High school and undergraduate students now have a ringside seat to watch atoms and molecules in super-slow motion and vivid color, as they jostle and bump each other within the cozy environs of a human cell or a beaker on a lab bench.
In “Big Numbers in Small Spaces: Simulating Atoms, Molecules and Brownian Motion,” students are invited to consider how many molecules are in a single drop of water, or a single cell, and then to fly in and find out.
“Big Numbers” is the newest instructional movie from CMIST (Computational Modules in Science Teaching), an educational outreach program of the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).
Joel Stiles, NRBSC director and associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, will introduced the new ten-and-a-half-minute CMIST movie at the National Science Bowl Finals Competition in Washington, DC on May 2. “To address the challenge of science learning for the video-gaming, tech-savvy, multi-tasking students of today,” says Stiles, “CMIST offers highly realistic and visually appealing content in easily usable form.”
In “Big Numbers,” students “see” carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water and glucose molecules. They watch red-blood cells passing through a vessel while discovering that each of these cells can hold about three-trillion water molecules. They see supercomputer simulations of realistic atomic sizes, covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, and other details of molecular structure and motion (molecular dynamics), before time and space leap ahead to illustrate Brownian movements of molecules on cellular and human scales.
Unlike many other animated teaching tools, CMIST movies are produced with highly realistic modeling and simulation software, such as MCell and DReAMM, programs co-authored by Stiles and used for realistic cell modeling in many research laboratories around the world. CMIST materials extrapolate from and bring life to classic textbook pictures and concepts. They seamlessly integrate content from biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and computational science, and are distributed online and as ready-to-use DVDs.
North Shore-based Bally Design will host an open house this Friday evening from 6-8pm for attendees of the IDSA Mideast District Conference. The Conference will be in town this weekend at the Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel. For more information, point your browser at 
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