Virginia school students learn from fish!
You can find the answer to that in various schools across Virginia that are taking part in the Virginia Trout in the Classroom program. It comes courtesy of Trout Unlimited and the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.
Amherst County Public Schools have adopted the program. Students there are raising brook trout in their classrooms and eventually releasing them into the Pedlar River, a native trout stream.
'We get eggs from the Department of Wildlife Resources in the fall, and they hatch those eggs and raise them in the classroom in tanks,' said Amherst County Public Schools Superintendent William Wells. 'The trout that make it into the spring are about an inch to two inches long; we put them here in Pedlar River.'
Wells actually leads the streamside study that includes releasing tiny brook trout, then surveying the river for other aquatic life, and assessing the water quality in the stream. On this day, it was a third grade class from Temperance Elementary School releasing their trout.
'I think I'm going to find a couple of crawfish, maybe like those, maybe like mayflies, or minnows,' said third-grader Grace Ramsey.
After releasing her brook trout, she was one of several students who broke up into groups to flip rocks to collect was then flowed downstream in a net. Based on the types of aquatic life they found like insects or other macro invertebrates, the students could follow a formula to measure water quality.
Based on what they discovered, the student found the quality of water in the Pedlar River to be in the excellent range.
The program is stealthy in the way it teaches. The children thought they were just having fun, but in reality, they were getting lessons in chemistry, biology, math, hydrology, earth science, and a host of other academic disciplines.
'It's definitely hands-on,' said Dr. Wells.
And, because it is hands-on, the lessons are likely to stick. Education experts have found children who practice hands-on learning develop a connection to and a better grasp of the concepts involved. That translates to greater knowledge retention.
That is good for the kids and good for the rest of us, because these are lessons that will last a lifetime.
'They need to understand that as stewards of the environment they have to be able to take care of what we have, and if we don't take care of it, no one else will,' Dr. Wells said. 'As much as I can get the kids out here to experience this, I think the better we are.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Scientific American
11-07-2025
- Scientific American
We're Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells
Many people fear that if fully sentient machine intelligence ever comes to exist, it will take over the world. The real threat, though, is the risk of tech companies enslaving robots to drive up profits, author Martha Wells suggests in her far-future-set book series The Murderbot Diaries. In Wells's world, machine intelligences inhabit spaceships and bots, and half-human, half-machine constructs offer humans protection from danger (in the form of 'security units'), as well as sexual pleasure ('comfort units'). The main character, a security unit who secretly names itself Murderbot, manages to gain free will by hacking the module its owner company uses to enslave it. But most beings like it aren't so lucky. In Murderbot's world, corporations control almost everything, competing among themselves to exploit planets and indentured labor. The rights of humans and robots often get trampled by capitalist greed —echoing many of the real-world sins Wells attributes to today's tech companies. But just outside the company territory (called the 'Corporation Rim') is an independent planet named Preservation, a relatively free and peaceful society that Murderbot finds itself, against all odds, wanting to protect. Now, with the TV adaptation Murderbot airing on Apple TV+, Wells is reaching a whole new audience. The show has won critical acclaim (and, at the time of writing, an audience rating of 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), and it is consistently ranked among the streamer's most-watched series. It was recently renewed for a second season. 'I'm still kind of overwhelmed by everything happening with the show,' Wells says. 'It's hard to believe.' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Scientific American spoke to Wells about the difference between today's AI and true machine intelligence, artificial personhood and neurodivergent robots. [ An edited transcript of the interview follows.] The Corporation Rim feels so incredibly prescient, perhaps even more now than when you published the first book in the series in 2017. Yes, disturbingly so. This corporate trend has kind of been percolating over the past 10 or 15 years—this was the direction we've been going in as a society. Once we have the idea of corporations having personhood, that a corporation is somehow more of a person than an actual human individual, then it really starts to show you just how bad it can get. I feel like that's been possible at any time; it's not just a far-future thing. But depicting it in the far future makes it less horrific, I guess. It allows you to think about these things without feeling like you're watching the news. Currently the idea of going to Mars is being pushed by private companies as an answer to all the problems. But [the implication is that those who go will be] some billionaires and their coterie and their indentured servants, and that will somehow be paradise for them and just the reverse for everybody else. With corporations taking over, that's when profit is the bottom line—profit and personal aggrandizement of whoever's running it. You can't have the kind of serious, careful scientific progress that we've had with NASA. This world that you've created is so interesting because it's a dystopia in some ways. The Corporation Rim certainly is. And yet Preservation is kind of a utopia. Do you think of them in those terms? Not really, because by that standard, we live in a dystopia now, and I think that the term dystopia is almost making light of reality. It's like if you call something a dystopia, you don't have to worry about fixing it or doing anything to try to alleviate the problems. It feels hopeless. And if you have something you call a utopia, then it's perfect, and you don't have to think about problems it might have or how you could make it better for people. So I don't really think in those terms because they feel very limited. And clearly in the Corporation Rim, there are still people who manage to live there, mostly okay, just like we do here, now. And in Preservation, there are still people who have prejudices, and they still have some things to work on. But they are actually working on them, which sets it apart from the Corporation Rim. One of the central themes of the Murderbot stories is this idea of personhood. Your books make it very clear that Murderbot, as a part-human, part-artificial construct, is definitely a person. With our technology today, do you think artificial intelligence, large language models or ChatGPT should be considered people? Well, Murderbot is a machine intelligence, and ChatGPT is not. It's called artificial intelligence as a marketing tool, but it's not actually artificial intelligence. A large language model is not a machine intelligence. We don't really have that right now. We have algorithms that can be very powerful and can parse large amounts of data. But they do not have a sentient individual intelligence at this time. I still think we're probably years and years and years away from anyone creating an actual artificial intelligence. So Murderbot is fiction, because machine intelligence right now is fiction. A large language model that pattern matches words, sometimes sort of sounds vaguely like it might be talking to you and sometimes sounds like it's just putting patterns together in ways that look really bizarre—that's not anywhere close to sentient machine intelligence. I find myself feeling really conflicted because I often resent the intrusion of these language models and products that are being called artificial intelligence into modern life today. And yet I feel such affection and love for fictional artificial intelligences. Yes! I wonder if that's one thing that's enabled the whole scam of AI to get such a foothold. Because so many people don't like having it in their stuff, knowing that it's basically taking all your data, anything you're working on, anything you're writing, and putting it into this churn of a pattern-matching algorithm. Probably the fictional artificial and machine intelligences over the years have sort of convinced people that this is possible and that it's happening now. People think talking to these large language models is somehow helping them gain sentience or learn more, when it's really not. It's a waste of your time. Humans are really prone to anthropomorphizing objects, especially things like our laptop and phone and all these things that respond to what we do. I think it's just kind of baked into us, and it's being taken advantage of by corporations to try to make money, to take jobs away from people and for their own reasons. My favorite character in the story is ART, who is a spaceship—that is, an artificial intelligence controlling a spaceship. How did you think about differentiating this character from the half-machine, half-human Murderbot? Ship-based consciousnesses have been around in fiction for a long time, so I can't take credit for that. But because Murderbot relies on human neural tissue, that's why it is subject to the anxiety and depression and other things that humans have. And ART is not. ART was very intentionally created to work with humans and be part of a of a team, so it's never had to deal with a lot of the negative things that Murderbot has. Someone on the internet described ART as, basically, if Skynet was an academic with a family. That's one of the best descriptions I think I've ever seen. One of the reasons that I and so many people love this series is how well it explores neurodiversity. You have this diversity of kinds of intelligences, and they parallel a lot of the different types of neurodiversity we see among humans in the real world. Were you thinking of it this way when you designed this universe? Well, it taught me about my own neurodiversity. I knew I had problems with anxiety and things like that, but I didn't know I probably had autism. I didn't know a lot of other things until writing this particular story and then having people talk to me about it. They're like, 'How did you manage to portray neurodiversity like this?' And I'm thinking, 'That's just how my brain is the way I think people think.' Until Murderbot, I don't think I realized the extent to which it affects my writing. I have had a lot of people tell me that it helped them work out things about themselves and that it was just nice to see a character who thought and felt a lot of the same things they did. Do you think science fiction is an especially helpful genre to explore some of these aspects of humanity? It can be. I don't know if it always has fiction is written by people, and the good and bad aspects of their personality go into it. A genre changes as the people who are working in it change. So I think it's been better lately because we've finally gotten some more women and people of color and neurodivergent people and disabled people's voices being heard now. And it's made for a lot of really exciting work coming out. Lately, a lot of people are calling it another golden age of science fiction. When I wrote [the first book in the series], All Systems Red, I put a lot of myself into it. And I think one of the reasons why people identify with a lot of different aspects of it is because I put a lot of genuine emotion into it and I was very specific about the way Murderbot was feeling about certain things and what was going on with it. I think there's been a fallacy in fiction, particularly genre fiction, that if you make a character very generic, that lets more people identify with it. But that's actually not true. The more specific someone is about their feelings and their issues and what's going on with them, the more people can identify with that because of that specificity.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
Anglers catch fish for science and to save a species vital to every state on the Atlantic coast
HIGHLANDS, N.J. (WFXR) — 'There she is, there she is, Fish on, fish on,' shouted Chuck Manny as a huge striped bass began to peel line off of a reel off the coast of northern New Jersey. Manny is an angler, one of the top striped bass sportfishermen around, but in this case, his fish-catching efforts are all in the name of science. Every striped bass Manny and the people on his boat catch, is tagged and tracked for research. Manny is one of thousands of charter captains and anglers who tag fish through a research program run by Gray Fish Tag Research. 'We tag and we research fish migrations,' said Roxanne Wilmer of Gray Fish Tag Research. 'We work with charter captains all around the world, so we have about 10-thousand charter captains we work with. What they do as they're releasing fish, they're tagging them with our tags.' Gray uses two types of tags. One is a 'spaghetti' tag; a thin green tube with a tag number on one side and a phone number and web address for Gray on the other. Anglers who catch a fish with those tags are asked to call the number or visit the website to report it. That way researchers can track the movement of where the fish was caught the first time and then every time after. Knowing those migrations is vital to understanding fish behavior. It is not uncommon to find a fish tagged in Virginia or Maryland several months later off the coast of New York or Massachusetts. The other type of tag is a satellite tag. It stays on the fish for six months collecting data on movement, depth, and water temperature. After six months, it detaches on its own and floats to the surface where the data is uploaded to a satellite. That data is collected by Gray. Thought to stay primarily coastal, those satellite tags have found striped bass range farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than previously thought. On this day, the species of interest were Atlantic striped bass or stripers as they are commonly known. Striped bass are a keystone species. Found in the waters of every U.S. state from Florida to Maine, they are a vital part of the commercial and sportfishing economies of those states, accounting for billions of dollars in economic impact. As of late, striper numbers are down due to poor spawns and other factors. That makes knowing as much about them as possible maybe more important than ever before. The data collected by Gray is made available for free to fisheries managers and researchers. 'So that we can get a better idea of their behavior and migration, but not just because it's static but because it changes as well,' said Stockton University researcher and professor Dr. Adam Aguiar. 'These fish are an important natural resource, not just to anglers, but to everybody, and they're an important aspect of the food chain, too.' Aguiar was one of a number of people on Manny's boat that day. In addition to researching stripers, he loves to catch them. Catching them is the only way to get tags into them. In this case, Manny was trolling live eels, a bait stripers find delectable. It was not long before Manny started boating stripers, sometimes three and four at a time in a scene that looked like organized chaos with anglers running for rods bowed double as huge striped bass peeled line off of reels. 'Mayhem's good,' laughed Manny. And it is in this case because these fish are being caught and released for science mayhem is good, and that is something Manny feels good about because it helps to preserve this iconic species he loves. 'The only thing that I know is that I don't know and that's why it's so important to do all this research on these fish,' said Manny. 'They have tails, they go where they want to go. They go where the bait goes; the temperature, whatever it is. All those satellite tags just prove that none of us really know and that's why you need to do more research.' Once a fish is caught, things move quickly. The striper is measured and weighed, tagged, and then released back into the water. The tags are inserted into a back muscle. It does not hurt or affect the fish. While Atlantic striped bass can be found from the Canadian Maritimes to Florida at various times of the year, the vast majority are spawned and reared in three places: The Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and the Hudson River. In the spring, schools of large striped bass are often found off of New Jersey and New York. Because of their migratory nature, they have a wide-ranging effect on the sport and commercial fisheries of the entire east coast. That is why a Virginia charter captain was on this trip, doing his part to help preserve a species that he will target next winter when he runs charters out of Cape Charles, Virginia. 'The fish that we're tagging today are the same fish that we're catching in the Chesapeake Bay in December and January,' said Captain Johnny Mathena of Patriot Fishing Charters. 'They are a migratory fish. We are tagging them so we can follow their migration patterns.' Knowing as much about striped bass can help fisheries managers reverse the downward trend in their numbers to prevent what happened in the 1980s when the species nearly collapsed and a fishing moratorium had to be instituted for several years until they rebounded in the 1990s. 'If you don't have data, then you don't know what's going on with the fishery,' said Wilmer. 'We have actual hands-on data. We get countless recoveries every week. If you don't have that information, then how do you know what the fish are actually doing?' This is part of a continuing occasional series on efforts to preserve Atlantic striped bass, which are Virginia's state saltwater fish and vital to the economies of every Atlantic coast state. On the day of this story, Gray Fish Tag Research held its annual Striper Quest, a one day tournament effort to catch and tag as many striped bass as possible. More than 200 fish were tagged for research on that day. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Chicago Tribune
03-06-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Review: In Lifeline Theatre's ‘War of the Worlds,' comedy wins out over human drama
Lifeline Theatre's new adaptation of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel 'The War of the Worlds' has many of the hallmarks of a campy sci-fi B movie: cheesy dialogue, exaggerated stock characters and visuals with the low-budget charm of mid-aughts 'Doctor Who.' With these bold stylistic choices by adapter John Hildreth and director Heather Currie, the play satirizes contemporary American society in an unconventional take on the science fiction classic. While Lifeline's version has its entertaining moments, the comedic approach comes at the expense of the story's human drama. Hildreth's loose adaptation changes the setting from southern England to northern Illinois, name-checking a litany of familiar cities, suburbs and rural townships throughout the play. The scientists who first discovered unusual activity happening on Mars work at 'the renowned Illinois Technological Institute, outside of Skokie, Illinois,' a fictional locale that is repeatedly introduced with the exact same wording until it becomes a mantra of sorts. This setting makes sense for a Chicago production, more so than English towns such as Woking and Weybridge, but the hyperlocal references sometimes feel a bit too cute. Professor Wittington (Mark Mendelsohn) narrates much of the action, and the dialogue is interspersed with clips of fictional TV news broadcasts — a nod to the format of Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio adaptation, which reportedly convinced some listeners that aliens were actually attacking the United States. The professor and a small crew of scientists from the Institute, including an artificially intelligent humanoid called Assistant Professor Whitehurst (Amanda Link), investigate a series of strange explosions on the surface of Mars. Months later, the mystery is solved when cylindrical space capsules begin to crash on Earth, letting loose an army of giant metallic tripods wielding weapons that blast deadly heat rays. With Illinois at the epicenter of a national and potentially global crisis, the play satirizes a range of all-American ideologues: conspiracy theorists, doomsday preachers, isolationists and jingoistic military types. Even J.B. Pritzker gets a sendup with Anthony Kayer's performance as the fictional governor of Illinois. Reading 'The War of the Worlds' as a satire is not a novel interpretation; Wells himself acknowledged that the book's anti-imperial themes were inspired by the brutality of European colonialism. But at Lifeline, the comedic tone is dialed up so high that the social commentary loses some of its bite. The production team augments the cast's over-the-top performances with floor-to-ceiling tentacles (set designer Lindsay Mummert), bursts of green light from the heat rays (lighting designer Sarah Riffle) and warbling sound effects that evoke a 1950s sci-fi film (sound designer Joe Griffin). The onstage violence is occasionally macabre but never gruesome; when Whitehurst, the android, loses both arms in battle, their silver-tipped severed limbs go flying (props designer Jenny Pinson), but none of the human characters shed visible blood. Later, during the dissection of a captured Martian, the creature's blue and orange color scheme mimics the Illini jacket that the governor previously appeared in (costume designer Aly Amidei). What gets lost in this inventive production are the human relationships that could give it more heart. For most of the play, Professor Wittington thinks that his wife, Dr. Wittington (Jocelyn Maher), has been killed by the Martians, but this emotional arc is overshadowed by the narrative weight his character bears. Since Lifeline can't recreate an alien invasion onstage any more realistically than Shakespeare could cram armies into his 'wooden O,' audience members must exercise their imaginations to picture the battles that Professor Wittington describes. There's little room for character development amid the action sequences, so the play doesn't have much of an emotional impact despite its high stakes for humankind. The inhabitants of Earth never get answers to the question of what they've done to deserve this catastrophe, but the play points the finger back at humanity by claiming that war is our greatest export and that the militaristic Martians offer a glimpse into our collective future. Toward the end, Whitehurst has a crisis of faith, revealing that the scientists have programmed the android with some sense of belief in god and an afterlife. It's a strange interlude that hints at the often-fraught relationship between science and religion. While hardcore sci-fi fans may be disappointed by this 'War of the Worlds,' those who appreciate the genre's more irreverent side will likely enjoy it. Lifeline never shies away from scaling epic stories to fit onto its small stage, and the company's gutsy creativity is evident in this latest world 'War of the Worlds' (2.5 stars) When: Through July 13 Where: Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes Tickets: $20-$45 at 773-761-4477 and
