fields

Hurricane Laura plowed through the heart of Louisiana’s oil and chemical industries as a powerful Category 4 storm, leaving a chlorine plant on fire and the potential for more hazardous damage in its wake. The burning BioLab facility sent dark smoke and chlorine gas into the air over the small community of Westlake, near Lake Charles, and shut down Interstate 10, officials said. The governor warned residents, already reeling from the hurricane’s damage, to stay in their homes, close their windows and doors, and turn off any air conditioning that might still be operating. While the full health impacts of the fire weren’t immediately known, a storm-driven chlorine gas release in a vulnerable community is the type of worst-case scenario that scientists and engineers like myself have warned ...

The big idea Students who have the kinds of talent scientists and engineers need to solve problems by visualizing how objects could be rotated, combined or changed in three dimensions often struggle at school. These students, whose strong spatial talents allow them to imagine new technological innovations, generally fare worse than their classmates who excel at English and math. In addition, as we observed in an article recently published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, there’s some evidence that spatially gifted and talented people are less likely to go to college. And, if they do enroll, they’re less likely to get their degrees. After looking at three major databases that are representative of the U.S. population and that span six decades, we estimate that between 2 mi...

Tag: fields

A burning chemical plant may be just the tip of Hurricane Laura’s damage in this area of oil fields and industry

Many students with the potential to excel in STEM fields struggle in school