By Ellen Chrismer

First-year student James Ferguson is "not a science person." He plans to major in history, but like any UC Davis student, Ferguson still needs to take a science class to fulfill UC Davis’ general education requirements.

Luckily, he found a new spring quarter class, "Science in the News," taught by geology faculty members Eldridge Moores and Richard Cowen to meet that obligation. And so far, he says, he’s enjoying himself.

"It doesn’t look like a traditional science class, which I’ve heard horror stories about," Ferguson said. "It seems like a real-world science class."

The lecture and lab class is just that, with topics focused on the science behind media discussions of California’s recent water shortage and energy crisis and the Mars orbit by an American spacecraft. Along the way, students will study a little physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry and other sciences.

"(The class) makes science more accessible," Moores said. "There’s a tremendous ignorance about science, but it’s really something everyone in society should know about."

For many students, a geology-based course is a good place to start, he said. "That’s what people are really curious about, themselves and their surroundings."

But the class was also designed to appeal to science majors, said Peter Rock, dean of mathematics and physical sciences, who led a committee to develop the class. "Basically what we are doing is trying to get students to think of the bigger picture," he said. "In chemistry classes you are thinking about chemistry. In math class, you are thinking about math."

First-year wildlife, conservation and fisheries biology major Mary Nicholl says the class will help prepare her for a future in research by teaching her to explain her specialized work in laymen's terms. While taking the course students subscribe to a Listserv that offers a daily download of scientific news stories.

"I need to know how to project my research to the masses," Nicholl said.

Student Peter Knudson is a second-year geology major. But he doesn’t mind a refresher in the basics for those who don’t have a science background. "You need to make sure everyone has the same tools to work with," he said.

During last Friday’s lab meeting, the 245-pound Knudson stood a six pack of soda cans to help demonstrate some physical science concepts to the class. The cans held under Knudson’s weight because of their strong pillar shape and because of the high pressure the soda was under, Cowen said.

He and Moores devised that lesson to teach the students about the strength of different materials. "When you get into the design of spacecraft you have to understand that things are carefully engineered to get the acceleration to get them off," Moores said.

But like the news, the class can be unpredictable. During the lecture portion of that day’s class, Cowen decided to tackle a topic not on the syllabus.

"I had written this great lecture about rockets, and I got in this morning and tuned into the Web, and there was this great story about an asteroid that is going to hit the Earth," he told his class. "So I dropped everything."

That day the class read a BBC on-line story about scientists’ discovery that a giant space rock, seven-tenth of a mile wide, has a one-in-300 chance of striking earth in 2880.

"This is the biggest, most important threat to Earth that has been identified," Cowen said.

To explain how scientists arrived at their conclusion, he taught students about the concepts of range and trajectory, using the work of a centerfielder tracking the flight of a baseball.

The class is a work in progress, Moores said. "One of the challenges is to bring a lot of threads of things together."

He and Rock, however, say they hope that "Science in the News" will be the first in a series of courses designed to make students "science literate."