≡ 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, History, Online Courses, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
How about a blog post that doesn’t deal with the controversy surrounding The New Yorker’s clumsy attempt at satirizing Barack and Michelle Obama …. ? (Update: See the imagined, right-wing satirical cartoon of John McCain.)
When Stanford launched its new YouTube channel several weeks ago, it debuted with a complete series of lectures from an undergraduate [...]
≡ Category: Google, Most Popular, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science, YouTube | ≅ 3 Comments
Smart video collections keep appearing on YouTube. But rather antithetical to the ethos of its parent company (Google), YouTube unfortunately makes these collections difficult to find. So we’ve decided to do the job for them. These enriching/educational videos come from media outlets, cultural institutions, universities and non-profits. There are about 70 collections in total, and [...]
≡ Category: Media, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Late in the week, TEDTalks named its top ten videos. Whether this is a quantitative or qualitative judgment, I am not sure. On the list, you’ll find Al Gore talking about how to avert a climate crisis, David Gallo showing amazing underwater creatures, and Ken Robinson describing why schools kill creativity (we’ve posted that one [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
“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: 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, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
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).
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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
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: History, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
What set the stage for Silicon Valley to change the entire landscape of technology? What made companies like Google, Yahoo and Hewlett Packard possible? According to this talk presented at Google by Steve Blank, it all goes back to the aftermath of World War II. It starts when Stanford University and its engineering/electronics department began [...]
≡ 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 [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ 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.
≡ 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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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
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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This is rather extraordinary. Here’s what Hurricane Dean looked like for the crew flying in a NASA space shuttle last August. You can check out more NASA videos on YouTube here. It’s also added to our YouTube playlist. Thanks to one of our readers for pointing this out.
Related Content:
What Genius Looks Like at Zero Gravity
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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Great historical footage. No commentary really needed. (If you want to see the liftoff, look here.)
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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Funny and yet it counts as science.
Chris Hardwick and Rainn Wilson, star of The Office, “dive deep into the chemical guts of a common household product” to discover “What’s Inside.” For more information, visit http://www.pbs.org/wiredscience (Source: BoingBoing)
≡ Category: Religion, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this week, PBS’s NOVA aired a two-hour program revisiting the controversial federal case, Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, which asked whether “intelligent design” could be taught in American schools alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution. Intelligent design essentially holds that “life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by [...]
≡ Category: Religion, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
When debating religion, you can take the low road (e.g., Ann Coulter’s recent flirtation with anti-semitism) or the high road. Here’s Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist and evolutionary biologist at Oxford, having a high-minded conversation about the existence (or non-existence) of God with Alister McGrath, who is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University and [...]
≡ Category: Video - Science, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State, released a smart video that immediately went viral on the internet. It was called Web 2.0… the Machine is Us/ing Us and it cleverly explained the often vague concept of Web 2.0 and why it matters. Now Wesch has launched another [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
PBS’s NOVA recently aired a three-hour mini-series, The Elegant Universe, that introduced TV viewers to string theory - a radical “theory of everything” that unites major laws of physics and offers a unified explanation for everything that happens in the universe. The program was hosted by Brian Green, a string theorist who wrote a runaway [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
And now we bring you a public service announcement….
Below, you can watch Al Gore talk about tangible ways that you can be a good environmental citizen. The first 5 minutes start with some wit and banter that would have served him well in 2000; the next 10 minutes get down to some business.
A few, quick [...]
≡ Category: Harvard, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
In 2003, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a widely read essay that called for an “Encyclopedia of Life.” Summed up simply, Wilson had in mind “an online reference source and database” that catalogued “every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet,” not to mention the many organisms [...]
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These days, there is no shortage of public thinkers launching a vigorous defense of atheism. Most recently, Christopher Hitchens has come out with God is Not Great. And, holding true to form, he has used this book and related media campaign as an opportunity to fight out the ugly culture wars once again. All [...]
≡ Category: Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Seed Magazine has an hour-long video conversation with David Byrne ("Rock’s renaissance man") and Daniel Levitin (neuroscientist) about the connections between music and cognition. Check out the highlights below or view the full interview here.
Click To Play (courtesy of Seed Magazine–see the article here)
Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music came out last year, [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Stephen Hawking recently climbed aboard a jet nicknamed the "Vomit Comet," which carried Hawking and his medical staff to 32,000 feet and then began a parabolic dive that put the celebrity physicist into a state of weightlessness. You can catch Hawking at zero gravity in the video below:
