system impacts our environments, both external and internal. This in turn enables students to make much more informed decisions about what they want to put in their bodies.

When it comes to sugars, confusion is the name of the game. There are dozens of ingredients that mark the presence of sugars in our food: maltodextrin, dextrose, invert sugar, cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup and starch, to name a few. Regardless of what the food industry calls them, your body sees basically three end products of their digestion: glucose, fructose and galactose. Which ones you eat, and how much, will dictate both their value and their danger to you.

You may have heard of three additional sugars — lactose, sucrose and maltose. Lactose is a combination of one glucose and one galactose. Also known as “milk sugar,” lactose is the nemesis of lactose-intolerant individuals who lack sufficient quantities of the enzyme that can digest it. Instead, bacteria that reside in their intestines get to process it, making painful amounts of gas as a by-product. Galactose can be converted to glucose in your body, but most individuals do not consume enough dairy to make this a source of concern.

Maltose is another type of sugar. It is a pairing of two glucose units and is the namesake for maltodextrin, etc. Consuming foods with maltose adds glucose to your diet — worth keeping track of as part of your total glucose consumption.

However, the most likely source of sugars in your diet is either sucrose or high fructose corn syrup. Sucrose, known also as table sugar, can be derived from sugar cane (cane sugar) or sugar beets (sugar.) Like lactose and maltose, sucrose is a paired structure, made of one glucose subunit and one fructose subunit. That is what your body absorbs regardless of the source (even organic.)

Sparing you the science behind its production, high fructose corn syrup is approximately half glucose, and half fructose too. Regardless of the marketing efforts by the Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association to make you believe one is better for you than the other, they end up, metabolically, in a virtual tie. Debating which to consume is a distraction from the consequences of consuming too much of either, or both.

The consumption of sugar (the term is legally owned by the Sugar Association as the sole name for sucrose) used to be limited by the relative expense and difficulty in obtaining it from its tropical source. Now the record levels of corn production in America have made it relatively cheap to produce and distribute sugar’s nearly identical-tasting competitor, high fructose corn syrup. You can find it in soda for sure, but also in pickles, peanut butter, ketchup and pretty much anywhere sugar might be used for additional appeal to consumers.

This has paved the way for the combined consumption of these sweeteners to reach more than 150 pounds per year per person in America. This far surpasses the 60 pounds per year considered by some experts to be the maximum amount that can be metabolized without ill consequences including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver, cataracts, personality and cognitive dysfunction, some cancers and (by the way) obesity.

Tying glucose and fructose consumption to the metabolic consequences noted above requires further discussion. And now, you are properly prepared for those lessons. As we say in Food Science class, “Chow!”

Chris Zenyuh is a science teacher at Harborfields High School and has been teaching for 30 years.

Life Lines: Magic, religion and science

by Elof Carlson - January 13, 2017

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Geb_and_Nut02 — Egypt has long been considered a land of mystery and magic. Above, the Magical Circle of Anubis is discussed in ‘The Golden Bough.’

By Elof Axel Carlson

In 1890 Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) wrote “The Golden Bough.” Frazer was Scottish, educated in Glasgow and then in Cambridge studying classical literature (Greek and Roman). He studied mythology, comparative religion and anthropology. His book argues that magic gave rise to religion and religion to science.

Magic assumes there are supernatural powers that some people can invoke or possess as innate gifts. With magic, what seems impossible can be made possible, at least to the observers of magical acts. Most professional magicians deny that they possess such gifts, and Houdini spent considerable time duplicating the tricks and illusions other magicians (and charlatans) used to deceive the public.

Frazer surmises the earliest humans believed in magical acts and associated them into rituals and myths with a belief in gods, often family ancestors, mythic heroes who were founders of a tribe, clan or larger population and sky gods. He believed the idea of resurrection came from the seasonal observation that plants die, scatter seeds and in the spring a resurrection occurs. He calls this “the dying corn god.”

Religion largely replaced magic as the basis for interpreting how the world arose, how society should function and how we relate to our gods. Religion in turn led to science with mathematics replacing numerology, astronomy coming out from astrology and chemistry from alchemy. The pursuit of knowledge from pseudoscience led to a weeding out of the failed experiments and predictions and a respect for more empirical and reason-based studies of the material, living and psychological universe in which we live.

Contemporary historians and philosophers differ with Frazer and among themselves on the origins of science. Some use a Marxist interpretation that farmers and workers laid the groundwork for science by their practical approaches to cultivate nature. Some argue that science is actually a cultural consensus or construction that shifts to new consensus and constructions in response to political and cultural changes.

Most scientists reject these social views of science and favor a material universe that can be explored, interpreted and manipulated with tools, experimentation, reason and data replacing myth, ideology or the supernatural. At issue in these debates are the ways scientists see the universe and their efforts to understand it. Science sometimes overthrows prevailing beliefs seen as truths. More often, it modifies its findings and its implications, incorporating the old as a portion of the new.

Newton’s laws of motion and gravity were not negated by Einstein’s theories of relativity or space-time. They became a more limited application useful for studying Earth and its solar system. Science is limited in what it can predict. We do not know if there are few, many or an unending number of scientific laws that may emerge in the centuries and millennia to come.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

New classrooms advance Miller Place students in science

by TBR Staff - November 1, 2016

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miller-place-science-3_anzelw — Max Rutter gets the lightbulb lit inside the new science classroom at Andrew Muller Primary School. File Photo by Rebecca Anzel

By Rebecca Anzel

Second-graders in Andrew Muller Primary School’s new science room were beaming with excitement Monday as teachers distributed materials for an experiment — a magnet, paperclip, battery, copper wire, rubber band and lightbulb.

The class was learning about interactions. Debbie Trelfa helped her students name each of the items in front of them and asked them to figure out how to make them interact. One table discovered the magnet attracted the paperclip, and Trelfa told her students there was another interaction they could make.

Andrew Muller Primary School second-grade teacher Debbie Trelfa teaches a new science lesson to her class. Photo by Rebecca Anzel

Students told one another to “persevere,” and a few minutes later another table discovered they could get the lightbulb to light up by placing it on the battery.

Miller Place school district’s two elementary schools, Andrew Muller and Laddie A. Decker Sound Beach School, adapted an available classroom each to be used as science learning and inquiry labs. Students study topics like weather and plants in an interactive way, as opposed to using textbooks.

“Having been a classroom teacher, I loved teaching science, but it’s very difficult to do in a classroom,” Andrew Muller Primary School Principal Laura Gewurz said. “Experimentation can be time consuming and complicated to set up and break down. Having a room designed for student experimentation and collaboration makes science exciting and accessible, and saves instructional time.”

These two spaces were instituted to prepare for new state science and engineering curriculum changes, which shift the focus of lessons from memorizing information presented by teachers to understanding concepts by investigating them. The updated standards are called Next Generation Science Standards, which use “three-dimensional learning.”

Instead of a teacher asking students a question with one correct answer, for example, students would instead consider an open-ended one by using evidence presented by a teacher or reading. Or, instead of students reading a textbook chapter and answering questions on a worksheet, they would read multiple sources and write reports and posters about the ideas.

“You’re seeing a lot more hands-on experiences, hearing a lot more student talk and witnessing more student collaboration.”

—Laura Gewurz

“New York State is really changing the curriculum for science, which I think is fantastic,” Gewurz said. “It has not been changed since 1996, and not only are our concepts about teaching different, the science is different.”

According to a NYS Education Department document, the proposed science learning standards will be presented to the Board of Regents this winter. It is the last step in a process that began in January 2015, when the board counseled the Education Department to begin drafting new standards. Since then, the draft was updated with results from a public survey and discussed in June 2016.

“As teachers, schools, and educational systems systemically transition to the new science standards and changes to local curriculum and instructional practice, a call for coherent professional development opportunities is vital,” the NYS Education Department said in a statement. “To this end, the Department will continue to collaborate with science education stakeholders across the state and nation to assist in building the awareness and the capacity of teachers and leaders of science.”

Miller Place is “way ahead of the game,” Assistant Superintendent Susan Hodun said, in beginning to implement science curriculum changes before the new state standards are finalized and implemented.

With cooperative learning tables for students to work with and learn from each other, separate storage areas for each grade level and science learning resources displayed, the new science labs further encourage modern teaching methods.

Anna Paesano and Kayla Martins perform the day’s experiment. Photo by Rebecca Anzel

“I think it really works with the new science learning standards that New York State has developed in the sense that students have more access to authentic learning,” Gewurz said. “You’re seeing a lot more hands-on experiences, hearing a lot more student talk and witnessing more student collaboration. I think with the changes to science, it’s all coming together, which is great.”

The science room is also financially smart, she added, because instead of purchasing duplicates of materials for each classroom, the school can instead buy a wider range of materials to create a “much richer room.”

Students spend about an hour per week doing experiments that supplement the time they spend in the classroom learning about science concepts. The teachers and principal at Andrew Muller hope that hands-on experience will help their students as they get older.

“If you’re looking at college and career readiness, how would kids even know if they want to be an engineer unless they’ve had the opportunity to experiment,” Gewurz asked. “I think it’s certainly motivational and I think you will see more boys and girls interested in engineering in this country if you start to do things like this.”

Invention Convention full of fresh ideas from young minds

by Alex Petroski - March 8, 2016

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For young Northport students, creativity was in the air recently at the Invention Convention.

Gifted and Talented Parents Association, a parent group in the district, hosted the 16^th annual Invention Convention at the William J. Brosnan administration building on Feb. 25, where students displayed their innovative projects.

The convention was open to kindergarten through sixth grade students in the district. About 25 projects were on display for community members, school administrators and school board members in attendance.

“The Invention Convention is focused on inspiring, encouraging and celebrating the creativity and ingenuity of our children,” a press release from the GTPA said. “Their natural curiosity and imagination are a perfect combination to create something new.”

One of the projects on display was “The Rotating House,” created by Fifth Avenue Elementary School second grader Andrew Mead, which turns a house at its foundation to allow sunlight into whichever room a homeowner desires at a given time.

“I think it would be very useful for everyone,” Mead said about his invention. “Some people may just want to take a nap or something but they can’t because the sun is shining right on them, and they might not want to wait so long for the sun to move around by itself.”

Logan Hecht, a first grader from Dickinson Elementary School, invented “Fork-A-Seal” for containers with snacks that come without plastic ware.

“I got this idea because one day I was going to have fruit salad for breakfast, but we were out of forks so I thought that this plastic piece right here could be a fork, so you’d always have a fork ready,” Hecht said. “You waste a piece of plastic that could be used for something good.”

Some other inventions included second grader Mitchell Cartwright’s “Second Life,” which turns used lunch trays into planters; first grader Jeffery Raynor’s “The Automatic Duster 5000,” which automatically cleans shelves; third grader Philip Bechtold’s “Adjustable Dish Drying Rack;” and first grade twins Liam and Jack Healy’s “Storm Glow RCI,” which are colorful lanterns for when the power goes out.

Ancient murder and copy of a corpse bring chance to learn

by Daniel Dunaief - February 18, 2016

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A murder mystery thousands of years old and a continent away is coming to Long Island, where middle school and high school students can look at a rare face from human history.

During the ice age, an arrow went through a man’s shoulder blade, nicked an artery that leaves the aorta and caused him to bleed to death. Some time after he died, weather conditions effectively freeze dried him, preserving him in a remarkably pristine state until German hikers found his five-foot, five-inch body protruding from a melting glacier in 1991. He was found in the Ötztal Alps (on the border between Austria and Italy) — hence the name Ötzi.

David Micklos, executive director of the DNA Learning Center, stands next to the only authorized replica of Ötzi outside of the South Tyrol Museum in Italy. Photo by Daniel Dunaief — Dave Micklos, executive director of the DNA Learning Center, stands next to the only authorized replica of Ötzi outside of the South Tyrol Museum in Italy. Photo by Daniel Dunaief

While Ötzi, as he is now called, remains preserved carefully in a special facility in Italy, a master craftsman and artist has created a painstaking replica of a 45-year-old man killed at over 10,000 feet that is now on display at the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

“Kids are fascinated by it,” said Dave Micklos, the executive director of the DNA Learning Center, who has shared the newest mummified celebrity with students for several weeks in advance of the official exhibit opening in the middle of February. “The story is quite fascinating: it’s an ancient murder mystery. We take it from the forensic slant: what is the biological evidence we can see on Ötzi’s body that tells us who he was and how he died.”

Ötzi, or the Iceman as he is also known, has become the subject of extensive investigation by scientists around the world, who have explored everything from the over 60 tattoos on his body, to the copper axe found next to him, to the contents of his stomach and intestines, which have helped tell the story about the last day of Ötzi’s life.

“It’s a story that’s been assembled, bit by bit,” Micklos said. “Each scientific investigation adds new twists to the story.”

The Learning Center came up with the idea to create a replica and proposed it to the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, Italy. Eventually, the museum granted the center the rights to use the CT scans, which provide detailed anatomical features. Ultimately, artist and paleo-sculptor Gary Staab used the images and studied the Iceman himself.

Staab, who has recreated copies of extinct animals for museums around the world, used a three-dimensional printer and sculpting and painting techniques to create an exact replica of a man who probably didn’t know he was in immediate danger when he was hit, because he seemed to be taking a break, Micklos said. Staab built one layer at a time of a resin-based prototype, then worked on the skin through sculpting, molding and painting.

A close-up of Ötzi the Iceman mummy’s replica at the DNA Learning Center. Photo by Daniel Dunaief

Nova produced a television feature called “Nova’s Iceman Reborn” on PBS that captures the process of combining art and science to make a replica of the rare and highly valued fossil, which viewers can stream online through the link https://www.pbs.org/nova.

Long Islanders can see the replica at the Learning Center, where they can ask a host of questions about a man born during the copper age — hence the copper axe — and about 2,500 years before Rome was founded. Visitors interested in seeing Ötzi need to purchase tickets, which cost $10, ahead of time through the Learning Center’s website at www.dnalc.org.

Ötzi’s entire genetic sequence is available online. The Learning Center is the first science center worldwide to focus on DNA and genetics.

The center is especially interested in helping students understand what DNA says about human evolution. In one experiment, students can compare their own DNA to Ötzi, a Neanderthal and another ancient hominid group, called the Denisovans. Students can see how similar modern DNA is to Ötzi and how different it is from the Neanderthals and Denisovans. The 5,200 year differences with Ötzi is “no time in DNA time,” Micklos said.

Ötzi’s genes reveal that he had atherosclerosis and the deposition of plaques on the inner walls of the arteries. Ötzi was a healthy, active, relatively long-lived man in the Paleolithic era, who ate a diet of natural, unprocessed foods, and yet he had heart disease. His heart condition came as a surprise to scientists.

A 3-D resin model of Ötzi’s head before being painted. Photo by Daniel Dunaief

In addition to his genes, Ötzi’s body left clues about his life, where he’d spent his last day and what he’d eaten. Scientists have explored the contents of each part of his digestive tract, which, remarkably, remained well preserved during those thousands of years.

Ötzi had eaten different kinds of ibex meat, which is a goat found in the mountains. The pollen that was in his system, which came from the air he inhaled and from the food he ate, were pieces of a puzzle that showed where he’d been. The pollen near the top of his digestive track came from coniferous trees, including relatives of spruces and pines, which came from higher altitudes. Stored deeper in his system was pollen from deciduous trees, like birch and hazel, which grew lower in the valleys.

In addition to the Ötzi replica, the Learning Center also has reproductions of the clothes he was wearing and the artifacts he was carrying, which included a couple of containers of birch bark sewn together with fibers.

The Learning Center is developing a program to help students from the age of 10 to 18 explore Ötzi, so students can ask what the artifacts tell them about neolithic time.

Micklos said students have shown a strong interest in this old replica.

“It’s a little bit morbid, but not too much, and it’s a little gruesome, but not too much,” he said. “Everybody loves a mummy,” he continued, citing the popularity of the mummy exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Government gives boost to Brookhaven lab

by Giselle Barkley - February 17, 2016

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NSLS-II-BNLw — Rainbow over NSLS-II: Brookhaven National Laboratory’s National Synchrotron Light Source II is a state-of-the-art 3-GeV electron storage ring. Photo from BNL

Budget season brought good news for the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which may receive $291.5 million from the government to help sustain and improve two of its facilities as part of President Barack Obama’s budget request for the 2017 fiscal year.

The president requested $179.7 million of that money to go toward BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility and the remainder to the National Synchrotron Light Source II facility. The proposed amount is $9.5 million more than what the lab received last year for the two facilities combined.

According to Brookhaven Lab spokesperson Peter Genzer, the money won’t only help the Lab’s RHIC and NSLS-II facilities run, but also help fund new experimental stations at NSLS-II. The president’s financial inquiry also includes $1.8 million for the Core Facility Revitalization project.

The project will provide the infrastructure and facilities to store data to support the lab’s growing needs, the press release said.

U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have worked to maintain America’s science presence — and securing more federal funds for the lab helps maintain it. Schumer said he was pleased with the president’s request to increase funding for the lab, saying that an increase in funding will help keep BNL and our nation at the forefront of innovation and boost Long Island’s economy.

“We appreciate the President’s continued support for science and, in particular, Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and National Synchrotron Light Source II,” BNL Director Doon Gibbs said. “ We are also extremely grateful for the ongoing efforts of Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand — and the entire N.Y. Congressional delegation — on behalf of the Lab and its research mission.”

According to RHIC’s website, scientists study earth in its infancy and other areas that will help people better understand how the world works. The approximate 16-year-old ion collider is also the first machine in the world that can support colliding heavy ions.

The NSLS-II allows scientists to examine high-energy light waves in a variety of spectrums, including x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. The RHIC and NSLS-II are BNL’s two largest facilities Genzer said.

He added that the “president’s budget request is the first step in the budget process for the fiscal year 2017.” The process begins on Oct. 1. In the best-case scenario, the government will agree on and vote to approve the final budget before the end of the end of September.

The senators will continue their fight to get increased funding for BNL as the lab “is a major economic engine for Long Island,” Gillibrand said.

Gillibrand said she was also pleased with the administration’s request for increased funds. Construction of NSLS-II began in 2009 and cost around $912 million. BNL expected construction to end last year.

Other members of BNL were unavailable for comment prior to publication.

Three Village BOE tackles science and English

by Andrea Moore Paldy - February 16, 2016

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Engelbright&Vorwald1_3VBOE_Feb16_Paldyw — State Assemblyman Steve Englebright, right, is applauded after paying a surprise visit to the Three Village board of education meeting last week in honor of Gary Vorwald. Photo by Andrea Moore Paldy

The science department chair at P. J. Gelinas Junior High School received special recognition at the most recent Three Village board of education meeting.

Gary Vorwald has taught science in Three Village since 1997 and has led the Gelinas Science Olympiad team to several championships. He also has received awards in his own right. Among them, he was named a New York State master teacher in 2015. In the same year, the New York Earth Science Teachers Association gave him its first Distinguished Earth Science Teacher award.

In Vorwald’s honor, State Assemblyman Steve Englebright (D-Setauket)paid a surprise visit during the board meeting. The Gelinas science teacher and paleontologist had just completed a presentation on the secondary science curriculum with colleagues Marnie Kula and Patrick McManus.

Englebright praised Vorwald.

“He has brought distinction to his work, but that’s not what he tried to do,” said the assemblyman, who also is a geologist and lecturer at Stony Brook University.

“What he tried to do is bring opportunities for learning for our children. The other things just happened because he was successful in bringing out the best. … He’s a scientist as well as a teacher. We’re so very fortunate that he brought his mastery of science and his unquenchable desire to learn as an inspiration for our kids.”

During their curriculum presentation, Vorwald and his colleagues emphasized dedication to science instruction.

“We want to keep kids jazzed about science,” said Kula, Ward Melville High School science and InSTAR chair.

The department’s goal, she said, is to help students to be hands-on, active learners.

“I’m happy to say that science is alive and well in Three Village,” Kula said, mentioning the district’s Regents scores, which surpass the state’s pass and mastery rates.

She added that while students are only required to take one physical and one life science for an Advanced Regents diploma, 60 to 65 percent of each graduating class exceeds the minimum requirements by taking both chemistry and physics.

Ward Melville offers every AP science course available, as well as several science electives that include astronomy, consumer chemistry and forensics.

Perhaps the best-known program at the high school is its three-year Independent Science Technology and Research (InSTAR) program. Its participants have received numerous honors in competitions such as The DuPont Challenge, Toshiba/NSTA ExploraVision, Siemens and the Intel Science Talent Search.

Opportunities for students to engage in science outside the classroom include the Robotics team at the high school and Science Olympiad and Science Bowl at all three schools. Students can also take part in beach cleanups and partnerships with Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Lab Open Space Stewardship program.

Vorwald said that the district’s science educators are preparing for an update in science standards. He explained that New York is developing new standards, based on Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a framework for K-12 science education. New York state science teachers are providing feedback “to tweak and modify” the standards, he said, adding that the edits will be submitted to the Board of Regents for possible adoption this spring.

Once the new standards are adopted, the department will develop a new curriculum. McManus, science chair at R.C. Murphy Junior High School, said additional goals are to bring coding to the junior high schools and to continue to bring more technology and upper-level advanced courses to the classroom.

English as a New Language

Perhaps less well known is the district’s English as a New Language (ENL) program, previously known as English as a Second Language. This program provides specialized instruction to English language learners at Nassakeag Elementary School, Gelinas and Ward Melville.

The district differentiates instruction according to proficiency level. There are “stand-alone” classes that follow the research-based Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol model. This means students learn English and develop academic skills to prepare them for success in a non-ENL classroom. Integrated classrooms offer grade-level instruction in English taught either by a teacher certified in English and ENL or taught with a co-teacher.

As of December 2015, the district has a total of 55 ENL students. Forty-seven percent of the district’s ENL students speak Spanish as their “home” language, while 25 percent speak Chinese and 9 percent, Korean. Other “home” languages include Russian, Japanese, Gujarati, Lithuanian, Greek, Tagalog, French and Hebrew.

Board Policy

In other news, the board voted to allow the use of district credit cards.

District credit cards will be used mostly for maintenance projects, said Jeff Carlson, assistant superintendent for business services. He said the cards would be used for purchases from stores such as Lowes and Home Depot, so that workers wouldn’t have to travel for parts.

The use of district credit cards represents a significant policy change.

“At a different time in our history in Three Village, we specifically established a policy that forbade the use of credit cards because there had been abuses,” BOE head Bill Connors said.

“We’re at a very different time. Plus we have the checks and balances in place now that we didn’t have back at a different time in our history.”

Carlson’s office will review disbursements monthly. The district has an internal auditor and a claims auditor who will also review the records.

Tesla Science Center gets early Christmas gift

by Giselle Barkley - December 22, 2015

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Tesla-Science_2015_01_barkleyw — The Tesla Science Center laboratory site in Shoreham is blocked off while it’s under redevelopment. Photo by Giselle Barkley

Science doesn’t come cheap.

So it was a pleasant surprise for the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe when the New York State Regional Economic Development Councils announced the center will receive two grants totaling $700,000. While the center has yet to receive the grants, the NYSREDC’s 2015 awards notice for Long Island is proof the grants are forthcoming. The state agency did not reply to messages prior to publication.

The center is slated to receive $200,000 through the Market New York grant program, which tackles public relations and increasing tourism, among other responsibilities. The remaining $500,000 will go toward the center’s Wardenclyffe site. The center is currently redeveloping this property and plans to establish the Nikola Tesla Museum and Science Center. The site is the last remaining laboratory of Tesla, a prominent inventor in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

According to Tesla Science Center President Jane Alcorn, the center applied for the grants this past July. Alcorn added applying for the grants is a competitive process as there are many applicants for these grants.

“It’s very exciting to have funds to promote our project and to work on the redevelopment of Wardenclyffe,” Alcorn said in an email.

Initially, the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe was known as Friends of Science East Inc. While its name changed, the not-for-profit mission to develop Tesla’s only existing laboratory site into a science center and museum remained the same.

In 2009, when Brookhaven Town Superintendent of Highways Dan Losquadro was a Suffolk County legislator and former state Assemblyman Marc Alessi was still in office, the two announced plans to acquire the 16-acre property. Former town supervisor, Mark Lesko, and state Sen. Ken LaValle (R-Port Jefferson) were also part of this effort to acquire and preserve the property on behalf of the state and town, according to an article on the Tesla website.

Alessi emphasized its importance as the last Tesla lab in the world. He added that the site was culturally and historically significant as a result.

“We need to ensure that it is protected so that future generations can continue to enjoy this landmark,” Alessi said in the article.

Regardless of these officials’ plans, Friends of Science East purchased the property in 2013. The organization also hoped to preserve the site and make improvements.

Tesla built his facility in Shoreham in 1901-03. It was a small brick building no bigger than a schoolhouse. Yet behind the building was a 187-foot tower that Tesla intended to be a wireless power transmission station, which Tesla claimed would produce wireless electricity.

Now years later, the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe is looking forward to a brighter future for the site, and hopes to be able to do even more.

“We hope to apply for additional grants in the future [that] will assist in the continuation of progress toward the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe opening day,” Alcorn said.

How science deals with the unknown

by TBR Staff - December 16, 2015

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By Elof Carlson

Science explores the unknown. I love the history of science because it reveals how science has changed our way of seeing the universe. It rejects the supernatural as an explanation. This has led to the formation of the major fields of science — physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology.

Combinations of these fields are used to explore other fields like oceanography, meteorology or paleontology. Those sciences require data gathering, associations, experimentation and the invention of instruments to obtain data not detectable with our own senses.

Telescopes, microscopes, centrifuges, cyclotrons, cameras, chromatography, space probes, computers, electronic sensors and hundreds of other devices are used in different fields of science to give us information about other planets, stars and galaxies. These tools allow it to smash atoms, sequence DNA or work out how an organism shifts from a fertilized egg to a crying newborn.

There is another lesson I learned from studying the history of science. We don’t know as much as we think we do. Almost all of modern science from the origin of starlight to the cellular composition of our bodies was unknown before the existence of the right tools and level of understanding of how things worked.

A college science textbook is complete only for the generation of students reading it. It becomes outdated within five years and new texts are required. The new material comes from new tools introduced, new experiments revealing unexpected outcomes and chance findings from sifting through data.

In my own field I would identify as a major unknown the composition and functions of the cytoplasm of the cell. This is the material in which the cell nucleus and membrane-bound organelles are located (the mitochondria, Golgi, endoplasmic reticulum and lysosomes are examples). But the “glop” around them is a gel of sorts and has some cytoskeletal components. What is not known are the component molecules and the structural arrangement of the molecules in the cell cytoplasm that makes it unique to the species.

You cannot put a fertilized mouse cell nucleus in an enucleated egg of a fish or toad or rabbit. That inability may be a consequence of the products of nuclear genes stored in the cytoplasm that are essential for turning genes on or off after fertilization. Lots of experiments will have to be done to see what’s going on.

That is the challenge of science. Each new generation of students looks at things in fresh or original ways. The old way of describing and interpreting things gives way. Sometimes it is rapid, such as the field of molecular biology after the discovery of nucleic acids as the hereditary material.

Often it is slow. The discovery of new organs or tissues in the human body is relatively slow. About once every 20 years or so, I read an article that a new tendon or region of the brain, or some new function of a gland, has been discovered.

No new continents on Earth have been discovered since the polar regions were explored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our technology for photographing Earth makes such a finding virtually impossible. We can predict what we can infer from the known knowledge of our fields, but we cannot predict what is totally unknown to us.

Some seek refuge in such areas of the unknown because they hope to tuck their supernatural beliefs into reality, but it is not reality until that area is fleshed out with data, functions and a comprehension of how things work and can be tested for their predictions and claims.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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