Just a little quiz

Source

 As regular readers of this blog are aware - I am a very big proponent of science education.

Not only because it is a subject I enjoy learning about, but also because it helps me understand the world around me and taught me how to think analytically. My education in science has dictated much of my career path, from me pursuing it in university with the idea to become a zoology professor to getting my Masters of Journalism degree so I could learn to share my enthusiasm for the subject with others.

Not that I know everything there is to know about science - that is one of the beauties of the subject. Every day more experiments are published, theories explored and ideas thought up. Every day more knowledge gets added to the fields of science, and it constantly changes - you could even say it evolves.

I try to keep on top of most of it, and I usually succeed in my major fields of interest: biology, zoology, ecology and the like.

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon an online quiz from the Pew Research Center, in co-operation with Smithsonian Magazine. The Pew center define themselves as "a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world."

Their online quiz was designed to test scientific knowledge for a random samples of Americans.  While the main study is completed, you can still take the test and see how well you did comparatively.

While the test was designed for the U.S., it is a good way to gauge your knowledge on various fields of science - from nanotechnology to climatology.

You can take the quiz here: http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/

And once you do, please let me know how you did! Either in the comment section below, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, email, etc...

SPACE!

As many of you know, a Canadian is currently in space, in charge of the International Space Station. His name is Commander Chris Hadfield, and not only is he up there right now, but is letting us tiny Earthlings know about it!

Hadfield is also tweeting from space, sharing glorious photos from a viewpoint that many of us will never have the opportunity to see.

If you look here, you can see all the wondrous photos he has taken of every continent and make yourself feel simultaneously very small and yet so very large.

But that is not all Hadfield is doing up there. He is also doing science!

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has its very own channel on YouTube and is constantly putting videos up there for Hadfield explaining how the ISS works, experiments that are going on and simple activities that become a bit of a chose in space - such as eating, shaving, sleeping and even crying!

Here are just a few examples of the videos (click here to see them all).