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Abstract

Background

The leaves of the Coriandrum sativum plant, known as cilantro or coriander, are widely used in many cuisines around the world. However, far from being a benign culinary herb, cilantro can be polarizing-many people love it while others claim that it tastes or smells foul, often like soap or dirt. This soapy or pungent aroma is largely attributed to several aldehydes present in cilantro. Cilantro preference is suspected to have a genetic component, yet to date nothing is known about specific mechanisms.

Results

Here, we present the results of a genome-wide association study among 14,604 participants of European ancestry who reported whether cilantro tasted soapy, with replication in a distinct set of 11,851 participants who declared whether they liked cilantro. We find a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) significantly associated with soapy-taste detection that is confirmed in the cilantro preference group. This SNP, rs72921001 ( p = 6.4 × 10 −9, odds ratio 0.81 per A allele), lies within a cluster of olfactory receptor genes on chromosome 11. Among these olfactory receptor genes is OR6A2, which has a high binding specificity for several of the aldehydes that give cilantro its characteristic odor. We also estimate the heritability of cilantro soapy-taste detection in our cohort, showing that the heritability tagged by common SNPs is low, about 0.087.

Conclusions

These results confirm that there is a genetic component to cilantro taste perception and suggest that cilantro dislike may stem from genetic variants in olfactory receptors. We propose that one of a cluster of olfactory receptor genes, perhaps OR6A2, may be the olfactory receptor that contributes to the detection of a soapy smell from cilantro in European populations.

Background

The Coriandrum sativum plant has been cultivated since at least the second millennium BCE[ 1]. Its fruits (commonly called coriander seeds) and leaves (called cilantro or coriander) are important components of many cuisines. In particular, South Asian cuisines use both the leaves and the seeds prominently, and Latin American food often incorporates the leaves.

The desirability of cilantro has been debated for centuries. Pliny claimed that coriander had important medicinal properties: 'vis magna ad refrigerandos ardores viridi' ('while green, it is possessed of very cooling and refreshing properties')[ 2]. The Romans used the leaves and seeds in many dishes, including moretum (a herb, cheese, and garlic spread similar to today's pesto)[ 3]; the Mandarin word for cilantro, ( xiāngcài), literally means 'fragrant greens.' However, the leaves in particular have long inspired passionate hatred as well, e.g., John Gerard called it a 'very stinking herbe' with leaves of 'venemous quality'[ 4, 5].

It is not known why cilantro is so differentially perceived. The proportion of people who dislike cilantro varies widely by ancestry[ 6]; however, it is not clear to what extent this may be explained by differences in environmental factors, such as frequency of exposure. In a twin study, the heritability of cilantro dislike has been estimated as 0.38 (confidence interval (CI) 0.22-0.52) for odor and 0.52 (CI 0.38-0.63) for flavor[ 7].

The smell of cilantro is often described as pungent or soapy. It is suspected, although not proven, that cilantro dislike is largely driven by the odor rather than the taste. The key aroma components in cilantro consist of various aldehydes, in particular (E)-2-alkenals and n-aldehydes[ 8, 9]. The unsaturated aldehydes (mostly decanal and dodecanal) in cilantro are described as fruity, green, and pungent; the (E)-2-alkenals (mostly (E)-2-decenal and (E)-2-dodecenal) as soapy, fatty, 'like cilantro,' or pungent[ 8, 9].

Several families of genes are important for taste and smell. The TAS1R and TAS2R families form sweet, umami, and bitter taste receptors[ 10, 11]. The olfactory receptor family contains about 400 functional genes in the human genome. Each receptor binds to a set of chemicals, enabling one to recognize specific odorants or tastants. Genetic differences in many of these receptors are known to play a role in how we perceive tastes and smells[ 12- 15].

Results and discussion

Here, we report on a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of cilantro soapy-taste detection. Briefly, the GWAS was conducted in 14,604 unrelated participants of primarily European ancestry who responded to an online questionnaire asking whether they thought cilantro tasted like soap (Table 1). Two single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were genome-wide significant ( p < 5 × 10 −8) in this population. One SNP, in a cluster of olfactory receptors, replicated in a non-overlapping group of 11,851 participants (again, unrelated and of primarily European ancestry) who reported whether they liked or disliked cilantro (see the 'Methods' section for full details). Figure 1 shows p values across the whole genome; Figure 2 shows p values near the most significant associations. A quantile-quantile plot (Additional file 1) shows little ( λ = 1.007) global inflation of p values. Index SNPs with p values under 10 −6 are shown in Table 2 (along with replication p values); all SNPs with p values under 10 −4 are shown in Additional file 2.

Table 1 Summary of the cohorts used in the analysis

Manhattan plot of association with cilantro soapy-taste. Negative log ₁₀ p values across all SNPs tested. SNPs shown in red are genome-wide significant ( p < 5 × 10 −8). Regions are named with the postulated candidate gene.

Associations with cilantro soapy-taste near rs72921001 (A) and rs78503206 (B). Negative log ₁₀ p values for association ( left axis) with recombination rate ( right axis). Colors depict the squared correlation ( r ²) of each SNP with the most associated SNP ((A) rs72921001 and (B) rs78503206, shown in purple). Gray indicates SNPs for which r ² information was missing.

Table 2 Index SNPs for regions with p < 10−6 for cilantro soapy-taste

We found one significant association for cilantro soapy-taste that was confirmed in the cilantro preference population. The SNP rs72921001 ( p discovery = 6.4 × 10 −9, odds ratio (OR) = 0.81, p repl = 0.0057) lies on chromosome 11 within a cluster of eight olfactory receptor genes: OR2AG2, OR2AG1, OR6A2, OR10A5, OR10A2, OR10A4, OR2D2, and OR2D3. The C allele is associated with both detecting a soapy smell and disliking cilantro. Of the olfactory receptors encoded in this region, OR6A2 appears to be the most promising candidate underlying the association with cilantro odor detection. It is one of the most studied olfactory receptors (often as the homologous olfactory receptor I7 in rats)[ 16- 19]. A wide range of odorants have been found to activate this receptor, all of which are aldehydes[ 17]. Among the unsaturated aldehydes, octanal binds best to rat I7[ 18]; however, compounds ranging from heptanal to undecanal also bind to this receptor[ 17]. Several singly unsaturated n-aldehydes also show high affinity, including (E)-2-decenal[ 17]. These aldehydes include several of those playing a key role in cilantro aroma, such as decanal and (E)-2-decenal. Thus, this gene is particularly interesting as a candidate for cilantro odor detection. The index SNP is also in high LD ( r ² > 0.9) with three non-synonymous SNPs in OR10A2, namely rs3930075, rs10839631, and rs7926083 (H43R, H207R, and K258T, respectively). Thus, OR10A2 may also be a reasonable candidate gene in this region.

The second significant association, with rs78503206 ( p discovery = 3.2 × 10 −8, OR = 0.68, p repl = 0.49), lies in an intron of the gene SNX9 (sorting nexin-9; see Figure 2). SNX9 encodes a multifunctional protein involved in intracellular trafficking and membrane remodeling during endocytosis[ 20]. It has no known function in taste or smell and did not show association with liking cilantro in the replication population. This SNP is located about 80 kb upstream of SYNJ2, an inositol 5-phosphatase thought to be involved in membrane trafficking and signal transduction pathways. In candidate gene studies, SYNJ2 SNPs were found to be associated with agreeableness and symptoms of depression in the elderly[ 21] and with cognitive abilities[ 22]. In mice, a Synj2 mutation causes recessive non-syndromic hearing loss[ 23]. Given recent evidence that the perception of flavor may be influenced by multiple sensory inputs ( cf.[ 24, 25]), we cannot exclude the SYNJ2-linked SNP as conveying a biologically meaningful association. While this SNP may be a false positive, it could also be the case that this SNP is associated only with detecting a soapy smell in cilantro (and not in liking cilantro). In addition, we were unable to replicate the SNPs that were found to be nominally significant for cilantro dislike in[ 26] (we saw p values in the GWAS of 0.53, 0.41, and 0.53 for rs11988795, rs1524600, and rs10772397, respectively).

We have used two slightly different phenotypes in our discovery and replication, soapy-taste detection and cilantro preference, which are correlated ( r ² ≈ 0.33). Detection of a soapy taste is reportedly one of the major reasons people seem to dislike cilantro. Despite having over 10,000 more people reporting cilantro preference, we have used soapy-taste detection as our primary phenotype because it is probably influenced by fewer environmental factors. Indeed, we see a stronger effect of rs72921001 on soapy-taste detection than on cilantro preference (OR of 0.81 versus 0.92). A GWAS on the replication set gave no genome-wide significant associations. SNPs with p values under 10 −6 for this analysis are shown in Additional file 3.

We find significant differences by sex and ancestral population in soapy-taste detection (Tables 1 and 3). Women are more likely to detect a soapy taste (and to dislike cilantro) (OR for soapy-taste detection 1.36, p = 2.5 × 10 −10; Table 1). African-Americans, Latinos, East Asians, and South Asians are all significantly less likely to detect a soapy taste compared to Europeans (ORs of 0.676, 0.637, 0.615, and 0.270, respectively, p < 0.003; see Table 3). Ashkenazi Jews and South Europeans did not show significant differences from Northern Europeans ( p = 0.84 and 0.65, respectively). We tested the association between rs72921001 and soapy-taste detection within each population. Aside from the European populations, there was only a significant association in the small South Asian group ( p = 0.0078, OR = 0.18, 95% CI 0.053-0.64). This association is in the same direction as the association in Europeans. Note that the GWAS population in Table 1 is a subset of the 'Europe all' population in Table 3, filtered to remove relatives (see the 'Methods' section). While the differences in allele frequency across populations do not explain the differences in soapy-taste detection, our analysis does suggest that this SNP may affect soapy-taste detection in non-European populations as well.

Table 3 Cilantro soapy-taste by ancestry

We calculated the heritability for cilantro soapy-taste detection using the GCTA software[ 27]. We found a low heritability of 0.087 ( p = 0.08, 95% CI −0.037 to 0.211). This estimate is a lower bound for the true heritability, as our estimate only takes into account heritability due to SNPs genotyped in this study. While this calculation does not exclude a heritability of zero, the existence of the association with rs72921001 does give a non-zero lower bound on the heritability. Despite the strength of the association of the SNP near OR6A2, it explains only about 0.5% of the variance in perceiving that cilantro tastes soapy. Our heritability estimate is lower than those given in a recent twin study (0.38 for odor and 0.52 for flavor)[ 7]. This could be due to the differences in phenotypes measured between the two studies, or it could be possible that other genetic factors not detected here could influence cilantro preference. For example, there could be rare variants not typed in this study (possibly in partial linkage disequilibrium with rs72921001) that have a larger effect on cilantro preference. Such rare variants could cause the true heritability of this phenotype to be larger than we have calculated. For example, the heritability of height is estimated to be about 0.8; however, the heritability tagged by common SNPs is calculated at about 0.45[ 26]. We note that there can be epigenetic modifiers of taste as well, for example, food preferences can even be transmitted to the fetus in utero through the mother's diet[ 24].

Survey responses, while very efficient for collecting large amounts of data, can only approximately measure the detection and/or perception of the chemicals in cilantro. This has implications for the interpretation of our results. For example, it is possible that the SNP rs72921001 could have a large effect on detection of a specific chemical in cilantro, but that the resulting effect on liking cilantro is much weaker, being modulated by environmental factors. For example, many people might initially dislike cilantro yet later come to appreciate it. This environmental component could also be the reason that our heritability estimates are low. It would thus be interesting to study the genetics of cilantro taste/odor perception in a group without prior exposure to cilantro to reduce the environmental effect, using more direct measures of cilantro perception (i.e., having the subjects actually taste and smell cilantro).

Conclusions

Through a GWAS, we have shown that a SNP, rs72921001, near a cluster of olfactory receptors is significantly associated with detecting a soapy taste to cilantro. One of the genes near this SNP encodes an olfactory receptor, OR6A2, that detects the aldehydes that may make cilantro smell soapy and thus is a compelling candidate gene for the detection of the cilantro odors that give cilantro its divisive flavor.

Availability of supporting data

We have shared full summary statistics for all SNPs with p values under 10 −4 in Additional file 2. Due to privacy concerns, under our IRB protocol, we are unable to openly share statistics for all SNPs analyzed in the study.

Methods

Subjects

Participants were drawn from the customer base of 23andMe, Inc., a consumer genetics company. This cohort has been described in detail previously[ 15, 28]. Participants provided informed consent and participated in the research online, under a protocol approved by an external AAHRPP-accredited IRB, Ethical and Independent Review Services (E&I Review).

Phenotype data collection

On the 23andMe website, participants contribute information through a combination of research surveys (longer, more formal questionnaires) and research 'snippets' (multiple-choice questions appearing as part of various 23andMe webpages). In this study, participants were asked two questions about cilantro via research snippets:

Among all 23andMe customers, 18,495 answered the first question (as either yes or no), 29,704 the second, and 15,751 both. Participants also reported their age. Sex and ancestry were determined on the basis of their genetic data. In both the GWAS set and the replication set, all participants were of European ancestry. In either group, no two shared more than 700 cM of DNA identical by descent (IBD, approximately the lower end of sharing between a pair of first cousins). In total, we were left with a set of 14,604 participants who answered the 'soapy' question for GWAS and 11,851 who answered only the taste preference question for a replication set. IBD was calculated using the methods described in[ 29]; the principal component analysis was performed as in[ 15]. To determine European and African-American ancestry, we used local-ancestry methods (as in[ 30]). Europeans had over 97% of their genome painted European, and African-Americans had at least 10% African and at most 10% Asian ancestry. Other groups were built using ancestry-informative markers trained on a subset of 23andMe customers who reported having four grandparents of a given ancestry.

Genotyping

Subjects were genotyped on one or more of three chips, two based on the Illumina HumanHap550+ BeadChip and the third based on the Illumina OmniExpress+ BeadChip (San Diego, CA, USA). The platforms contained 586,916, 584,942, and 1,008,948 SNPs. Totals of 291, 5,394, and 10,184 participants (for the GWAS population) were genotyped on the platforms, respectively. A total of 1,265 individuals were genotyped on multiple chips. For all participants, we imputed genotypes in batches of 8,000-10,000 using Beagle and Minimac[ 31- 33] against the August 2010 release of the 1000 Genomes reference haplotypes[ 34], as described in[ 35].

A total of 11,914,767 SNPs were imputed. Of these, 7,356,559 met our thresholds of 0.001 minor allele frequency, average r ² across batches of at least 0.5, and minimum r ² across batches of at least 0.3. The minimum r ² requirement was added to filter out SNPs that imputed less well in the batches consisting of the less dense platform. Positions and alleles are given relative to the positive strand of build 37 of the human genome.

Statistical analysis

For the GWAS, p values were calculated using a likelihood ratio test for the genotype term in the logistic regression model:

Y∼G+age+sex+ pc 1 + pc 2 + pc 3 + pc 4 + pc 5 ,

where Y is the vector of phenotypes (coded as 1 = thinks cilantro tastes soapy or 0 = does not), G is the vector of genotypes (coded as a dosage 0-2 for the estimated number of minor alleles present), and pc 1 ,..., pc 5 are the projections onto the principal components. The same model was used for the replication, with the phenotype coded as 1 = dislikes cilantro or 0 = likes. We used the standard cutoff for genome-wide significance of 5 × 10 −8 to correct for the multiple tests in the GWAS. ORs and p values for the differences in soapy-taste detection between sexes and population were calculated directly, without any covariates. Table 3 uses a proxy SNP for rs72921001, as our imputation was done only in Europeans, so we did not have data for rs72921001 in other populations.

For the heritability calculations, we used the GCTA software[ 27]. The calculations were done on genotyped SNPs only within a group of 13,628 unrelated Europeans. Unrelated filtering here was done using GCTA to remove individuals with estimated relatedness larger than 0.025. Thus, this group is slightly different from the GWAS set, as the GWAS set's relatedness filtering was done using IBD. We assumed a prevalence for soapy-taste detection of 0.13 for the transformation of heritability from the 0-1 scale to the liability scale. Otherwise, default options were used. We calculated heritability for autosomal and X chromosome SNPs separately; the estimates were 0.0869 (standard error 0.0634, p value 0.0805) for autosomal SNPs and 2 × 10 −6(standard error 0.010753, p value 0.5) for the X chromosome.

Abbreviations

AAHRPP:

Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs

BCE:

before common era

CI:

confidence interval

GWAS:

genome-wide association study

IRB:

institutional review board

OR:

odds ratio

odds ratio:

:

SNP:

single-nucleotide polymorphism

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank the customers of 23andMe for participating in this research and all the employees of 23andMe for contributing to the research.

Author information

Affiliations

23andMe, Inc., Mountain View, CA, 94043, USA

Nicholas Eriksson, Shirley Wu, Chuong B Do, Amy K Kiefer, Joyce Y Tung, Joanna L Mountain, David A Hinds & Uta Francke

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicholas Eriksson.

Additional information

Competing interests

The authors of this paper are 23andMe employees and own stock options in the company.

Authors' contributions

NE, SW, CBD, AKK, JLM, DAH, UF, and JYT conceived and designed the experiments. NE analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript with contributions from all other authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Eriksson, N., Wu, S., Do, C.B. et al. A genetic variant near olfactory receptor genes influences cilantro preference. Flavour 1, 22 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-1-22
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Keywords

Cilantro

Coriander

Olfactory receptor

Genetics of taste and smell

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A genetic variant near olfactory receptor genes influences cilantro preference

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The leaves of the Coriandrum sativum plant, known as cilantro or coriander, are widely used in many cuisines around the world. However, far from being a benign culinary herb, cilantro can be polarizing-many people love it while others claim that it tastes or smells foul, often like soap or dirt.

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Don't Flood the Fidgits Game . DESIGN SQUAD GLOBAL | PBS KIDS

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Build a city for the Fidgits that will stay safe and dry during a flood. Experiment with real-world building materials in this absorbing simulation game.

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Voyager: Grand Tour is an interesting game for teaching players about physics whilst letting them explore the cosmos. This physics puzzle game enables players to experience the wonders of our solar system in detailed 3D graphics.

Players are taught about the basics of the Voyager probe as well as the basics of some rocket science and other basic physics principles. You will need to plan slingshots around planets, avoid hazards and generally explore space.

After each successful mission players are rewarded with a lovely little flyby from Voyager's POV.

It is free to play but does come with in-game purchases - after all the game developers do need to eat.

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Tami's Tower, developed by the Smithsonian Science Education Center, is a great little game for children of all ages. The idea of the game is to help Tami (a golden lion tamarin) reach some food by building towers.

Sounds simple enough, but you will need to defy not only gravity but other mischievous animals attempting to thwart Tami's efforts.

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As you might have guessed, this educational game has been built to help teach your student how to design a solution to a problem using basic engineering design principles.

3. Phys1 is a great little Physics puzzle game

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It does have a mildly steep learning curve, but being challenged is a great way to learn and develop your knowledge of something. Each challenge is randomized so you shouldn't have to solve the same problem twice, in fact, your challenge might be the only one any player will ever have to solve.

The game comes with some other cool features like a time tool to measure how long it takes for objects to travel between two points. The interface is drag and drop and should be self-explanatory for any user.

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The game is set on various different worlds with each one focussing on a specific aspect of Physics. There are currently four different worlds: -

- Froth - Teaches you about friction, or lack thereof, and net forces on an ice planet;

- Bespent - Teaches players about gravity and force and includes jetpacks!

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- Kamiyes - This planet teaches players about angles and other interesting physics principles.

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Experience challenging worlds and solve puzzles in order to unlock abilities and space gear.

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Super Planet Crash does everything it says on the tin. You can think of this game a bit like a physicists' version of angry birds, only on a planetary scale.

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The more massive objects you can add the more points you get, but be careful it could all go horribly wrong.

The game is free to play and is online only.

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Kerbal Space Program might just be the best game around for anyone interested in space and space exploration. This physics-based game will teach you all you really need to know about rockets and spaceship design.

On the surface, it seems oversimplified at first, but it will test your knowledge of rocketry and physics to design a ship that can safely overcome a planet's gravity.

Each part performs a specific function. So get ready for some rocket science and exciting projects that involve mining resources from outer space and capturing asteroids.

It comes in three modes Sandbox, Science Mode and Career mode. Each one has its own mission goals but all are united in their need to manage the space project from crew management to funding and maintaining PR.

7. Universe Sandbox might be the perfect space-lovers game

Universe Sandbox is a fantastic planetary-scale gravity game that will really help you visualize some basic principles of astronomy. This interactive space game combines elements of climate, collision, and real-time gravity to help players understand the fragility of Earth and the beauty of the universe.

This physics-based game has been designed to be as scientifically accurate as possible. You can play around with settings like CO2 levels in a planet's atmosphere to see what happens or boost a star's mass to see how it evolves over time.

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These 7 Computer Games Will Teach Anyone About Physics

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If you love physics and computer games, then you have come to the right place. Here we have gathered 7 physics-based computer games that will help you learn about some basics of physics and have fun at the same time. RELATED: 9 EVERYDAY SKILLS VIDEO GAMES CAN IMPROVE This list is far from exhaustive and is no particular order.

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Hi, Alicia here. What about using video games to teach about STEAM?

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If you are looking for some fun games that will teach you about Biology you have come to the right place. This short list of selected titles will help you grasp some basic biology concepts in no time at all.

The following list is far from exhaustive and is in no particular order.
RELATED: 9 EVERYDAY SKILLS VIDEO GAMES CAN IMPROVE
What skills can video games improve?

Video games have been shown to provide some very interesting real-life skills. But when you combine games with real-science, you can also expand your knowledge of science whilst having fun.

What skills do you learn from playing video games?

There are plenty of studies that have shown that playing video games either develop or strengthen real-life skills. These range from things like multi-tasking to other less obvious skills like reading and writing.

Source: Gamesingear/Wikimedia Commons

Why video games can be good for you?

Video games are good for you in a few areas. They can help develop various real-life skills and also provide a means of relaxation and feelings of achievement.

But, they should not be used to substitute real-life achievements and should not be used as your sole means of relaxation.

Are video games good for learning?

Yes, they are. Other than real-life skills they can help develop, educational video games can actually be used to learn things from science to a new language.
RELATED: 7 VIDEO GAMES TO HELP MAKE TEACHING MATH FUN
However, they should only be used a learning aid rather than as your sole tool for learning something new.

1. Immune Defense does everything it says on the tin

Immune Defense is another game that will teach you biology whilst having fun at the same time. It is a 2D real-time strategy game, where the player is tasked with taking control of the immune system at the molecular level.

Within the game, players learn practical knowledge of molecular cell biology by using cells, signals, and receptors as tools.

It has been developed by Molecular Jig Games and is available on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and online.

2. Watch this space or Progenitor X

Source: Gear Learning

Progenitor X is a game that deals with various aspects of biology from body systems to regenerative medicine. The game is currently under development but should be available very soon.

The game takes a leap into the future and explores potential advances in Regenerative Medicine and Medical Device Engineering that will surely be of interest to the broad public.

Unlike other games on the list, this game is narrative-driven, and turn-based but does involve puzzle-solving games that help teach some aspects of biology. The game has been developed to be attractive to a broad audience from middle school students to teachers and the general public.

3. Tyto Online is a great multiplayer game

Tyto Online is a great quest-based, online role-playing biology game. The player takes on the role of an evacuee from a devasted Earth that must forge a new life on a distant planet.

Your character has settled on a new planet called Ovo to study at an academy called the Tyto Academy.

Throughout the game, you will need to complete quests that will teach you about some real scientific concepts as you establish a new life.

The game is aimed at middle school children and has been developed by Immersed Games. It is a paid-for game and it is only available online.

4. Guardians of the Genome VR is great fun

Guardians of the Genome VR is a fun game that will also teach you some fundamentals of biology. The game has been developed by AXS Studio and is available on Oculus and Vive.

The game is also provided under license for free to select educators and groups in exchange for feedback and testimonials.

Within the game, players learn about DNA in a fun and educational fashion. The player is tasked with repairing base-pairing errors along a strand of DNA in a virtual nucleus.

You will need to differentiate between DNA bases, play around with base pairing and identify enzymes and processes used for the repair of DNA sequences.

5. Cell to Singularity is more entertainment than educational

Cell to Singularity is a single player game that sees you evolve from a single cell to a cutting-edge technological civilization. The game is primarily designed to be entertaining, rather than an educational game per se, but will raise awareness about general scientific concepts.

You'll track your species from their origin 4.5 Billion Years Ago. You will need to gain entropy to unlock each new chapter and take the next step in your evolution.

According to the developer, the game takes you through "The epic story of evolution, technology, and humanity is yours to tap. It's a breathtaking evolution game! Tap into the extraordinary tale of evolution in this cosmic clicker game."

The game is available online, on Android, on iOS and Mac, and Windows.

6. Evolve to survive in Niche - a genetics survival game

Source: Niche-game

Niche - a genetics survival game is another fun game that will teach you about biology. Within the game, you will need to constantly evolve your species to keep them alive in different environments.

Find different strategies of survival and breed your animals smartly, all based on real genetics. Keep your eyes wide open and you will learn a lot about Biology while playing this game.

The game has been developed by Philomena Schwab and her team. It can be purchased on Steam, GOG or Humble. It is primarily aimed at middle to high school students but is enjoyable for anyone interested in evolution and ecology.

7. Bacteria Combat (Lite) is a card-based biology game

Source: Game Doctor UK/Google Play

Bacteria Combat (Lite) is a thrilling card battle game that pits pathogens against each other and antibiotics. It also has period tests to track your learning development as you progress.

The game lets you battle friends and family in a fun and educational way. The lite version includes:

- 8 Infectious Bacteria cards;

- 10 Health-boosting bacteria cards, and;

- Bonus antibiotic and immune cell cards.

This amazing science game was designed by real scientists working with real bacteria. All of the featured 'bugs' can be found in the human body too.

It is currently only available on iOS and Android.

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These 7 Games Can Teach You About Biology

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If you are looking for some fun games that will teach you about Biology you have come to the right place. This short list of selected titles will help you grasp some basic biology concepts in no time at all. The following list is far from exhaustive and is in no particular order.

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Physicist breaks down the science behind 10 iconic Marvel scenes

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Physicist breaks down the science behind 10 iconic Marvel scenes

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Alicia here. I like the idea of using super hero movies to separate between fact or fiction science. People will love this!

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Turns out, there's a scientific basis for a lot of the movie magic seen in the Marvel universe, from "Iron Man" to "Avengers: Endgame."

Dr. James Kakalios is a physicist and science consultant for films like "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Watchmen."

Dr. Kakalios examines the science behind 10 notable Marvel scenes and rates them based on how realistic they are.

Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.

To celebrate the release of "Avengers: Endgame," we had physicist (and lifelong comic book fan) Jim Kakalios take a closer look at the physics of the Marvel universe. Here he reacts to 10 memorable scenes from Marvel movies and rates them based on their accuracy. Find out what exactly quantum mechanics, time dilation, Einstein's theory of special relativity, and spider silk tell us about the superheroes of the Marvel franchise.

Which weapon would you rather have in a fight: Thor's Mjolnir hammer or Captain America's shield? Hint: The answer has to do with the conservation of energy - and the sonoluminescence of vibranium. Dr. Kakalios breaks down the physics behind this and many other Marvel phenomena, including Shuri's holographic car in "Black Panther;" Peter Parker's spider-webbing train save in "Spider-Man 2;" the multiverse theory of "Doctor Strange;" the role of Pym particles and the Higgs boson in "Ant-Man;" artificial gravity in "Guardians of the Galaxy;" and Tony Stark's cybernetic helmet and gold-titanium exoskeleton in "Iron Man." He sheds light on why Carol Danvers doesn't age from "Captain Marvel" to "Avengers: Endgame;" why the Space Stone is so powerful when yielded by Thanos in "Avengers: Infinity War;" and what's with all the talk of quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, and "quantum mumbo-jumbo" in "Ant-Man and the Wasp."

Kakalios is the author of three books - "The Physics of Superheroes," "The Physics of Everyday Things," and "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics." He was a science consultant for Sony's 2012 film "The Amazing Spider-Man." Before that, he won an Emmy for his work as a science consultant for the Warner Bros. superhero film "Watchmen." A physics professor at the University of Minnesota, Kakalios teaches a popular class that uses comic books to illustrate the principles of physics.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Shuri: You've been taking bullets, charging it up with kinetic energy.

Gamora: You turned off the artificial gravity everywhere but in here.

Bill Foster: It's quantum entanglement between the quantum states of Posner molecules in your brains.

Scott Lang: Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?

Jim Kakalios: I gotta say, we do put the word "quantum" in front of everything. Hi, I'm Jim Kakalios. I'm a physics professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of "The Physics of Superheroes."

Shuri: Woo, let's go!

"Guardians of the Galaxy" (2014)

Jim: That's a scene from the first "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, and as they're making their jailbreak, Rocket turns off the artificial gravity in the space station so that everyone else floats and is unable to get their bearings, and they make their escape.

Rocket Raccoon: I told you I had a plan.

Jim: Say you're in an elevator, and in the worst-case scenario, the cables break, and you start free falling. You're no longer feeling the effects of gravity. It's as if you're weightless. You could start doing magic tricks to the other people in the elevator, say, "Hey, look at this pipe" and let go of the pipe, and it would just float there because it's falling, you're falling all at the same rate.

But if you're already standing on the floor, you'd stay standing on the floor. However, anyone who was walking at the moment they were walking, they were pressing their feet down on the ground and then lifting their feet up. And at that moment, if the gravity was turned off, they would have launched themselves up, and without gravity to slow their ascent, they would keep rising in that way.

So the people who were stationary and started to float up, not so much. Anyone who was walking would indeed start to float up. I'm not quite sure how the artificial gravity is being generated in the space station, and the whole notion of artificial gravity that can be turned on and off at will in generalized locations in the space station, that's a bit too far. Talking raccoons, that part's OK.

Rocket Raccoon: Huh?

"Guardians of the Galaxy" rating: 3/10

"Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)

Loki: My undying fidelity.

Jim: So Thanos has just acquired the Space Infinity Stone, and as soon as he has this, he's able to stop Loki's dagger thrust in midair.

Thanos: Undying, you should choose your words more carefully.

Jim: Well, there's actually some real physics behind this. Back in the beginning of the 20th century, Emmy Noether was able to show a deep, intimate connection between space and momentum. Controlling the Space Stone not only allows you to teleport but apparently also gives you command over momentum. Loki's dagger thrust is arrested, and all of the momentum is stopped.

If you look closely around Loki's arm, you see a little blue glow that's coming from the Space Stone that's arresting the momentum of his thrust. It's worth noting that in "Captain America: The First Avenger," the Space Stone, which was embedded in the Tesseract at the time, is the only Infinity Stone that was actually weaponized by Hydra and used to create force beams, thereby showing that there is indeed a connection between space and momentum.

"Avengers: Infinity War" rating: 8/10

"Iron Man" (2008)

Jim: The first "Iron Man" movie, 2008, the one that started the whole Marvel universe. I love it, Tony Stark, the superhero as engineer and the engineer as superhero. When he built his first suit in a cave out of scraps, it was made of iron and was very heavy, about 150 pounds just counting the iron, not counting the weaponry.

Then he developed the Mark II, which was titanium. Titanium is lighter than iron and strong. And then in order to combat the icing problem, he used a gold-titanium alloy.

Tony Stark: Let's connect to the cisco, have it reconfigure the shell metals, use the gold-titanium alloy from the Seraphim Tactical Satellite. That should ensure fuselage integrity while maintaining power-to-weight ratio, got it?

Jim: Now there are gold-titanium alloys. They tend to be very brittle. They're used in dental applications more than anything else. So unless he's fighting crime boss Gingivitis, I don't think that he really would want to use a gold-titanium alloy.

So much of the technology except for the arc reactor are things that we actually have right now. We have exoskeletons. We have plating. We even have jet boots. The one thing we don't have is a power supply.

He has an arc reactor that's about the size of a hockey puck and puts out the power of three nuclear power plants. If we knew how to do that, we wouldn't need superheroes because otherwise you'd have an Iron Man suit, but you'd have to drag a long extension cord behind you in order to have enough power for the suit.

One thing that's realistic in this is that we never see him, when he engages his boots or shoots a repulsor ray, we never see him press a button or give a voice command. He thinks it, and it happens. That's because he has a cybernetic helmet that picks up his thought waves and sends the information to the suit. This is real.

Scientists and engineers at the University of Minnesota and at other universities and institutions around the world are developing cybernetic helmets that pick up the very weak radio waves that are generated when we think, amplifying them, sending them via Bluetooth to another device.

They're trying to develop prosthetics and treat paralysis, but if you had asked me as kid when I was reading "Iron Man" comics which part in the 21st century would be the closest to reality, the last thing I would have said was the cybernetic helmet.

"Iron Man" rating: 9/10

"Ant-Man" (2015)

Ant-Man: Why don't you pick on someone your own size?

Jim: Ant-Man shrinking down to the size of an ant, even much smaller. When Ant-Man shrinks, he's also able to control his mass, and he shrinks at constant density, so he's very lightweight. When he rides on an ant, for example, he doesn't smush the ant, but when he wants to punch Yellowjacket, he's able to increase his mass so there's more force, more momentum behind his punch. How does he do it? In the comics and in the movie, via Pym particles that were discovered by Hank Pym. If they had just given a little bit of lip service to how one changes the size of atoms. They say that they're changing the spacing between the atoms or the space in the atoms, no. The size of an atom is determined via quantum mechanics to be the ratio of several fundamental constants: charge of an electron, mass of an electron, Planck's constant. If, via the Pym field, to adjust, say, the magnitude of Planck's constant, make it 10 times smaller, then the atoms would become 100 times smaller, and the size of an object would shrink uniformly. If you make it 10 times bigger, the size of the atoms would be 100 times bigger, you could become Giant-Man.

"Ant-Man" rating: 4/10

"Spider-Man 2" (2004)

Person 1: It's Spider-Man.

Person 2: Oh, my God, this is it.

Spider-Man: Tell everyone to hang on.

Jim: Oh yeah, I see that look in class a lot. So here, Peter Parker, Spider-Man, needs to stop a runaway elevated train. He shoots out multiple web lines, they stretch a great deal, but they don't break, and he's able to stop the train just in the nick of time.

How strong does the webbing have to be for this to work? We can look up the mass of a train. We can estimate its initial velocity by seeing how long it takes to pass city blocks. We can look at the distance over which the webbing stretches. We can estimate its diameter. We can count the number of web lines, and we come up with a tensile strength for the webbing that has to be about 1,000 megapascals, which is equivalent to 145,000 pounds per square inch.

But real spider silk has a tensile strength of 1,200 megapascals. If Spider-Man's webbing is anywhere as strong as real spider silk, then this indeed could happen. He's shooting it out of his wrists, which is not what a real spider would do, but we'll just leave that aside.

"Spider-Man 2" rating: 8/10

"Doctor Strange" (2016)

Jim: "Doctor Strange" is a deviation from all the other Marvel movies, insofar as everything else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe up till then had some sort of hand-wavy, super-science-type explanation. But here they're just going for full-on magic.

Stephen: This doesn't make any sense.

Ancient One: Not everything does, not everything has to.

Jim: The notion that there are multiple dimensions is an idea that has been taken seriously by at least some physicists.

Ancient One: What if I told you the reality you know is one of many?

Jim: Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the properties of atoms and how they interact with light. One aspect of quantum mechanics that many scientists find troubling is that it only deals with probabilities. So you can calculate the probability of a measurement, giving the electron at a certain location in space and time, but not exactly where that electron will be.

One alternative explanation is that there are actually an infinite number of parallel universes. You find the electron in one location, but in other universes, it might be at some different location. So presumably, maybe Doctor Strange is visiting some of these parallel Earths that have undergone significant quantum deviations from our own.

As far as the science there, even if they're in a parallel Earth, the fact that their antagonists are able to affect the orientation of gravity locally, I'm sorry, that's just magic. But he's the master of the mystic arts, so I'll give him a break.

"Doctor Strange" rating: 3/10

"The Avengers" (2012)

Captain America: Now, I don't know what you plan on doing here.

Thor: I've come here to put an end to Loki's schemes.

Captain America: Then prove it. Put that hammer down.

Iron Man: Uh, yeah, no. Bad call. He loves his...

Thor: You want me to put the hammer down?

Jim: Thor puts the hammer down on Captain America's shield. In the movies, the shield is made of pure vibranium, where in the comics it's an alloy of steel and vibranium. That's actually more realistic.

You want steel to provide strength and rigidity so that when Captain America throws his mighty shield, it will ricochet, but you want the vibranium because it absorbs all vibrations, making it the perfect shock absorber, as it's absorbing Thor's hammer blow in this scene.

Captain America: It's completely vibration-absorbent.

Jim: Energy can't be destroyed. It can only be converted to another form. The energy of the hammer strike is converted into sound waves in the hammer, and if the vibranium absorbs it, what form does it take?

What we see from the clip: It's converted into blue light, ultraviolet light, this enormous flash of light that's given off. It's showing that the vibranium is actually a perfect sonoluminescent material.

"Sono" meaning sound, "luminescent" meaning light. You send sound waves in, and you get light out. This is a real phenomena in physics. The only real difference is that vibranium unfortunately doesn't exist.

"The Avengers" rating: 7/10

"Ant-Man and the Wasp" (2018)

Bill Foster: You're linked to Janet. It's quantum entanglement between the quantum states of Posner molecules in your brains.

Scott Lang: Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?

Jim: This is a classic example of quantum mumbo-jumbo. There are some real words and real concepts that were used there, but they're used in a context, or in connection with other phrases, that I just cannot follow.

But quantum entanglement is a real thing. If you bring two objects so close together that their quantum-wave functions overlap, then they can only be described as a single two-object quantum-wave function. And if I bring them very far apart, and I don't disentangle them, then they remain connected.

So something that's done on this end shows up in the other end even though they could be on opposite ends of the Earth or opposite ends of the solar system, they would still be communicating to each other because they're still described by one single wave function.

Scientists are using this property of entangled quantum states to try and see if they can develop superior computers.

They're trying to make the context for a character in the movie "Ghost" who is quantum-mechanically tunneling through solid objects, a real phenomena, but the way they're doing it just doesn't really make sense. A little bit too much quantum woo. So I'd say less woo, more quantum.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp" rating: 2/10

"Black Panther" (2018)

Shuri: I'm not going to make it.

Black Panther: Keep going.

Jim: So here we see the Black Panther and his sister, scientific genius Shuri. She's using a holographically generated car in Wakanda to steer a car the Black Panther has commandeered in South Korea.

Shuri: Which side of the road is it?

Black Panther: For Bast's sake, just drive.

Shuri: OK, calm down.

Jim: What makes Wakanda special is that its near-inexhaustible supply of Vibranium, an extraterrestrial mineral that has the ability to absorb all vibrations. The hard-light hologram always used to bother me. Holograms are interference patterns created with light. The hologram itself is not an actual object, it is an image.

But I thought about it some more. Using sound, you can create regions that have a pressure and exert a force as if they were a solid object. And presumably, if you overlaid that with a optical hologram, you would have something that feels solid but is generated via light.

Presumably using their command of vibranium, Shuri is able to do this and overlay it with an optical hologram, which has no solidity but still produces a visual image for her to interact with. I don't know if I could create a interference sound pattern overlaid with a hologram to create a hard-light object, but "Shuri" someone can.

Shuri: You show-off.

"Black Panther" rating: 5/10

"Avengers: Endgame" (2019)

Jim: Surprising absolutely no one, here we see Carol Danvers, Captain Marvel, showing up in "Avengers: Endgame," obviously responding to the SOS call sent out by Nick Fury at the end of "Avengers: Infinity War."

We last saw her in the mid-1990s at the end of her own movie, "Captain Marvel," where she took off into outer space to try to find the Skrulls' home world. She comes back to Earth 24, 25 years later, doesn't appear to be any older.

Einstein's special theory of relativity says that all observers, whether stationary or moving, have to agree on the value of the speed of light. For that to be the case, they will disagree about distances and disagree about times.

There's an effect called time dilation that if someone is moving very close to the speed of light, to a stationary observer, time will appear to have been moving slower. Say she spends six months traveling close to, but not at, the speed of light, then six months traveling at this velocity would correspond to 24 years passing on Earth.

We don't know what's going to happen in "Captain Marvel 2," but if any of it involves traveling near the speed of light, then the time-dilation effect could easily account for the fact that she doesn't appear to have aged significantly from the last movie.

"Avengers: Endgame" rating: 9/10

This has been Jim Kakalios, your friendly neighborhood physics professor, and in the words of the legendary Stan Lee, "Face front, true believer."

Stan Lee: What's the matter with you kids? You never seen a spaceship before? Bring 'em over here, and hold on for safekeeping. That is hilarious!

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Physicist breaks down the science behind 10 iconic Marvel scenes

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Turns out, there's a scientific basis for a lot of the movie magic seen in the Marvel universe, from "Iron Man" to "Avengers: Endgame." Dr. James Kakalios is a physicist and science consultant for films like "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Watchmen."

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Fact-Checking 'Contagion' — In Wake Of Coronavirus, The 2011 Movie Is Trending

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Fact-Checking 'Contagion' — In Wake Of Coronavirus, The 2011 Movie Is Trending

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This is a bit harsh, but maybe it could be used somehow? Cheers, alicia

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The current top-trending movie rentals and purchases were all released within the last few months with one notable exception: , the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring film from 2011 about a worldwide virus outbreak that starts in Hong Kong.

The thriller, in which - spoiler alert - Paltrow dies four days after contracting the virus but not before unleashing it around the world and causing millions of deaths, has been as high as No. 10 among films rented or bought on iTunes. Chatter on Twitter ("So many similarities between the movie plot and what's happening now," wrote one user) could be fueling the renewed interest. Google searches with the film's name have skyrocketed since early 2020, when news of the novel coronavirus broke.

The movie indeed has some similarities to the current coronavirus outbreak. Like the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease now called COVID-19, the movie virus jumped from animals to people. But there are also a lot of differences. The imaginary Contagion disease kills over 20% of those infected, a magnitude beyond the estimated 2% or so death rate in the current outbreak.

Scott Burns, the screenwriter of Contagion, wrote in an email to NPR that the filmmakers wanted to tell the story of a "plausible" outbreak - "not a Hollywood exaggeration."

"We were trying to tell a story that was credible within the boundaries of scientific understanding, but also illuminate how our world might respond - that is why the poster of the movie says 'nothing spreads like fear,' " he adds.

Even though the film is not a documentary, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pointed out when the movie was released, it does have scientific content - sometimes accurate, sometimes not - about viral outbreaks. So we asked some specialists in global health and infectious diseases to fact-check the movie's science.
Birth of an outbreak
The movie saves the origin story of its virus for the last two minutes, when it shows a bulldozer razing trees where bats live to construct a pen for pigs. Once the pigs are in place, a bat flies over and drops a piece of banana that it's eating, which a pig then consumes. A virus carried by the bat mixes with a pig virus and mutates. A chef preps a presumably infected pig, puts his hand in its mouth and then without having washed up goes on to shake hands with Paltrow's character, transferring the virus to her.

Our experts think it's a realistic story - so realistic that Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, says she often shows the film's ending to the students in her class on emerging infectious diseases.

"I show the last few minutes of Contagion to my class, to show the interconnectedness between animals, the environment and humans," Katz says.

"If you cut down trees, it changes the behavior of bats. The bats interact with swine, [which are] being raised for consumption, and humans then interact with infected swine as part of food preparations. This is just one example of how an emerging infectious disease can jump species into humans," she adds.

Glenn Wortmann, head of infectious diseases at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., agrees: "The film presents a plausible series of events" based on what we know about how viruses can possibly jump from animals to humans.
Finding infected people
When an outbreak is suspected in the movie, the CDC dispatches trained foot soldiers from the Epidemic Intelligence Service to outbreak areas to try to identify people with this new infectious disease, and it sets in motion disease control protocols to stem the outbreak. EIS is a real organization, and the movie's depiction of its staff earns praise for accuracy from the specialists we interviewed. The public health officials in the film identify potential cases and clusters of people with similar symptoms, track where those people had traveled, trace people in contact with those infected individuals and isolate the sick and exposed.

"This is very consistent with standard epidemiologic principles and practices," says Theresa Madaline, the health care epidemiologist at the Montefiore Health System in New York City, who notes that there is "always a sense of urgency" in identifying and properly responding to any emerging pathogen.

"What is accurate is the professionalism and devotion of staff in the EIS at CDC," says William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "These people are tireless, and I'm truly honored that several of my former students went on to serve in EIS. It's also not an especially glamorous job, for all its importance, and Kate Winslet's portrayal captures that." (Winslet's epidemiologist character, who works for EIS, becomes ill in the field early in the outbreak and is treated at a mass infirmary where the number of patients has overwhelmed resources.)
How does a new virus spread?
"Fomite" is not an often-heard vocabulary word, but it's spoken in the movie - and it's a critical term in the lingo of epidemiologists as they assess an outbreak's potential to spread.

The term refers to an object that, if touched by an infected person, can harbor the pathogens that the person is carrying and pass them on to a new individual. The movie does a good job explaining what a fomite is, says Wortmann.

"I think the movie highlighted various 'touch points' which can serve as fomites," he says - for example, a touch screen for orders in a restaurant, which was touched by Paltrow's server after handling Paltrow's credit card, and an elementary school door touched by Paltrow's son.

"All those surfaces harbored viruses, which can then be passed to whomever else touches that surface," says Wortmann, "which highlights the need to wash one's hands."

But the speed of transmission and some of the pathways shown were not fully accurate, notes epidemiologist Madaline. For example, the film hints that on the day Paltrow contracts the virus, she visits a casino, blows on dice and touches a bowl of nuts, which become "fomites" that spread the virus to others.

Our experts say Paltrow wouldn't necessarily be able to transmit the virus that quickly after becoming infected. "It would take some period of time - at least days - for her to shed the virus from her respiratory tract or saliva," says Madaline.

Before transmission can occur, says Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a volunteer spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a virus that has entered cells in the body needs to make so many copies of itself that it reaches a threshold that activates the immune system to initiate coughing and sneezing.

For the novel coronavirus in China, he says, the period of time before transmission is possible is looking like five to six days.
Infection control for health workers
Taking precautions against contracting a virus is critical for health care providers and lab workers. Madaline notes that "in some scenes," the health care workers in the movie "wore personal protective equipment, which is what we normally do when caring for a patient who has a potentially transmissible disease."

But in other instances, that's not the case. A nun caring for patients at an airport infirmary wears only gloves and a mask as protective garb. That's also how Winslet's epidemiologist character protects herself early in the movie, when she rushes to find an infected person she has ordered to get off a bus.

Wortmann notes that "with a large outbreak, it would be difficult for all health care workers to [completely] maintain appropriate infection prevention measures, and I think the film recognizes those gaps."
Burial
The film shows some virus victims buried in mass graves. Madaline says such "graves could be used in outbreak settings when the ability to promptly bury the deceased exceeds morgue and funeral home capabilities or when burial itself is a high-risk activity for disease transmission." Indeed, during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and during the current outbreak in Congo, burial practices have changed because the body of someone who dies of Ebola is highly contagious.
Vaccine development
The way vaccine development was portrayed in the film was not terribly realistic, says Madaline. The scientist testing vaccine candidates in primates in the film inoculates herself to prove the vaccine works - and says that physician Barry Marshall inoculated himself with Helicobacter pylori to prove it was the cause of gastric ulcers and won a Nobel Prize for his work in 2005.

While this is true of Marshall, "the same action for vaccine development would not be effective or safe," says Madaline. "Efficacy and safety of vaccines must be established in multiple people, not just one person."
Infection rate
At a couple of points in Contagion, epidemiologists in the film discuss what the virus' "R ₀" (pronounced R-naught), or reproductive rate, is. R ₀ refers to the average number of people infected by one sick person, and the R ₀ in Contagion climbs as the film progresses.

The very fact that the movie script mentions the R ₀ factor is a plus, say the specialists. "The current outbreak has hopefully helped people understand the concept of R ₀ a little better," says Hanage. "Folks should be able to understand that if people start trying to take precautions to avoid transmission," he says, "this number might decrease as it did for SARS, which is how it was defeated."

What worked? Hanage says hand hygiene, greater awareness of the risk of infection and making sure people took steps to avoid transmission to others if they did fall ill.

Fran Kritz is a health policy reporter based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and Kaiser Health News. Find her on Twitter: .

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Fact-Checking 'Contagion' - In Wake Of Coronavirus, The 2011 Movie Is Trending

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The current top-trending movie rentals and purchases were all released within the last few months with one notable exception: , the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring film from 2011 about a worldwide virus outbreak that starts in Hong Kong.

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Five Ways to teach science with Star Trek

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Five Ways to teach science with Star Trek

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Alicia here :)

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When I was in tenth grade, my interest in astronomy collided with a boyfriend who was into Star Trek, just as The Next Generation was ending and Voyager was beginning. Two years later, I decided that I'd taken all the calculus any person needed, but I felt a little guilty not taking any math at all. So I made things even on the cosmic scales of STEM education by signing up for an astronomy class.

That class was taught by a man with a magical cabinet. Behind its doors were rows and rows of VHS tapes holding every episode of every season of every Star Trek series that had aired to date. And they weren't just for rewards after a tough test or days we had a substitute-he used them to teach science.

At the time, this technique astounded me. A teacher using a TV show to actually teach? But the first half of science fiction is science, and many scientists today point to Star Trek as having inspired them to go into their fields. If I were to list technologies from the show that don't actually exist, this post would be instantly out of date when somebody invented them tomorrow.

This is not to say, by any stretch, that Star Trek always got the science right. For the most recent movie's rights and wrongs, read Bad Astronomer Phil Plait's play-by-play. And NASA has a section of their site devoted to Star Trek. You can read up on technologies from the show and to what extent they exist in reality.

You can pick just about any episode and look for the science on your own. But here are a few to get you started.

1. Medicine: "Angel One" (TNG)
If someone asked me the one *Star Trek *invention I'd like to see in real life, it would probably be the replicator. But easily in second place is the hypospray-I really hate needles. Six years ago, I thought I got my wish when geek news was abuzz with the SonoPrep. Unfortunately, despite that FDA approval, my flu shot this year still came the old-fashioned way. Read more about jet injectors, which are actually older than Star Trek.

2. Botany: "Parallax" (VOY)
You'll sometimes hear someone refer to the hydroponics lab on one of the ships. Deep Space 9 had its own hydroponic garden and an episode that mentioned a conference on the topic. Try building your own hydroponics system.

3. Stellar cartography: "Lessons" (TNG) or just about any episode of Voyager
The real-world word for what* Star Trek *calls "stellar cartography" is "uranography." Unfortunately, most of us now live in areas with too much light pollution to see the stars well. But even if you can't see much at night, you have other options. Use SKY-MAP.ORG to find sky objects that you would see, or that someone on the other side of the world is seeing. You can also help astronomers at Zooniverse by identifying galaxies, spotting solar explosions, exploring the moon, and looking for supernovae.

4. Chemistry: "Rascals" (TNG) and "Cardassians" (DS9)
Star Trek, like many shows and movies, was full of in-jokes and side humor. One of the best examples is the periodic table visible in these two episodes. They differ slightly from one another but quite a bit from the periodic table we learn about in real-world science class. Scroll through the elements in the Star Trek version of the periodic table and identify the fake elements. It's also fun to try to guess the joke that led to the name. (Click any in that list to read more about them.) If your budding chemist has already memorized the real periodic table, see if she can spot the different atomic weights on the real elements.

5. Nanotechnology: "Evolution" (TNG)
Nanotech has come a long way since Wesley Crusher accidentally terrorized the Enterprise with his lost nanites. At the Project for Emerging Nanotechnologies, you can browse a list of where you're encountering nanotech every day, from your sunscreen to your washing machine. If you aren't lucky enough to be a student in Danville, IL classes experimenting with nanotech, try one of these experiments from Science in School.

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Five Ways to Teach Science With Star Trek

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When I was in tenth grade, my interest in astronomy collided with a boyfriend who was into Star Trek, just as The Next Generation was ending and Voyager was beginning.

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Hi, Alicia again. Star Trek is a great source of material for this. Check out this link from NASA that we could use to look up specific video clips. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/star_trek.html

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Hola, Alicia here! Optical illusions are SUPER popular! Everyone loves them! And they are a great way to introduce brain science for example. The Exploratorium has several fun optical illusions.

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Bernard and Barbro Osher Gallery 1: Human Phenomena

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Alicia here. Not sure if I got this one. Do you refer to things such as health and safety engineering for example?

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Alicia here. Not sure if I got this one. Do you refer to things such as health and safety engineering for example?

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Maybe develop trivia questions about how to keep a construction site or school/playground safe? Relate it to engineering?
Also, do we introduce covid19 here? What about developing trivia puzzles about the importance of wearing a face mask and how it lowers the probability of catching the virus? We could bring in materials engineering, microbiology, etc.

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Hola, Alicia here. This seems like an attractive topic for many youth! Fun trivia questions could come out of this. How about having youth and family reflect on advantages and potential challenges of wearable technology? Implications on daily life, health, teaching and learning, etc.
A great way to introduce youth to innovative wearable technology that could help push their creative expression :) Example: Check "Neurocouture" wearable tech that connects your brianwaves with digital projections to visualize your mindset!  http://www.neurocouture.com/
Another example: kinetic sculptures/art . A great way to create artwork through engineering. It requires a lot of problem solving and engineering :)

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Hi again! The Discovery Museum in VA has fun activities related to the 5 senses. This is a topic that is very attractive to kids and families in general. Senses are a great way to engage in STEM!  This topic could be connected with the "Stretch Your Mind" theme/topic :)

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Take a moment to consider your surroundings. What can you see? What sounds do you hear? How does where you are sitting feel? Is it lumpy or smooth? Hard or soft? Can you smell something cooking nearby? Does it smell sweet or spicy? Are you eating a snack? How does it taste? Is it salty? Sour? Bitter? You are now officially a Five Senses Detective, as you use your senses (and your BRAIN) to make sense of the world around you.

These activities include things that will help your child develop fine and gross motor skills, problem-solving and engineering skills, and can help them engage in cooperative play, while fostering creativity and perseverance. Each theme also comes with recommended literature and viewing connections. Feel free to throw in your own activities that might relate, and don't forget to post your results to social media and tag @discoverymuse to share with everyone else!

Start your Five Senses Detective work by joining Handley Regional Librarian Katie Moss for a special story time read aloud of Five for a Little One by Chris Raschka. Science Activities: Sense of Sight

Fun Facts about the EYES:

The eye allows us to recognize light and color - as many as 10 million colors!

The eye and the brain work together to understand information! Sometimes the eye can be fooled and the brain fills in missing information or things that are not there.

When the brain is fooled or tricked by the information it is getting from the eye, we call that a visual illusion.

Try This! Make a Hole In Your Hand

Hold your paper towel tube in your right hand and place in it in front of your right eye.

Look through the tube like you are looking through a telescope, but (THIS PART IS IMPORTANT) keep both eyes open.

Choose an object to focus on across the room.

Hold your left hand in front of their left eye, with your palm facing you, about halfway down the paper towel tube. Your left hand should be next to or touching the tube.

REMEMBER TO KEEP BOTH EYES OPEN!

In this activity, you will create a visual illusion using only a paper towel tube and your hand!
Try This!

Make an I Spy Bottle

Drop 20 -30 small items into an empty water bottle.

Count the small items together as you add them.

Use the funnel to pour rice into the bottle.

Be sure to leave space at the top.

Put the cap on the water bottle.

Shake the bottle so that the rice and small items mix.

Play I SPY together. "I Spy an orange bead." "I Spy a blue feather." "I Spy a pink eraser."

The idea behind this activity is to show you how each eye sees a slightly different view. When the brain puts the two views together to create one image, sometimes a visual illusion happens.
TRY THIS:
What Just Happened? Did you see a hole in your hand? When you look through the tube and see a hole in your hand, you are seeing a visual illusion. The tube allows you to look across the room with your right eye and to see your hand with your left eye. Your brain takes what each eye saw and puts them together, making one image. That image makes it look like there's a hole in your hand. To extend the activity, try this.

What You Need: a clean and empty water bottle with a lid; a funnel; rice; and small items to hide inside the bottle (e.g. beads, buttons, sequins, foam shapes, feathers, paperclips, etc.)

Science Activities: Sense of Hearing/Sound

How Does Sound Work?
At the Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum, we currently have an Ames Room on the first floor. The science behind the Ames Room is something we see in movie magic, when we want to make something appear smaller or larger than normal (think the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings). What makes the Ames Room illusion work is the vantage point. Viewed from a particular angle, the room looks square, even though the ceiling on one side is actually about twice the height as the other. Since we are used to looking at "square" rooms, the brain decides the Ames room IS square, which is what causes the people inside to appear to grow and shrink as they move from one side to the other.
Try this: Sound Sorting Activity

You can make your own Ames Room!

Here are some more visual illusions you can try at home, as well as some visual illusion puzzles to try to solve.

Sound is created by vibrations and travels in waves. It moves through the matter and pushes particles around. These vibrations rattle the thin membrane of our eardrum and that's how we hear.

Test the sensitivity of your ears to different pitches (the rate at which vibrations are produced).

Decide how many cups or matching pairs you want to have.

Work with two cups at a time.

Fill each of the two cups with the exact same thing (e.g. two pink erasers, 4 beans, or even nothing at all).

Cover the cups securely with the foil so that you can't see what is hiding inside the cup.

Repeat this process for as many pairs of sounds as you want for the game.

Mix up the cups.

Invite a family member to try to match the sounds by only using his or her sense of sound/hearing.

How quickly can you match the cups? Which ones had a higher pitch? Which ones had a lower pitch? How could you tell the difference without looking?

Explore Sound With More At Home Science Experiments Science Activities: Sense of Smell

FUN FACTS ABOUT THE NOSE & SENSE OF SMELL

Without peeking or using any other sense except your sense of hearing, shake the canisters and try to match them based on the sounds you hear.

Some pitches will be lower. Some will be higher. What do you think is causing the canisters to sound different from each other? How is your ear able to tell the difference between canisters?

To do this activity, you will need: clean (empty) yogurt cups, paper cups, or small jars; aluminum foil to cover the top of the empty cups; objects to fill the cups and create sounds (e.g. erasers, buttons, beans, rice, beads, rocks, blocks, puzzle pieces, etc.)

The nose has special cells, which help us smell.

Pick out 4-5 different smells from your kitchen with your grown-up's approval (we like things like vanilla, lemon, peppermint, vinegar, cinnamon, coffee, etc.)

Put 3-4 drops of a liquid scent on a cotton ball. Place the cotton ball in a small paper cup and cover it with another cotton ball.

Make two cups for every scent you are using.

If you are using a spice like cinnamon, sprinkle it in the bottom of the paper cup, then cover it with cotton balls so that it looks the same as the other cups.

Mix up the cups.

Take turns trying to create scent matches using only your nose to guide you!

TRY THIS! Science Activities: Sense of Taste

How Does Taste Work?
The human nose can smell many different odors but is far less sensitive than other animals, such as dogs.

Bats have developed a keen sense of smell in order to find their own families among all the other bats that may be living in the same cave or tree. Like many animals in the natural world, bats find their pups through their sense of smell, position, and even their hearing. Just like us, bat senses work together.
Try this: Taste sorting game
Try This! Using only your sense of smell ( no peeking with your eyes), try to match the "smelly cups" with their correct partner.

To Do This Activity, You Will Need: clean empty paper cups, cotton balls, different scents from your kitchen (get your grown-up's approval first) such as vanilla, lemon, peppermint, vinegar, cinnamon, coffee, etc.,

Science Activities: Sense of Touch Fun Facts about the sense of touch:
Taste buds are sensory organs that are found on your tongue and allow you to experience tastes that are sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. The average person has about 10,000 taste buds, and they are replaced every 2 weeks or so.

Taste buds have very sensitive tiny hairs that send messages to the brain about how something tastes, so you know if it's sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. Your nose also has special cells that help you smell. They send messages to the brain. About 80 percent of what we think we taste is actually smell. Flavor is a combination of taste and smell. Test this yourself by holding your nose closed the next time you eat something, can you taste it very well? Chances are you can't.

It's time for a Healthy Snack party with the family. With your grown-up's permission, raid the refrigerator and cupboards to find small samples of foods that fit the different things the tongue can taste (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami). Umami (/uˈmɑːmi/), or savory taste, is one of the five basic tastes (together with sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and saltiness).
Try This!
Practice healthy habits while you sample the foods and decide where they go (that means CLEAN HANDS and no sharing bites). You can write the food in on the graph below or draw a picture of it. There may be disagreement about whether a food is sweet or salty. That's okay. Talk together about why we might have different reactions to food and taste.

Set up your sensory bin by pouring beans or rice into a shallow pan and burying the objects. Take turns asking each other to try to find all of the red cars or the blue squares.

Talk about the items you find. Are they soft? Are they rough? Are they bumpy? Are they smooth? Are they hard? Are they squishy? Are they prickly? How do they feel to your sense of touch?

Sort the items on the graph. How many of each do you have? Count them together.

Sort the shapes in the sensory bin. What shapes are there? How many of each do you have? Count them together.

How many of each are in the bin? Graph them together. ¿Cuántos de cada uno están en la papelera? Graficarlos juntos Sense of Touch Art Activity/Fine Motor Activity

2 (4-ounce) bottles washable school glue, such as Elmer's (see note for variations)

1 to 2 drops liquid food coloring (optional)

1/4 cup glitter (optional)

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 to 3 tablespoons saline solution (i.e., contact lens solution), divided

Talking Tips and Further Investigation: How many foods were sweet? How many were salty? Bitter? Sour? Umami? Count the foods together. Talk about where in the world each food comes from. Have you tried food in each category? If not, are there other foods you'd like to try? Do some research and prepare a recipe together.
Physical Activity
The largest organ in the body is skin.

The skin has at least 5 types of nerve endings, which work with our brain to give us our sense of touch. The skin has millions of sensory nerve receptors that allow us to feel pressure, moisture, temperature (hot and cold), vibration, and pain.

Most of the time, the skin receptors send information about touch directly to the brain. Some of the time, however, the message goes right to the muscles to help protect the body. These receptors are called reflexes. After the muscles react, the data is sent to the brain.

For this activity, you will need a small pan or tub; rice or beans to fill the tub; the graph (see below) that you can adapt for the items you pick; and assorted items to place and hide in the tub (we used shape blocks, but you can use buttons, blocks, legos, toys trucks - just try to make sure you have different textures and shapes included).

Five Senses Detective Scavenger Hunt

Making Slime is an ooey gooey tactile activity just right for experimenting with the sense of touch. For this activity, you will need the following ingredients:

You can follow along with Megan and Alice as they test out the slime recipe for us or you can grab the recipe from thekitchn.com.

Now that you are a Five Senses Detective, it's time to go outside and have your very own Five Senses Scavenger Hunt.

To get some ideas for your scavenger hunt, take a walk with MB. As you take your virtual nature walk, follow along with MB's nature guide below and see how many things you can check off your list!

Now it's time for YOU to take a walk. Make your own five senses scavenger hunt or be inspired by MB's. What can you touch? What can you hear? What can you see? What can you smell? You shouldn't taste things on your walk, but you can look for things that might be tasty to insects, birds, or small animals.

Get some of those wiggles out while showing that you have what it takes to be a Five Senses Detective!

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Take a moment to consider your surroundings. What can you see? What sounds do you hear? How does where you are sitting feel? Is it lumpy or smooth? Hard or soft? Can you smell something cooking nearby? Does it smell sweet or spicy? Are you eating a snack? How does it taste?

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BioEd online has great resources on the science of food. There's lots of fun activities that can be adapted to different grade levels. Cheers! alicia

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Hi! alicia here. I'm thinking it would be fabulous to talk about how our culture influences taste preferences!  :)   It would be fun for people to know that our taste preferences are determined by perceptions that are shaped by the interaction of biological, social and psychological factors. It would be fun to have kids and families think about how genetics, age or marketing of goods influence taste. Check this article form the BBC https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160125-why-some-cultures-love-the-tastes-you-hate

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Alicia here! I found a nice activity from the University of Washington about the genetics of taste.

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Your Sense of TasteDiscover the real taste of candy

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Your Sense of TasteDiscover the real taste of candy

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Hi again, the Exploratorium has a nice simple activity about taste.

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Hi, alicia here! Nice resource from the University of Utah. A fun activity could be designed using PTC paper.

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In 1931, a chemist named Arthur Fox was pouring some powdered PTC into a bottle. When some of the powder accidentally blew into the air, a colleague standing nearby complained that the dust tasted bitter. Fox tasted nothing at all. Curious how they could be tasting the chemical differently, they tasted it again. The results were the same. Fox had his friends and family try the chemical then describe how it tasted. Some people tasted nothing. Some found it intensely bitter, and still others thought it tasted only slightly bitter.

Dark chocolate and coffee are common bitter tasting foods.

PTC paper is used to test whether a person is a "taster", "non-taster", or somewhere in between.

The ratio of tasters to non-tasters varies between populations, but every group has some tasters and some non-tasters. On average, 75% of people can taste PTC, while 25% cannot.

Soon after its discovery, geneticists determined that there is an inherited component that influences how we taste PTC. Today we know that the ability to taste PTC (or not) is conveyed by a single gene that codes for a taste receptor on the tongue. The PTC gene, TAS2R38, was discovered in 2003.

There are two common forms (or alleles) of the PTC gene, and at least five rare forms. One of the common forms is a tasting allele, and the other is a non-tasting allele. Each allele codes for a bitter taste receptor protein with a slightly different shape. The shape of the receptor protein determines how strongly it can bind to PTC. Since all people have two copies of every gene, combinations of the bitter taste gene variants determine whether someone finds PTC intensely bitter, somewhat bitter, or without taste at all.

Natural Selection At Work

Plants are much more likely than animals to contain toxins. Because avoiding bitter plants would severely limit their food sources, strict herbivores have fewer bitter taste genes than omnivores or carnivores. Instead, animals that graze on plants have a high tolerance to toxins. Grazers have large livers that are able to break down toxic compounds

PTC stands for phenylthiocarbamide. Also known as phenylthiourea, the chemical structure of PTC resembles toxic alkaloids found in some poisonous plants.

Although PTC is not found in nature, the ability to taste it correlates strongly with the ability to taste other bitter substances that do occur naturally, many of which are toxins.

Plants produce a variety of toxic compounds in order to protect themselves from being eaten. The ability to discern bitter tastes evolved as a mechanism to prevent early humans from eating poisonous plants. Humans have about 30 genes that code for bitter taste receptors. Each receptor can interact with several compounds, allowing people to taste a wide variety of bitter substances.

If the ability to taste bitter compounds conveys a selective advantage, then shouldn't non-tasters have died off long ago? Why do so many people still carry the non-tasting PTC variant? Some scientists believe that non-tasters of PTC can taste another bitter compound. This scenario would give the greatest selective advantage to heterozygotes, or people who carry one tasting allele and one non-tasting allele.

The ability to taste PTC shows a dominant pattern of inheritance. A single copy of a tasting allele (T) conveys the ability to taste PTC. Non-tasters have two copies of a non-tasting allele (t).

Curiously, there are also tasting and non-tasting chimpanzees. Unlike non-tasting humans, chimps that cannot taste PTC appear to lack functional PTC receptors.

PTC sensitivity is often used as an example of a simple Mendelian trait with dominant inheritance. However, tasters vary greatly in their sensitivity to PTC. And while the PTC gene has about 85% of the total influence over whether someone is a taster or a non-taster, there are many other things that affect PTC tasting ability. Having a dry mouth may make it more difficult to taste PTC. What you ate or drank before sampling PTC paper may also affect your tasting ability. And an individual's sensitivity may change over time. Some people may find that they can taste PTC on some days, but not on others.

The biological warfare agent ricin comes from the bean of the Castor tree. A scant handful of castor beans contains enough ricin to deliver a toxic dose.

The toxic alkaloid atropine comes from the highly poisonous Deadly nightshade. The common name belladonna (Italian for "beautiful lady") came about during the Renaissance. Women placed atropine-containing drops in their eyes to dilate their pupils, giving them a dreamy look that was believed to be attractive. Tragically, many of these women later became blind.

Potential Health Applications

PTC tasters may be more sensitive than non-tasters to compounds in tobacco and vegetables in the cabbage family.

Studies indicate that individuals with the "strong tasters" PTC gene variant were less likely to be smokers. This may indicate that people who find PTC bitter are more likely than non-tasters to find the taste of cigarettes bitter and may be less likely to smoke.

Other studies suggest that there may be correlations between the ability to taste PTC and preferences for certain types of foods. This may be why some of us think that broccoli is just too bitter to eat.

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In 1931, a chemist named Arthur Fox was pouring some powdered PTC into a bottle. When some of the powder accidentally blew into the air, a colleague standing nearby complained that the dust tasted bitter. Fox tasted nothing at all. Curious how they could be tasting the chemical differently, they tasted it again.

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Soccer improves health, fitness and social abilities

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Soccer improves health, fitness and social abilities

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Hi, alicia here again. This is a niece research piece that shows how soccer improves health, social abilities, and fitness.

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Soccer is a pleasurable team sport that provides an all-round fitness and can be used as treatment for lifestyle-related diseases. Men worry less when playing soccer than when running. Women's soccer creates we-stories and helps women stay active.

The above statements are taken from some of the results from an extensive soccer research project involving more than 50 researchers from seven countries. The researchers studied physiological, psychological and sociological aspects of recreational soccer and compared it with running. Led by Professors Peter Krustrup and Jens Bangsbo from the Department of Exercise and Sports Sciences, University of Copenhagen, the 3-year project covered several intervention studies involving both men, women and children, who were divided into soccer, running and control groups.

The results from the studies are so remarkable that the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports are publishing a special edition issue entitled "Football for Health" containing 14 scientific articles from the soccer project on April 6, 2010.
Soccer for Health
The researchers studied the physical effects of soccer training for untrained subjects aged 9 to 77 years. The conclusion was clear. Soccer provides broad-spectred health and fitness effects that are at least as pronounced as for running, and in some cases even better.

Study leader Peter Krustrup concludes "Soccer is a very popular team sport that contains positive motivational and social factors that may facilitate compliance and contribute to the maintenance of a physically active lifestyle. The studies presented have demonstrated that soccer training for two-three hours per week causes significant cardiovascular, metabolic and musculoskeletal adaptations, independent on gender, age or lack of experience with soccer."

Professor Jens Bangsbo continues: "The effects can be maintained for a long period even with a reduced frequency of training to one to two times one hour a week. Recreational soccer, therefore, appears to be an effective type of training leading to performance improvements and significant beneficial effects to health, including a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular diseases, falls and fractures. In a number of aspects, soccer training appears to be superior to running training. Soccer training can also be used to treat hypertension and it was clearly superior to a standard treatment strategy of physician-guided traditional recommendations."

The two researchers foresee a great perspective in using soccer as a health promoting activity: "The studies have convincingly shown that soccer training is effective to enhance fitness and the health profile for the general population. Future studies are needed to understand what is causing the beneficial effects of football, how well football can be used to improve heart health in early childhood and how other patient groups such as those with type II diabetes or cancer can benefit from playing soccer."
Soccer creates we-stories and helps women stay active
One of the many aspects of the study was to examine the level of social capital for women gained from running and soccer. Even though both the soccer players and the runners trained in groups, there were significant differences in the way they interacted and what they considered the most important aspects of the sport they were engaging in. The runners were more focused on themselves as individuals, whereas the soccer players developed "we"-stories as they began to see themselves as a team. From the beginning, most of the women, both soccer players and runners, thought running would be an easier form of exercise to stick to after the intervention programme was over. That turned out not to be the case:

"The most important finding was the difference in social interaction and creation of we-stories between the groups, which may impact the possibilities of long-term compliance. A year after the study, many of the soccer players continue to play soccer, some have even joined an organised soccer club. Not many from the running group have continued their training. This can very well be due to the fact that the runners focussed on their health and on getting in shape, whereas the soccer players were more committed to the activity itself, including the fun and not letting down team mates," says Associate Professor Laila Ottesen.
Men worry less when playing soccer than when running
Another study examined the exertion experienced during training for untrained adults and their experience of "worries" and "flow." This study, based on 6 groups of untrained men and women, showed that all groups experienced an overall high level of flow during the intervention, which underlines that the participants felt motivated, happy and involved to the point where they forgot time and fatigue. There was no difference in the level of worry for the female soccer players and runners, but the running men seemed to worry quite a lot more than their soccer playing counterparts.

- "The men that played soccer elicited lower levels of worry than during running, 2.8 vs 4.0 on a 0-6 scale, and although they are training at the same average heart rate they do not feel the exertion as strongly as during running" says Associate Professor Anne-Marie Elbe and adds: "Further research is needed to examine why men and women experience playing soccer differently but it could be that the men just have had more experience with football in earlier years than the women."
Documentation for FIFA, Michelle Obama and others
F-MARC, the research unit of FIFA, is a central partner in the project and the research provides scientific documentation for initiatives such as FIFA's newly launched "The 11 for Health" campaign that uses soccer as an educational health tool for children in order to raise awareness and improve health in African and South American communities. Also Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" project aiming at eliminating obesity in American children through diet and sports have recently promoted soccer as a favourable activity. The research results are also used in Europe, where the research group is directly involved in implementing the results through projects focusing on adults and children, such as "The Open Soccer Club project," "The Soccer at Work project" and the "Intensity in Pupil School Sport project." Sports Confederations, Football Associations, Ministries of Culture and Health and researchers from Universities, Hospitals and Centres for Working Environment are cooperating about the implementation and scientific evaluation of those projects.

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fitness; sports medicine; accident and trauma; teen health; gender difference; racial issues; child development; mental health

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Soccer improves health, fitness and social abilities

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Soccer is a pleasurable sport that provides an all-round fitness and can be used as treatment for lifestyle-related diseases. Men worry less when playing soccer than when running. Women's soccer creates we-stories and helps women stay active. The above statements are taken from the results from an extensive soccer research project involving more than 50 researchers from seven countries.

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NASA Turns World Cup into Lesson in Aerodynamics

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NASA Turns World Cup into Lesson in Aerodynamics

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Hi again! Here is a fun link from NASA that uses a soccer ball to teach a lesson in aerodynamics!

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The Surprisingly Sophisticated Science of Cleats

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The Surprisingly Sophisticated Science of Cleats

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Hola, alicia again. Here is a cool article that explains the science behind soccer shoes (cleats). This could be used to link soccer with engineering (e.g. materials engineering). This could be linked to the Design/Expression content area. Alma Stephanie's SciGirls role model video could be introduced here! There is also a nice SciGirls role model video of a Bicycle engineer, Rachel Gitajn http://www.scigirlsconnect.org/resources/bicycle-engineer-rachel-gitajn/
The material could be nicely adapted as trivia and puzzles. Something like: Guess the shoes? And show different types of sport shoes. Ask things like: what makes the best cleats? What cleats make you faster? How are football cleats different from soccer cleats? Are men's and women's cleats interchangeable? Also, connect types of cleats (e.g. metal cleats, soft ground, firm ground) with different field surfaces/field types (e.g. muddy, wet, synthetic grass, etc.) and playing conditions :)

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In their most basic sense, football and soccer cleats are just shoes with studs that protrude into the ground to keep athletes upright when cutting, faster when sprinting, and stable when pushing. But if you take a look at the footwear of today's top athletes, we're a long way from basic.

Nearly a century after the the first mass producing of soccer cleats, today's shoes use force-plate technology, computer analysis, and advanced materials to maximize an athlete's performance, whether he or she is on natural grass or an artificial surface. As Nike rolls out its newest advancements this fall-including new anti-clog technology that covers the studs with a water- and mud-repellant film-it's clear that manufacturers can tailor a player's cleats to even their specific position on the field.

Take football. Nike offers three lines of football cleats, says Marlan Harper, Nike product line manager for football footwear. There's the Vapor for speedy receivers, the Alpha for running backs and linebackers who have to quickly change direction, and the Force line for the big guys on the offensive and defensive lines. Soccer is similar: attacking forwards, dynamic midfields, and steady defenders wear specific shoes.

You probably know that shoes themselves are made of different materials depending upon their purpose and position on the field, but the same is true of the actual cleats. Thermo nylon studs are rigid but lightweight for sudden propulsion. TPU, meanwhile, offers a stable yet comfortable stud for a forgiving fit, more appropriate for a defender.

Harper says looking at both movement and weight of players also helps determine the style and size of studs placed on cleat plates.

Nike's use of a digital "Finite Element Analysis" allows designers to play with the cleat plate and test it virtually before making a 3-D-printed version for real-life testing. This process includes changing the locations of the studs and tweaking the geometry of individual studs to see how they react to the pressures of the foot. Max Blau, Nike's vice president of football (soccer) footwear, says using a virtual model speeds up the design process.

The quick-moving world of digital analysis has already produced a major shift in design for speed cleats. Nike used a bladed stud for explosive speed-the conical stud helps with multi-directional movements, while other geometries with differing sides help to either decelerate a player or move in a specific direction based on the angle of the flat surfaces-but FEA data showed that chevron shapes offer increased propulsion and multidirectional movements over the blade.

The typical soccer cleat plate will often include a mix of conical and chevron (an inverted V shape) geometry. "One of the greatest benefits of stud placement is stud disbursement, or the equalizing of pressure of the studs across the plate," Blau says.

When the Dassler brothers started offering rubber molded cleats around 1925 it was a major materials advancement. And the 1960s gave us some new placements of those studs, but still in a typical conical stud. The rubber conical stud remained a mainstay of the 1900s and it has taken a research effort-whether materials or geometry-to move the cleat beyond the conical.

Now we have designs that focus on speed-the Mercurial Superfly in soccer, for example-that place angled studs in the forefoot for propulsion and chevrons in the heel for braking. Others offer rotational traction with chevrons encircling the ball of the foot combining with half-conicals on the outside for a quicker movement. Studs have changed in size too, growing smaller over time as research show the smaller diameter of a surface area, Blau says, provides both better surface penetration and a faster release of the ground.

In a basic sense, cleats remain shoes with studs poking the ground. But engineering has given basic a fresh design.
Follow Tim Newcomb on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.
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The Surprisingly Sophisticated Science of Cleats

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In their most basic sense, football and soccer cleats are just shoes with studs that protrude into the ground to keep athletes upright when cutting, faster when sprinting, and stable when pushing. But if you take a look at the footwear of today's top athletes, we're a long way from basic.

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Hi! Alicia here. This is a great link that shows how physics plays a role in soccer! Gives a brief intro to Newton's law and explains how where you kick the ball impacts the movement/direction of the ball. Maybe simple physics equations could be introduced to calculate the trajectory of the ball. Students could calculate the ideal vs. the real trajectory by doing experimentation, for example. The activity could be designed to help students develop many STEM skills including observation, questioning, investigation, experimentation, data collection, etc. And it is a great way to continue learning at home with family. Students could collect data from "kicking experiments" done at home with friends and family. They could collect data using their smart phones too; kids could download the Adidas Snapshot App to calculate the speed, distance and angle of shots. They could work in teams and share their data points using Google sheets or some online tool and create a data visualization that allows everyone to see the data and discover trends. Pretty cool!  :) This could be adapted as trivia or puzzles.

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Soccer is a sport that requires speed, strength, endurance and strategy, but it seems that good ball control in soccer also requires a good grasp of physics. In this article, I will present a few basic laws in physics and show how these laws are reflected in soccer. Some of the facts may seem a bit trivial, but no one said physics lacks logic.

A short introduction to the Newton's laws of motion
According to Newton's first law, if no force is applied to a ball, it will continue moving at the same speed and direction as it did before. When we put the ball on the grass it stays in its place, namely it stays in zero motion since no force is applied to it. However, after we kick the ball, it will continue moving in the direction we kicked it. Its speed will drop gradually, due to friction (a force applied on the ball in the opposite direction to its motion), but the direction of its motion will remain the same.

According to Newton's second law, a force applied to an object changes that object's acceleration - namely, the rate at which the speed of the object changes. When we kick the ball, the force we apply to it causes it to accelerate from a speed of 0 to a speed of dozens of kilometers per hour. When the ball is released from the foot, it begins to decelerate (negative acceleration) due to the force of friction that is exerted upon it (as we observed in the previous example). If we were to kick a ball in outer space, where there is no friction, it would accelerate during the kick, and then continue moving at a constant speed in the direction that we kicked at, until it hits some other object or another force is applied to it.

What is the difference in passing the ball by kicking it with the side of the shoe as opposed to doing a "toe kick"?
Two things happen when we pass a ball by kicking it with the side of the shoe. On one hand, our ability to provide the ball with a strong momentum that will drive it to a far distance is relatively limited. On the other hand, we restrain the ball with our whole foot so that it cannot 'escape', causing it to move in the direction we were aiming at. When we toe-kick a ball, however, the kick is stronger but less accurate.

The problem with the toe kick is that we give the ball a powerful strike on a small surface area - our toe. Whoever tried to play soccer barefoot on the beach clearly remembers it to be a painful experience.

The difference between the toe kick and the side kick resembles the difference between stepping on a single nail and laying on a bed of nails. In the first scenario, the force of our weight is focused in one spot; while in the second, it is distributed over a large area, which is less painful.

Is it important where we hit the ball in a "toe kick"?
Of course it is! Kicking at the center of the ball will send it moving in a straight line, and it will roll on the grass until friction causes it to stop. Kicking any other area of the ball will cause it to spin on its axis, according to the location of the kick. Kicking the top part will cause the ball to spin forward, and kicking the bottom part will cause it to spin backward. In any case, within a short time, the force of friction exerted on the ball by the grass will cause it to spin forward.

What is even more interesting is what happens when we kick the ball on its side - it begins to spin around in its place according to the location of the kick. If we kick the ball on the side and a bit towards the bottom, a wonderful thing happens: the ball rises up in the air while spinning on its own axis. In the beginning it will fly exactly in the direction of the kick, and as it slows down due to friction with the air, the spinning motion will cause the air on one side to move faster than that on the other side. The ball will then change its direction and will turn either left or right, depending on the side we kicked the ball at. This is called the Magnus effect, more commonly known as a "banana kick".

Another example for this is given by a player in another game: in what seems a nearly impossible move, a ball kicked from the side of the field, at an angle of almost 180 degrees with the goal, still manages to get in. In this case, as before, the player kicked the ball very strongly, with a side spin, which turned an almost completely flat kick into a banana kick that scored him a goal.

Could a strong-enough banana kick make the ball complete a full round and return?
Sadly no. No matter how strong and acurate the kick is, as the ball moves through the air the friction slows it down, causing the radius of the turn to become smaller and smaller. The ball can theoretically go in smaller and smaller circles, but in order to do that it has to spin extremely fast around its axis; much faster than any human play can kick it.

Why do players kick the ball high in order to score a goal from a long distance?
According to Newton's second law of motion, a force applied to an object causes it to accelerate. Once the force is no longer applied it stops, and a force opposite to the direction of motion causes the object to decelerate. When a player kicks the ball high, he applies a force on the ball that causes it to accelerate to a high speed. The moment the ball leaves the foot, it stops accelerating, and from this point forward only two forces are exerted upon it: the friction with the air, which slows the ball's motion, and gravity, which pulls it down.

As the ball moves, it slows and falls down. In order for the ball to enter the goal without falling to the grass, it needs to be kicked high enough for it to reach the goal above grass level. This means that what you see in cartoons, with a player kicking a ball strong and forward across half of the field, is a very complicated task to perform.

If I want to pass a ball coming from another player to a third player, where should I aim at?
When I want to pass a ball on, what would happen if I kick the ball straight towards the third player, without stopping the ball first? The ball would continue moving in the direction that the passing player was kicking towards, and the additional force I would apply to it would cause it to slightly shift diagonally, ending up somewhere between its original path and the location of the third player.

Conversely, if I were to kick the ball diagonally in the direction of the player who passed it to me, the sum of directions would cancel out, and the ball would move straight towards the direction I was aiming at. Another option, of course, is to simply stop the ball and then pass it on. This is demonstrated in the following illustration.

What is the difference between parrying the ball and catching it at the goal?
Energy is the potential to create work or force, which is manifested in motion, heat, etc. Energy never disappears, but rather transfers from one object to another, and from form to form (from motion to heat and so on). As the ball reaches the goalie at a high speed, he has two options - either catch the ball with his two hands and block it with his body, or parry it with his hand.

The ball reaches the goal with a large amount of energy of motion. Due to the law of energy conservation, that energy cannot be lost, but must transfer onto another object or transform into a different form of energy. Due to the high energy of the ball, parrying it with the hand might be a painful experience, since the energy of the ball is absorbed in the palm of the hand (a small area), and some of it is reflected back onto the ball when it is released in another direction. For this reason, many goalies prefer parrying the ball with their fist- it is simply much less painful.

In contrast, when a goalie catches the ball, he stops it with his body and absorbs its energy, and with a strong enough kick, he will be pushed back. For this reason, goalies sometimes lay on the ball or roll with it- this way they have better control over the large amount of energy coming with the ball, thus preventing it from entering the goal.

Why do soccer players wear cleats?
In contrast to other ball games, soccer is played on grass. Grass is a very smooth surface, but also one that generates a lot of friction with the ball. As the ball rolls on it, the grass stems rub against it and slow it down. If it were an asphalt or parquetry field, it would be a completely different story. The players, however, are much less affected by the grass, and even encounter the opposite problem: they might slip on the grass. The cleats in the shoes stick the players' feet into the grass, and prevent them from slipping.

This is not the only role the cleats play. Since the cleats stick into the ground instead of having the entire foot step on it, they allow the players to run faster. The same goes for the cheetah, which sticks its claws into the ground, running almost on its nails. This reduces the cheetah's friction with the ground, allowing it to spring forward.

Finally, according to Newton's third law, every force has a force that is equal to it in the opposing direction. This is what prevents us from sinking into the ground when we stand on it, helps us run with cleats, and what causes a ball to become squashed as it hits a player in the face. That looks like it has got to hurt, right?

Dr. Erez Garty
Davidson Institute of Science Education
Weizmann Institute of Science

Article translated from Hebrew by Elee Shimshoni, PhD student at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

A note to the readers
If you find the explanations unclear or have further questions, please drop us a line on the forum. We welcome your comments, suggestions and feedback.

Davidson Online works to provide scientific information only, and is by no means intended to replace medical or nutritional counseling. Parts of this article must not be quoted without citing the article in its entirety.

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Soccer is a sport that requires speed, strength, endurance and strategy, but it seems that good ball control in soccer also requires a good grasp of physics. In this article, I will present a few basic laws in physics and show how these laws are reflected in soccer.

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Genetics/food preference connections

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Synesthesia/color-sound connection content

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Short clips of popular shows and movies, with questions for patrons to decide if the STEAM content is “fact” or “fiction”

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Zoomed in images/textures would be a great visual question. What is this??

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Zoomed in images/textures would be a great visual question. What is this??

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Slice a rectangular pyramid | Perimeter, area, and volume | Geometry | Khan Academy

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Visual and Spatial Games | HAPPYneuron brain training

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Our visual and spatial skills help us find our orientation in space, perceive objects around us and organize them into a coherent visual scene, mentally...

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Ingeniera en Materiales | Materials Engineer: Alma Stephanie Tapia - SciGirls CONNECT

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Alma Stephanie is a Metallurgical and Materials Engineer at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

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What materials science, physics, or other connections to soccer?

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https://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-world-cup-ball-20180521-story.html

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GORE-Tex