No Ice at the North Pole

in Science | June 26th, 2008

The chance of ice dis­ap­pear­ing this sum­mer? 50/50. Wor­ri­some, I’d say.

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The Gas Mileage Illusion (and the Future of Electric Cars)

in Business, Science, Video - Science | June 26th, 2008

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 the state of elec­tric cars and when they may be ready for prime time. You’ll learn here about the Tes­la Road­ster, a high-per­for­mance elec­tric sports car, that goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 sec­onds and gets the equiv­a­lent of 256 miles per gal­lon. Pret­ty impres­sive, even if it costs $109k.

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Learn About Memory & Aging on YouTube

in Science, Video - Science, YouTube | June 18th, 2008

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 col­lec­tion to our larg­er list of edu­ca­tion­al video col­lec­tions on YouTube.

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Magnetic Fields Made Visible

in Science, Video - Science | June 4th, 2008

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.”

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Video Lectures for the Science Mind

in Science | May 6th, 2008

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 schol­ars and sci­en­tists at the most impor­tant and promi­nent events…” Among the most pop­u­lar lec­tures, you’ll find lec­tures along these lines: Fuzzy Log­ic, Where the Social Web Meets the Seman­tic Web, and an Inter­view with Tim Bern­ers Lee. But, you’ll also stum­ble upon a few non-sci­en­tif­ic talks giv­en by some well known names. Take for exam­ple Noam Chom­sky (Force, law and the prospects of sur­vival) and Umber­to Eco (On The His­to­ry of Ugli­ness).

For more uni­ver­si­ty con­tent, vis­it our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and our list of Free Online Cours­es, which includes a good deal of sci­en­tif­ic con­tent. Also see our Sci­ence Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

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Self-Regenerating Robots

in Science | April 29th, 2008

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 sci­ence pod­casts, check out our list here.

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Water Balloon Exploding at 2,000 Frames per Second

in Science | April 18th, 2008

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MIT’s (Free) Introduction to Physics

in Physics, Science | April 13th, 2008

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 cov­ers such oth­er top­ics as Flu­id Mechan­ics, Kinet­ic Gas The­o­ry, Bina­ry Stars, Neu­tron Stars, Black Holes, Res­o­nance Phe­nom­e­na, Musi­cal Instru­ments, and Stel­lar Col­lapse.

You can down­load the course lec­tures in video via iTunes or in var­i­ous for­mats here. (The course is also list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties, which now con­tains over 200 free cours­es.) For more lec­ture series by Wal­ter Lewin, look here (Elec­tric­i­ty and Mag­net­ism) and here (Vibra­tions and Waves).

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