Take a Panoramic Tour of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with Google Street View

in Astronomy, Google, Science | August 2nd, 2012

The Kennedy Space Cen­ter in Flori­da turns 50 this year. To cel­e­brate the occa­sion, NASA and Google Street View have teamed up to give the pub­lic unprece­dent­ed access to this cen­ter of space inno­va­tion. Start­ing today, you can explore 6,000 panoram­ic views of the Space Cen­ter. Some of the high­lights tout­ed by Google include:

You can start your tour here. Oth­er great places to vis­it with Street View include: Pom­peii and oth­er his­tor­i­cal sites, the Ama­zon Basin, Shackleton’s Antarc­tic, Ver­sailles, The White House, and 151 Great Muse­ums Across the Globe.

via Giz­mo­do and Google

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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio Show Podcast Tackles the History of Video Games

in Physics, Podcasts, Science | July 31st, 2012

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a pod­cast. I repeat, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a pod­cast. If you’re unfa­mil­iar (and you shouldn’t be), Tyson is Astro­physi­cist-in-res­i­dence at New York’s Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Muse­um and Direc­tor of its Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um. He’s also the most promi­nent advo­cate for a revi­tal­ized U.S. space pro­gram. Okay, back to the pod­cast. As an avid con­sumer of every sci­ence-based pod­cast out there, I can tell you that the StarTalk Radio Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) has quick­ly risen to the top of my list. The very per­son­able Tyson is the big draw, but he has also made the wise deci­sion to include “come­di­an co-hosts, celebri­ties, and oth­er spe­cial guests.” In the episode right below, Tyson and come­di­an Eugene Mir­man (whom you might rec­og­nize as the voice of Gene from Bob’s Burg­ers) mix it up with video game design­er Will Wright and author Jeff Ryan.

Ryan’s Super Mario: How Nin­ten­do Con­quered Amer­i­ca—and the his­to­ry of video games more generally—is the top­ic of the show. Despite the less-than-stel­lar audio qual­i­ty, this is not to be missed. The con­ver­sa­tion is rapid-fire: Mir­man inter­jects hilar­i­ous inani­ties while Wright and Ryan speed through the fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry and Tyson throws knuck­le­ball ques­tions and enthus­es (at 4:30) that the “first real video game,” Space Wars, was about, what else, space. We also get the his­to­ry of the unfor­get­table Pong (at 5:59), the orig­i­nal Star Wars game (at 8:17), and, nat­u­ral­ly, Don­key Kong (at 3:19), designed by the now wild­ly famous (in Japan, at least) Shigeru Miyamo­to–who also invent­ed Mario, and who had nev­er designed a game in his life before Don­key Kong. All this and some clas­sic 8‑bit video game music to boot.

StarTalk in gen­er­al has much to rec­om­mend it. Tyson is the “nation’s fore­most expert on space,” and is prob­a­bly instant­ly rec­og­niz­able from his host­ing of NOVA sci­en­ceNow and his best­selling books. He is the pub­lic face of a sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty often in need of good press, and he has the rare abil­i­ty to trans­late abstruse con­cepts to the gen­er­al pub­lic in a humor­ous and approach­able way. Pre­vi­ous guest­s/­co-hosts have includ­ed Janeane Garo­fa­lo (in the “most argu­men­ta­tive Startalk pod­cast ever”) and John Hodg­man (of the Dai­ly Show and the “Mac vs. PC” ads). But above all, c’mon, it’s Neil deGrasse Tyson. The man deserved­ly has his own inter­net meme, inspired by his dra­mat­ic ges­tures in this video dis­cus­sion of Isaac New­ton from Big Think.

Enough said.

Watch the full Big Think inter­view with Tyson here. And don’t for­get to sub­scribe to the StarTalk Radio Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site).

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Benefits of Being Awestruck

in Psychology, Science, Video - Science | July 31st, 2012

http://vimeo.com/46264514

In Decem­ber 1972, astro­nauts aboard the Apol­lo 17 space­craft snapped a pho­to­graph of our Earth from an alti­tude of 45,000 kilo­me­tres. The pho­to­graph, known as “The Big Blue Mar­ble,” let every­one see their plan­et ful­ly illu­mi­nat­ed for the first time. The pic­ture, show­ing the Earth look­ing iso­lat­ed and vul­ner­a­ble, left every­one awestruck. And “The Big Blue Mar­ble” became the most wide­ly-dis­trib­uted image of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Now, less than a half cen­tu­ry lat­er, pic­tures of our plan­et bare­ly move us. And we hard­ly bat an eye­lash at videos giv­ing us remark­able views from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion.

We’re los­ing our sense of awe at our own per­il, how­ev­er. The title of a new Stan­ford study tells you all you need to know: Awe Expands People’s Per­cep­tion of Time, Alters Deci­sion Mak­ing, and Enhances Well-Being. Appar­ent­ly, watch­ing awe-inspir­ing vidoes makes you less impa­tient, more will­ing to vol­un­teer time to help oth­ers, more like­ly to pre­fer expe­ri­ences over mate­r­i­al prod­ucts, more present in the here and now, and hap­pi­er over­all. (More on that here.) All of this pro­vides film­mak­er Jason Sil­va the mate­r­i­al for yet anoth­er one of his “philo­soph­i­cal shots of espres­so,” The Bio­log­i­cal Advan­tage of Being Awestruck. It’s the first video above.

Find more awe in our col­lec­tion of Great Sci­ence Videos.

 

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Celebrate Harry Potter’s Birthday with Song. Daniel Radcliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune, The Elements.

in Comedy, Film, Music, Science | July 27th, 2012

Some child actors are unen­dear­ing, snarky types (think Sele­na Gomez or a young Dako­ta Fan­ning). Oth­ers, you root for because even if they’re cloy­ing they seem real (Haley Joel Osment comes to mind).

Daniel Rad­cliffe, who was most cer­tain­ly a child when he was cast as Har­ry Pot­ter at 11, may fall more into the sec­ond camp. He’s as hap­less and earnest as Har­ry, and it turns out that he’s endear­ing­ly nerdier in real life than Har­ry him­self could ever be.

Rad­cliffe, who cel­e­brat­ed his 23rd birth­day this week, sealed his fate as a bit of an anorak when he appeared on the BBC’s Gra­ham Nor­ton Show and ner­vous­ly sang Tom Lehrer’s song The Ele­ments.

Maybe Radcliffe’s best sub­ject at Hog­warts would have been potions. On tele­vi­sion he admits to being a lit­tle ner­vous before launch­ing into the homage to Lehrer, explain­ing that he’d stayed up all night try­ing to mem­o­rize the song. One of Lehrer’s clas­sics, it actu­al­ly sets the peri­od­ic table of ele­ments to music. In the best ver­sions, Lehrer accom­pa­nies him­self on piano while recit­ing all of the chem­i­cal ele­ments known at the time of writ­ing (1959) to the tune of a Gilbert and Sul­li­van melody.

Har­ry Potter’s birth­day is next week (July 31), the same day author J.K. Rowl­ing cel­e­brates hers. Per­haps Pot­ter fans could cook up a birth­day cel­e­bra­tion for Pot­ter involv­ing a song about lawren­ci­um, which was added to the peri­od­ic table two years after Lehrer wrote his song. As he clev­er­ly not­ed him­self at the end of the tune,

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’­vard,

And there may be many oth­ers, but they haven’t been dis­cav­ard

Good stuff. Wor­thy of the boy who sur­vived.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. See more of her work at .

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The Science of the Olympic Flame; Ancient Style Meets Modern Technology

in History, Science, Video - Science | July 26th, 2012

For all the recent scan­dal and the trau­ma of past Games, the Olympics remain a pageant of grandeur and glo­ry, and there is no greater sym­bol of its ideals than the Olympic Flame. The video above, from the Ontario Sci­ence Cen­tre, explains the evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy that keeps the flame burn­ing from its light­ing to the clos­ing cer­e­monies. It’s a pret­ty cool sto­ry, set to a bom­bas­tic sound­track wor­thy of its sub­ject and car­ried by an ani­mat­ed run­ner who just peeled him­self off of an ancient Athen­ian vase.

Intro­duced in the 1928 Sum­mer Olympics in Ams­ter­dam, the flame revives a sym­bol from antiq­ui­ty, com­mem­o­rat­ing Prometheus’s audac­i­ty and remind­ing war­ring city states to put aside hos­til­i­ties for as long as it burned. In the mod­ern Olympics, between the light­ing and the open­ing cer­e­monies, the flame, in its styl­ized torch, makes a pil­grim­age to the host city via relay, a prac­tice that began with the 1936 games in Berlin. This year’s relay start­ed on May 19th in Land’s End in Corn­wall and ends this Fri­day, the 27th at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny in Lon­don. The torch will have trav­eled through 1,000 places in the UK, cov­ered a total of 8,000 miles (and pass­ing through 8,000 hands), mov­ing over land, air, and water, with­out once hav­ing to be relit.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! We’ll thank you for it.

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Has Science Refuted Religion? Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer vs. Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson

in Religion, Science | July 26th, 2012

Just yes­ter­day, I sat across from a fel­low wear­ing a t‑shirt embla­zoned with the image of a gun-wield­ing Jesus blow­ing away Charles Dar­win above the words “EVOLVE THIS!” At first I assumed he wore it to emphat­i­cal­ly sig­nal his belief that reli­gion, specif­i­cal­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, refutes sci­ence, specif­i­cal­ly bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. Then, remem­ber­ing that Jesus prob­a­bly would­n’t have used a hand­gun even had they been avail­able in his day, I took the shirt as a mock­ery of the blunter vari­eties of cre­ation­ist rhetoric. Look­ing it up lat­er, I found out that the shirt comes from the movie Paul, so the wear­er prob­a­bly meant noth­ing more than to express his appre­ci­a­tion for what I under­stand to be one of 2011’s most under­rat­ed come­dies. Yet the ques­tion lingers: has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion, or is it the oth­er way around? The inter­net age pro­vides us access to a vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed num­ber of these debates, although you’ll often search in vain for match­es of cogent, well-artic­u­lat­ed argu­ments. Just take a look at the sci­ence-reli­gion squab­bles cur­rent­ly roil­ing in YouTube com­ment sec­tions. Keep out of the com­ments, then, and stick to the videos, such as the debate above. In two hours com­pris­ing short seg­ments of argu­ment, rebut­tal, cross-exam­i­na­tion, and audi­ence ques­tions, the pro­gram pits Skep­tic mag­a­zine pub­lish­er Michael Sher­mer and Cal­tech cos­mol­o­gist Sean Car­roll against MIT physi­cist Ian Hutchin­son and King’s Col­lege pres­i­dent Dinesh D’Souza. In an unusu­al­ly order­ly, well-dis­ci­plined debate of this type, all four weigh in on one cen­tral propo­si­tion: “Has sci­ence refut­ed reli­gion?” Car­roll says that sci­ence, a “real­i­ty check” on human bias­es, offers the only expla­na­tions that work. Hutchin­son blames not sci­ence but some­thing he calls “sci­en­tism,” a belief in the absolute suprema­cy of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge, for a vari­ety of social and intel­lec­tu­al ills. Sher­mer describes reli­gious belief as an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly deter­mined char­ac­ter­is­tic of human beings, and an increas­ing­ly use­less one at that. D’Souza upbraids sci­ence for fail­ing not only to find answers to ques­tions about human pur­pose and life’s mean­ing, but for throw­ing up its hands when pre­sent­ed them. All this offers a good bit of human dra­ma as well, but in good fun; when I inter­viewed Sher­mer, a habitué of such debates, he men­tioned often enjoy­ing tak­ing his osten­si­bly sworn intel­lec­tu­al ene­mies to beers and piz­za after­ward. Relat­ed Con­tent: Richard Dawkins & John Lennox Debate Sci­ence & Athe­ism Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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NASA & Grateful Dead Drummer Mickey Hart Record Cosmic Sounds of the Universe on New Album

in Music, Science | July 3rd, 2012

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured UC San­ta Cruz’s new Grate­ful Dead Archive Online. There you’ll find a wealth of mate­ri­als about the band from their incep­tion in 1965 until their dis­band­ment in 1995. But over the past 17 years, the sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the Dead have pur­sued all sorts of fas­ci­nat­ing projects, musi­cal and oth­er­wise. Mick­ey Hart, the group’s drum­mer between 1967 and 1971 and again between 1974 to the end, has put out a par­tic­u­lar­ly unusu­al new album that takes its basic mate­ri­als from the heav­ens. As both a musi­cian and musi­col­o­gist, Hart has estab­lished a prece­dent for such son­ic exper­i­ments. Craft­ing his 1989 album Music to Be Born By, he record­ed his yet-unborn son’s heart­beat with­in the womb — the most nat­ur­al of all per­cus­sion, you might say — and record­ed tracks on top of it. For his lat­est record, Mys­teri­um Tremen­dum, he lis­tened not to the core of a human being but as far in the oth­er direc­tion from human­i­ty as pos­si­ble, col­lect­ing and com­pos­ing with “cos­mic sounds” made in out­er space.

To make music like this, you need some unusu­al col­lab­o­ra­tors. Hart went to NASA, Penn State, and the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry, work­ing with sci­en­tists like George Smoot, win­ner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Math­er. They helped con­vert light, radio waves, and oth­er elec­tro­mat­ic radi­a­tion into sound waves that Hart and his band could put to musi­cal use. After get­ting a sam­ple of the result­ing extrater­res­tri­al grooves in the videos above, you might con­sid­er lis­ten­ing to this recent inter­view with Hart on KQED’s Forum. Why go to all the trou­ble of sam­pling the bil­lons-of-years-old sounds of the infi­nite uni­verse? Because the Big Bang, Hart thinks, marked the very first beat. “Four words: it’s the rhythm, stu­pid,” he explains. “That’s what I always say to any­one, and myself as well. It all goes back to that. We are rhythm machines, embed­ded in a uni­verse of rhythm.” Spo­ken like a true drum­mer.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sound­track of the Uni­verse

UC San­ta Cruz Opens a Deadhead’s Delight: The Grate­ful Dead Archive is Now Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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Evolver: A Darwinist Reimagination of The Beatles’ 1966 album

in Music, Science | July 2nd, 2012

The Evolver T‑Shirt, it’s the per­fect gift for the sci­ence believin’ Bea­t­les fan.  It’s obvi­ous­ly a play on The Bea­t­les’ great 1966 album Revolver. And, over at Boing­Bo­ing, Mark Frauen­felder asked read­ers to rethink the titles of var­i­ous songs on the album — to imag­ine them in evo­lu­tion­ary terms. Here are some of the cre­ative sug­ges­tions:

Tax­man = Macaques, Man

And Your Bird Can Sing = And Your Chimp Can Swing

I’m Only Sleep­ing = I’m Only Simi­an

Doc­tor Robert = Doc­tor Fos­sey

I Want to Tell You = I Want to Groom You

Tomor­row Nev­er Knows = Too Many Bono­bos

Per­son­al­ly, I think “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” could stay just as it is. Does­n’t it already cap­ture the Dar­win­ian spir­it in its own way?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Lit­er­ary T‑Shirts

Darwin’s Per­son­al Library Goes Dig­i­tal: 330 Books Online

Dar­win: A 1993 Film by Peter Green­away

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