This article describes early studies of the auroras, including techniques used from 1960 when Henry Brecher first spent the winter at Byrd Station in Antarctica.

Dancing Lights: Exploring the Aurora through Art and Writing is a science-in-literacy program about the aurora. Students in grades 3-5 write and illustrate their perceptions, ideas, and facts pertaining to auroral science. This short educator background primer was based upon interactions with teachers during Dancing Lights workshops and is meant as a quick guide to the science of the aurora.

In this lesson, students begin to focus on the torque associated with a current carrying loop in a magnetic field. Students are prompted with example problems and use diagrams to visualize the vector product. In addition, students learn to calculate the energy of this loop in the magnetic field. Several example problems are included and completed as a class. A homework assignment is also attached as a means of student assessment.

Students learn more about magnetism, and how magnetism and electricity are related in electromagnets. They learn the fundamentals about how simple electric motors and electromagnets work. Students also learn about hybrid gasoline-electric cars and their advantages over conventional gasoline-only-powered cars.

In this activity, students take the age old concept of etch-a-sketch a step further. Using iron filings, students begin visualizing magnetic field lines. To do so, students use a compass to read the direction of the magnet's magnetic field. Then, students observe the behavior of iron filings near that magnet as they rotate the filings about the magnet. Finally, students study the behavior of iron filings suspended in mineral oil which displays the magnetic field in three dimensions.

Students are introduced to the role of electricity and magnetism as they build speakers. They also explore the properties of magnets, create electromagnets, and determine the directions of magnetic fields. They conduct a scientific experiment and show cause-effect relationships by monitoring changes in the speaker's movement as the amount or the direction of the current change.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"As we go about our daily lives, we aren’t generally aware of the forces generated by solar activity or the earth’s magnetic field. While these planetary changes are well documented, precisely how they affect human beings is less clear. To answer this question, researchers have turned to the autonomic nervous system – the subconscious control system that regulates bodily functions such as breathing and digestion. Their findings suggest that our nervous systems are well attuned to the energetic fluctuations that ripple through our solar system. The work builds on observations made by the famed astronomer Alexander Chizhevsky during World War I. He noted that battles intensify during peak solar flare periods and that major human events and behaviors closely follow the cycle of the sun – which led to the hypothesis that some unknown solar forces affect human health and behavior, providing a provocative link between events occurring in our solar system and life on Earth..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.