If I had my way, more academics would care about teaching beyond the walls of the academy. They’d teach to a broader public and consider ways to make their material more engaging, if not inspiring, to new audiences. You can find examples out there of teachers who are doing it right. The heirs of Carl Sagan–Brian Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye–know how to light a spark and make their material come alive on TV and YouTube. How they do this is not exactly a mystery, not after M.I.T. posted online a course called “Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show.”
Taught at M.I.T. over a month-long period, Becoming the Next Bill Nye was designed to teach students video production techniques that would help them “to engagingly convey [their] passions for science, technology, engineering, and/or math.” By the end of the course, they’d know how to script and host a 5‑minute YouTube show.
Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated humankind for centuries upon centuries; long before the X‑Files popularized the declaration, we’ve wanted to believe. But this curiosity-driven desire goes hand-in-hand with mortal fear: what if intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe, and it decides to come to Earth and exterminate us? Turn-of-the-century sci-fi master H.G. Wells tapped into that emotional current with The War of the Worlds; forty years later, Orson Welles tapped it deeper still with his adaptation of Wells’ novel, “a certain notorious radio broadcast which some of you may remember.”
That’s how Welles puts it from the narrator’s seat of Who’s Out There?, a half-hour television documentary originally broadcast in 1971. “It starts off strong with its Doctor Who-esque credits sequence,” writes io9’s Katharine Trendacosta. “Then Welles talks about becoming friends with H.G. Wells after his infamous War of the Worlds radio play. Then they interview people who had been scared by the broadcast. It gets barely more normal as it goes on. Once Carl Sagan showed up, my head exploded.”
I listened to Welles’ War of the Worlds over and over again on tape as a kid, but by that time it had already passed into the realm of historical artifact. When Who’s Out There? debuted, however, that infamous Halloween broadcast had aired less than 35 years before (Who’s Out There? itself, by comparison, aired 45 years ago), so the fright it caused remained in living memory. Even more recently, David Bowie had capitalized artistically on a new wave of outer-space fascination with “Space Oddity” in 1969 and, more directly, “Life on Mars?” two years later.
“Life on Mars?” acts as more or less the animating question of this documentary, which both examines the then-current evidence for such a phenomenon, on the Red Planet or elsewhere, and ponders why we so often assume that visitors from outer space will come with malevolent intentions. (Welles wonders aloud if it has to do with our having named Mars after the Roman god of war, and I suppose he has a point.) Still, our curiosity hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by ExoMars, the joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency which today launches probes out to search for, yes, life on mars. If whoever’s out there won’t come to us, well then, we’ll just have to go to them.
Who can now deny that, in the internet, we have the greatest educational tool ever conceived by mankind? Surely no Open Culture reader would deny it, anyway, nor could they fail to take an interest in a new startup aiming to increase the internet’s educational power further still: Pindex, which calls itself “a Pinterest for education.” No other company has yet staked that territory out, and certainly no other company has done it with the support of Stephen Fry.
The Telegraph’s Cara McCoogan describes Pindex, which launched just last month (visit it here), as “a self-funded online platform that creates and curates educational videos and infographics for teachers and students,” founded and run by a four-person team.
Fry’s role in the quartet includes offering “creative direction,” but he’s also put his unmistakable voice to one of Pindex’s first videos, an “explainer about the Large Hadron Collider, dark matter and extra dimensions. Other videos will focus on science and technology, including ones on the Hyperloop, colonising Mars, and robots and drones. Mr Fry is expected to do the voiceovers for several of these.”
Two years ago, World Science U debuted on the net, promising to bring free science courses to anyone, from high schoolers to retirees. (We wrote about it here.) The courses would be taught by the top scientists in their fields, featuring lectures, animations, interactive exercises, feedback, and even virtual office hours. At the time, however, Brian Greene’s project to bring the latest in research on string theory, particle physics, dark energy, relativity and more featured only two courses.
Since then, World Science U has taken off. It now offers “Science Unplugged,” a series of short videos that offer answers to layperson questions about science; “Master Classes” which are short classes about various subjects (mostly in physics) that take a few hours to complete; and “University Courses” which take eight to ten weeks to complete and are designed for the more advanced learner. These latter two offerings offer certificates upon completion.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If I could send a message back in time, I might send it to the wide-eyed and skyward-looking children of 1960s America, apologizing that we never did build those jetpacks, flying cars, and moon colonies, but also letting them know that at least we, the citizens of the 21st century, have developed such technologies as smartphones and a myriad of ways for snack foods to taste both sweet and salty at once.
I probably wouldn’t tell them how many of us long for the spirit of their own time, which American history has labeled “the Space Age” for good reason. It had its share of awfulness, starting with the apocalyptic tensions of the Cold War, but that competition between societies did spur mankind to voyage boldly and unhesitatingly out into the great beyond, at least for a while there.
“Back in the 1930s and ’40s, during the height of the Great Depression,” writes Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, “artists designed posters for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) to encourage travel to national parks and other tourist sites in the United States. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) design studio is taking a similar approach to promote a future of travel to other planets at a time when its funding is up against budget constraints and even a journey to our galactic neighbor Mars may seem almost impossible.” And so we have this brand new series of fourteen Visions of the Future, free to download, print, and hang above your desk to fuel your own outer-space daydreaming.
You’ll notice that all the artists commissioned have designed their space-travel posters—whether they promote the high gravity of the “super Earth” exoplanet HD 40307g, the one-day “Historic Sites of Mars,” or the “Grand Tour” of the Solar System—in a richly retro style reminiscent of 1930s air travel advertisements. This makes them artistically captivating, but also emphasizes the continuity between our present, the century behind us, and the centuries ahead. “As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations,” says NASA/JPL’s site, “remember that you can be an architect of the future” — and every future worthy of the name comes built solidly upon a past.
Blank on Blank returned this week with the latest episode in “The Experimenters,” a miniseries highlighting the icons of STEM. This new animation brings to life a 1983 interview featuring one trailblazer, Gloria Steinem, talking with another, Sally Ride, a physicist who became the first American woman in space, and endured a lot of gender stereotyping along the way. Other episodes in “The Experimenters” series have focused on Buckminster Fuller, Richard Feynman, and Jane Goodall.
Note: Gloria Steinem recently published a new memoir called My Life on the Road. You can download it as a free audiobook if you head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. The trial lets you download two audiobooks for free. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio books. The choice is yours. Get more info here.
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What’s it like inside the mind of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking? Is it an electro-cosmic dance party narrated by Carl Sagan? I would like to think so. So would director Will Studd of Aardman Studios who created the hip promo video above, which also includes audio clips from Hawking himself and fellow physicists Brian Cox and Andrew Strominger, with music by Max Halstead. Pretty cool, but what’s it for?
Ask Hawking—or rather, read his paper (or one of the layfolk summaries), “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” which he posted a couple of weeks ago on Cornell University’s arXiv, an open access database of physics, mathematics, and other scientific research. Of Hawking and other physicists’ theory, Tia Ghose at Live Science writes, “black holes may sport a luxurious head of ‘hair’ made up of ghostly, zero-energy particles.” These “hairs” may store quantum information that would otherwise be lost forever. In the second part of his lecture, Hawking will expand on his theory of black hole radiation. Get a brief summary of that theory in the video clip above, and watch this space for Hawking’s sure-to-be-enlightening black hole lectures.
Some of our favorite, and most popular, posts at Open Culture focus on book illustration. From fine art to graphic design, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the purely technical, the art used to visualize beloved works of literature and scientific texts captivates us. Perhaps that’s in part because we encounter illustration so rarely these days, what with the triumph of photography and, now, the proliferation of digital images, which are so easy to create and reproduce that too few give sufficient consideration to aesthetic essentials. Graphic novels and comics aside, the carefully hand-illustrated book or periodical has become something of a novelty.
But when we reach back to the mid-19th century, it was photography that was novel and graphic art the norm. So what was the subject of the first book to use photographic illustration? Monuments? Landscapes? Celebrities? No: algae.
English botanist Anna Atkins—who is not only credited as the first person to make a book illustrated with photographs, but as the first woman to make a photograph—created her handmade Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843. And though the subject may be less than thrilling, the images themselves are austerely beautiful.
The subtitle of the book refers to the process Atkins used to make the images, a technique developed by Sir John Herschel. “Early photographers,” writes Phil Edwards at Vox, “couldn’t easily develop their pictures.” The techniques available proved expensive, dangerous, and unstable. “Herschel came up with a solution,” Edwards tells us, “using an iron pigment called ‘Prussian Blue,’ he laid objects of photographic negatives onto chemically treated paper, exposed them to sunlight for around 15 minutes, and then washed the paper. The remaining image revealed pale blue objects on a dark blue background.” The process, Jonathan Gibbs informs us at The Independent, “had previously been used to reproduce architectural drawings and designs,” and is, in fact, the origin of the word “blueprint.”
Though “a capable artist,” Edwards writes, Atkins realized that Herschel’s cyanotypes “were a better way to capture the intricacies of plant life and avoid the tedium—and error—involved with drawing.” British Algae, the BBC tells us, was Atkins’ “most valuable work” as a naturalist. As the daughter of a scientist and Royal Society Fellow, Atkins had frequent contact with the most well-respected scientists of the day, including Hershel and photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. Her “first contribution to science was her engravings of shells, used to illustrate her father’s translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells” in 1823. Afterward, she became interested in botany, and algae in particular, and in the emerging technology of photography as a means of preserving her observations.
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