We are all told that the Earth turns and we accept that. But an actual demonstration of how scientists proved this can have lasting impact on the acceptance of this authoritative statement and also on how students judge other authoritative statements for themselves, scientific or otherwise. Satisfying oneself that Earth does actually rotate shows what can be done to encourage such thinking.

If you have a clear night and you're somewhat removed from city lights, many satellites are fairly easy objects to see. They look like faint stars (occasionally bright stars) gliding across the night sky. Sometimes satellites look like airplanes, but airplanes have blinking lights that are usually colored. What's interesting about Iridium satellites, from a star gazing point of view, is that they can suddenly brighten and may easily outshine every star or planet in the sky.

In the state of Maryland, a local politician claimed that sea level is rising because there are too many people putting boats on the open ocean! This is a true story! Is this or similar claims possible? Imagine if all of the people in the world agreed to go float on the ocean at the same time! Could that result in a significant sea level rise, perhaps even destroy low-lying nations such as Bangladesh?

You can find statistics in every day life. Counting problems arise in situations where selections are made as in the following example of corrupted politicians.

Human beings' color vision allows us to distinguish both large and subtle differences between objects of similar color. Consider a forest, with its multitude of greens. But objects with similar colors are not necessarily the same, as the jade and seaweed found on some Pacific coast beaches illustrate. Researchers, chemists, criminalists, and many other investigators study and compare objects and learn about their compositions by breaking the light down into its composite colors, a technique called spectroscopy