The Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (BIFoR) is home to the BIFoR F...

This Catalyst article describes how, as two tectonic plates separate, wide fissures appear in the ground in northern Ethiopia. Eventually a new ocean will form in the area affected. The Earth’s surface is not stable or permanent. The tectonic plates that form our planet’s outer crust are constantly moving around,...

This Catalyst article looks at orchids, their breeding, and why they have great commercial value. The family of Orchidaceae is one of the largest plant families, with about 900 genera and 25,000 species. Orchids are amongst the oldest flowering plants. After a long evolution, they have developed a very intimate...

Produced by Twig, this animated video is a clear and accessible explanation of how the Solar System fromed. The video describes how:

* the solar system grew from a ball of gas which formed the Sun

* gravity caused heavy material to cluster together and eventually form planets

* the inner...

In this activity the goal is for students to understand how the regression line is chosen. Autograph has a built-in facility for showing the squares of the residuals and is required to make this task work. Students are asked to explore what the lines that give the sum of the y-on-x residuals equal to zero have in...

In this activity, students are challenged to produce a scatter diagram consisting of ten points that give a product moment correlation coefficient of exactly 0.99. Students are expected to appreciate that the points will lie almost exactly on a straight line with at least one point being slightly out. The answer...

This Core Maths resource includes data from which students can calculate correlation coefficients. The resources includes a card sort that matches up scatter-graphs, data tables and product moment correlation coefficients. 

The teachers' notes give detailed teaching suggestions on how to introduce and...

This series of activities from NASA take a mathematical approach to looking at black holes. They are intended as supplementary problems for students looking for additional challenges in the maths and physical science post-16 curriculum. Problems consist of a student page and an answer sheet. Students need to be...

Black holes provide an important tool for testing the fundamental laws of the universe. This resource from the Institute of Physics, looks at the extreme physics associated with black holes, how we can spot them, and what roles they may play in galaxy formation.

This guide looks at stellar black holes and...

These career profiles provide information on the wide range of people involved in the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (...

This video and classroom task explores how the crew of the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project (@BlackSeaMAP...

This article explores the relationship between black holes and gravitational waves.

Catalyst is a science magazine for students aged 14-19 years. Find out more about Catalyst magazine: www.stem.org.uk/catalyst

This Catalyst article explains how chemists build molecular 'traps' to mimic the surface of a cell. To scientists, sugar is much more than a food; sugar molecules can also form polymers which act as ‘molecular bar codes’ to help cells recognise each other. The article describes how chemists made a synthetic...

Purpose: Observing changes over time can result in the collection of a lot of data. One method of keeping a central record for the class is to set up a blog or a wiki for the duration of the investigation where photographs, measurements, results tables and graphs can be collated. Using a digital record rather than...