≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, UC Berkeley, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Richard Muller teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents. You can download the course in audio (iTunes - Feed - MP3s) or watch it on YouTube (see first lecture below and get full course here). And now you can buy Muller’s new book. Just published by [...]
≡ Category: Science, Stanford, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
What’s the “theoretical minimum” for thinking intelligently about modern physics? Here’s your chance to find out. Below, you will find three courses (the first of eventually six) presented by Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who helped conceptualize string theory and has waged a long-running “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawking (see his new book on [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, UC Berkeley | ≅ Leave a Comment
How does modern neuroscience make sense of the current McCain-Obama race? Have a listen to Christopher Lydon’s fascinating conversation with George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (iTunes - MP3 - Feed - Web Site).
Lakoff is the author of the new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand [...]
≡ Category: Google, Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Not an obvious conclusion, I’ll agree. However, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, presents the argument like this: as all sorts of data accumulate into a vast ocean of petabytes, our ability to synthesize it all into elegant theories and laws will disappear. The story is the cover of this month’s issue of Wired but I [...]
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Article begins: “Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures. They have proposed [...]
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“In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.” If you want to get deeper into Greene’s work on string [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ 1 Comment
The chance of ice disappearing this summer? 50/50. Worrisome, I’d say.
≡ Category: Business, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Given the sudden national obsession with the price of oil & gas, it seems worth flagging this bit of video put together by two professors from Duke University. Some may find their perspective on gas mileage rather obvious, others not. Either way, it can’t hurt to get their point across.
Separately, here’s a quick piece on [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick public service announcement: UCSF, one of the leading medical schools in the US, has launched a Memory & Aging Channel on YouTube, whose purpose is to “educate patients, caregivers and health professionals about the various forms of neurodegenerative diseases.” The diseases covered here include Alzheimer’s, Frontotemporal dementia and Creutzfelt-Jakob. We’ve added the [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ 2 Comments
What do natural magnetic fields look like? This extraordinary footage from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory (UC Berkeley) gives you a glimpse and reveals their “chaotic, ever-changing geometries.” In terms of wow factor, it’s right up there with the Geometry of Sound.
≡ Category: Most Popular, Science, Video - Science | ≅ 5 Comments
On the cooler side ….
≡ Category: Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
We talk a good deal here about free university courses and lectures, and mostly we end up talking about the humanities. But here’s a good excuse to talk about the sciences, and particularly about computer science. A project started in Slovenia, Videolectures.net provides “free and open access of high quality video lectures presented by distinguished [...]
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The University of Pennsylvania has done it. They’ve created a robot that you can kick apart, and it knows how to reassemble itself. Eerie stuff. Give it a few decades, and these guys (the robots and the students) will be running the show. (Video added to our YouTube playlist)
via Marc Andreessen’s blog
For lots of good [...]
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Welcome to MIT. Here’s your introduction to Physics.
Today, we present Physics I: Classical Mechanics, a freshman course taught by Walter Lewin, the popular physics professor who was recently written up in The New York Times. The course covers the foundations of modern physics, which takes you from Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work to supernovas, and which [...]
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Einstein’s Theory of Relativity needs no introduction. Actually maybe it does since we’re not dealing with light concepts here.
Relativity in a Nutshell (MP3) offers a free, 30-minute introduction to Einstein’s theoretical work. The lecture was presented by Richard Wolfson of Middlebury College. And it’s coupled with a second free lecture called Einstein’s Miraculous Year. Both [...]
≡ Category: Google, Science | ≅ 1 Comment
Here’s what you get when Google engineers put their heads together with astronomers from large observatories: With Google Sky, “you can search for planets, listen to Earth & Sky podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky from the comfort of your browser.” The product was rolled out just [...]
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When he wasn’t busy hashing out the theory of quantum electrodynamics, Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was hit the bongos and sang praises to orange juice. Watch him go. (We’ve added the video to our YouTube Playlist, and you can also watch more serious Feynman lectures here).
via Metafilter
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Courtesy of Wired’s Blog, here are 10 videos displaying some rather cool chemistry experiments at work. Below, we’ve posted one video that will let you answer a question that you’ve almost certainly pondered for ages — can liquid nitrogen neutralize molten iron? (For more videos along these lines, check out this site.)
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≡ Category: Religion, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
At least in America, Charles Darwin has become the favorite whipping boy for many fundamentalists on the right. In one neat package, you get in Darwin all things deplorable. A godless “secular humanist” who denied the sanctity of humanity, God’s providence, and the integrity of the Bible. What more could you love to hate?
Somewhere lost [...]
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That’s one estimate of the size of our universe, and this video (added to our YouTube Playlist), using pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, tries to put it in perspective. For more amazing photos from the Hubble, see this collection.
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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
On Friday, we mentioned the BBC production called “What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity.” Below is another video by the same producers called “Psychedelic Science,” which surveys the past and present of psychedelic drugs, and the new era of scientists exploring ways to use these drugs again for therapeutic purposes (i.e., the treatment of [...]
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Speaking of psychedelics, we’ve posted a documentary below (yet another BBC production) that takes a not entirely flattering look at the life of Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor who went counterculture in 1960s and advocated the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. I remember seeing him years later when I was in college. My [...]
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Earlier this week, we highlighted a great conversation about whether we inherited morality from our primate ancestors. It raised the question whether our “inner chimp” tells us what is right or wrong.
Now, to switch gears just a bit, we bring you an interview with Neil Shubin that delves into your “inner fish” (MP3 - iTunes [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
This video was apparently developed with scenes taken from the BBC series Walking with Monsters. (But don’t completely quote me on that.)
For more smart videos, see our YouTube Playlist.
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Is morality a sixth sense that’s in all of us, and is it perhaps a product of our biological evolution? Writing recently in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker suggests that morality may well be hardwired. And he points to fascinating new research that backs up this belief. Pinker’s article covers [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
In November, Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft orbited the moon with a high-def camera onboard. You can see the first HD footage of an “earthrise” and “earthset” by checking out these still images (Earthrise and Earthset) or watching the video footage below, which has also been added to our YouTube playlist.
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Sometimes order seemingly comes out of nowhere. It just materializes. It happens in ant colonies, in cities, on the web, in the brain. This episode of Radio Lab (MP3 - iTunes - Feed) takes a fascinating look at how groups organize and direct themselves without the help of a leader, or some kind of central [...]
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What Have You Changed Your Mind About? — That is the question that the website, Edge.org, posed this year to 165 leading scientific minds. The answers, which are all over the map, can be found here. (Make sure that you scroll down the page a little.) Some of the more well-known thinkers to offer their [...]
