The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Astronomy, Education, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s something you don’t see every night: the far side of the Moon, photographed by one of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft. The Moon is “tidally locked” in its orbit around the Earth, meaning its rotational and orbital periods are exactly synchronized. As a result, we always see the same view of [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
With the largest solar storm since 2005 lighting up the night skies this week after a pair of solar flares sent streams of charged particles hurtling toward the earth, prophets of doom have been lighting up the Internet. Bob Thiel, a self-described “Church History and End Times Examiner” and author of 2012 and the Rise [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Film, Physics | ≅ 3 Comments
Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The doctors told him he would gradually lose control of every [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
In late November, NASA’s Curiosity, the world’s biggest extraterrestrial rover, began rocketing toward Mars (see photos of the launch here) in search of any hint that the red planet might have provided a home for microscopic life. The Curiosity will eventually reach Mars in August after covering 345 million miles. Earlier this year, an artist released a rather dramatic animation depicting key moments [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Comedy, Physics, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
With a fast-moving mixture of comedy and seriousness, an interview on The Colbert Report is something of an improvisational flying trapeze act. “Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer,” writes physicist Sean Carroll, “managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge.” Beneath [...]
≡ Category: Art, Astronomy, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
In 1961, John F. Kennedy asked a lot of the U.S. space program when he declared: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” NASA hit that ambitious target with a few [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Video - Science | ≅ 4 Comments
We have seen several time-lapse views of Earth from the International Space Station, but this may well be the best. Recorded from August to October, 2011, this HD footage has been smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc, and then coupled with music by Jan Jelinek. It gives you a pretty splendid view of the aurora [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Music, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Electronic musician John Boswell has just released the 12th installment in his “Symphony of Science” series. Onward to the Edge celebrates the adventure of space exploration and features the auto-tuned voices of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, particle physicist Brian Cox and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. It’s a mashup of material from four sources: Tyson’s My Favorite [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Physics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Sean Carroll, a physics professor at Caltech, has a knack for making science publicly accessible. He writes regularly for the blog Cosmic Variance, and you have perhaps seen him on the History Channel, Science Channel, or The Colbert Report. Yesterday, he announced that five lectures he gave at CERN now appear online, and it all begins [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Physics, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
When two teams of scientists announced in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down due to gravity but was in fact accelerating, the worldwide scientific community was shocked. The discovery turned many of the prevailing assumptions about the universe upside down. Looking back, perhaps the only thing that wasn’t a surprise [...]
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