Interesting news, for me at least, since my daughter has type 1 diabetes.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/glucose-monitor-0809.html

These guys are using raman spectroscopy to non-invasively measure blood-sugar levels e.g. injecting not necessary.

Unfortunately the technique does not measure the blood sugar directly, but instead measures sugar levels within the institial fluid just below the skin. This is less than ideal since sugar levels in interstitial fluid time-lag the levels in the blood. To get around this problem, they measure the rate at which glucose diffuses into the interstitial fluid. Sounds like differential equations, so learn your maths kids!!!!

Educating your children is not something that can be done in a day. Rather, it takes many years of constant input and training to obtain the smarts.

The best way to gradually accumulate knowledge is to do something every day (and or course have a [sun]-day of rest each week) and the most efficient way of gradually accumulating knowledge is to have a strong routine. Yes, hard as that can often be, routines work well and discipline pays off. No pain, no gain, as the saying goes.

We start at 8am each morning. Bible/theology reading comes first, followed by music practice, followed by 50 minutes of maths, and so on.

Training Your Children to Manage Money

“In the days of the Klondike gold rush, two miners struck a huge deposit. Feverishly excited, they unearthed more and more gold each day. Meanwhile they neglected to store up provisions for the winter. Then came the first blizzard. Nearly frozen, one scrawled a shaky note explaining their predicament. Months later a prospecting party discovered the note, along with two frozen bodies lying on top of a huge pile of gold.”

More to read here.

This is a nice looking book that has lots of science experiments such as blowing up a balloon with a banana!!! Very adventurous, and no nitrogen rich fertilizer or plastic explosives necessary. I know one very prominent New Zealand scientist who blew other things up when he was a kid and it didn’t appear to harm him too much…

Btw, did you notice how hard it is to buy a plastic gun for a boy these days? Of course, kids that have these things taken away by the left (hand) just replace their fun using the right hand of Xbox and Nintendo and Playstation (and probably obesity to go with it).

PS. I hope you are using Google Books to find information and book previews. The book mentioned above for example has a few experiments that you can read online.

Rebecca Keller (Wikipedia entry) has written, with the help of a few others, a series of science textbooks.  She has a PhD in Biophysical Chemistry.

Her Wikipedia entry lists the numerous books and textbooks she has written, and samples chapters for several of them are available on her website here.

Who uses Real Science-4-Kids?

Home schoolers in all 50 US states, as well as in Latin America, South America, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Korea, now use Real Science-4-Kids.  An active Yahoo group of 1,200+ maintains notes on the curriculum. In addition, a number of charter, private and public schools use RS4K.

Rebecca Keller interviewed

This episode of ID the Future features part two of an interview with Dr. Rebecca Keller, who discusses the nature of science and interpretation and how it applies to science education.