Cambridge University has had many famous graduates, but perhaps none is more famous than Isaac Newton (class of 1665). This week, Cambridge continues to honor Newton by opening a digital archive of Newton’s personal papers, which includes an annotated copy of the Principia, the landmark work where the physicist developed his laws of motion and gravity. The initial archive features 4,000 pages of scanned materials (roughly 20% of the complete Newton archive), and eventually Cambridge will add material from Charles Darwin, another famous alum, and other scientific figures.
Bonus: If you’re looking to bone up on Physics, you can find many free physics courses in our big collection of Free Online Courses. Leonard Susskind’s class on Classical Mechanics may be of particular interest here.
What is nano? And how will nanoscience (the study of phenomena and manipulation of materials at the nanoscale) shape our future, from the way we build houses to how we cure diseases? It’s all explained in a snappy 17 minute video narrated by Stephen Fry (British writer, actor and director). Produced in partnership with Cambridge University, NANO YOU was named the best short film at the Scinema Science Film Festival in 2010.
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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 in the mission — the voyage, the landing (don’t miss this part!), the exploration, and all of the rest. It’s another candidate for our collection of Great Science Videos.
If you attended the recent Society for Neuroscience conference, you had the chance to see some unprecedented 3D imaging of the brain — images that showed the exact order in which women’s brain regions (80 in total) are activated in the sequence leading to an orgasm. For Barry Komisaruk (professor of psychology at Rutgers University), this imaging isn’t gratuitous. The whole point is to demystify how the brain experiences pleasure, something that could eventually inform our understanding of addiction and depression. Komisaruk said:
It’s a beautiful system in which to study the brain’s connectivity. We expect that this movie [above], a dynamic representation of the gradual buildup of brain activity to a climax, followed by resolution, will facilitate our understanding of pathological conditions such as anorgasmia by emphasizing where in the brain the sequential process breaks down.
Meanwhile, back at the neuroscience ranch, researchers are also using imaging technology to observe the human brain in another state, the state where people experience mystical awakenings during prayer and meditation or other spiritual epiphanies. Scientific American took a fairly deep look at this cutting-edge field several years ago (read the full piece here), and now NPR has produced a multimedia glimpse into the evolving science of spirituality. The presentation (click here or the image above) combines audio, video, articles, book excerpts, etc. and delves into the fundamental question: Is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?
If you want to learn more about the brain and neuroscience, don’t miss the courses listed in the Psychology/Neuroscience section of our big collection of Free Online Courses.
Time and The Guardian have more on the first story above here and here.
Produced at the Vancouver Film School, this split-screen animation tells the story of Earth’ s origins from a creationist and Darwinist/evolutionist point of view. To make things more interesting (spoiler: stop reading now if you want to maintain the element of surprise), the scientific story is told using religious language, whereas the Biblical version is told as if it were the scientific one. The slightly confusing conclusion (its’ a zinger) shows how the language we use to present ideas influences their perception. And the ironic use of infographics tops off this visual and linguistic experiment.
On the homepage of the project, you can watch the videos separately and download them. Also, the YouTube channel of Vancouver Film School is always worth a visit.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
60,000 peer-reviewed papers, including the first peer-reviewed scientific research journal in the world, are now available free online. The Royal Society has opened its historical archives to the public. Among the cool stuff you’ll find here: Issac Newton’s first published research paper and Ben Franklin’s write-up about that famous kite experiment. Good luck getting anything accomplished today. Or ever again. —
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 was that the Nobel Prize Committee should take notice.
Last Tuesday the Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics would go to three American-born scientists from two rival teams: physicist Saul Permutter, head of the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, would receive half of the prize, while Brian P. Schmidt, head of the High‑z Supernova Search Team and an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, Weston Creek, would share the other half with a colleague who wrote the original paper announcing the team’s findings in 1998, astronomer Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Despite popular belief, the two teams did not “discover” dark energy. As Perlmutter points out in the short film above, “People are using the term ‘dark energy’ basically as a place holder to describe any explanation for why it is that we seem to be seeing the universe’s expansion getting faster and faster.” What is actually known is that the universe has been expanding for as far back as we can observe, and about 7 billion years ago–roughly half the estimated age of the universe–the expansion began to accelerate.
“Why is it speeding up?” Perlmutter asked during a press conference on the morning his Nobel Prize was announced. “It could be that most of the universe is dominated by a dark energy that pervades all of space and is causing this acceleration. It could be, perhaps even more surprising, that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity needs a little bit of a tweak, perhaps acting slightly differently on these very large scales of the universe. But at this moment I would say that the question is wide open.”
All we can say is bless Don Pettit. While working on the International Space Station in 2008, the NASA astronaut shot videos that are literally and figuratively out of this world: The Aurora Borealis Viewed from Orbit and What It Feels Like to Fly Over Planet Earth. And then we discover that Pettit invented a “zero‑g coffee cup” that lets you drink coffee in outer space without using a straw. That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.…
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Cambridge University has had many famous graduates, but perhaps none is more famous than Isaac Newton (class of 1665). This week, Cambridge continues to honor Newton by opening a digital archive of Newton’s personal papers, which includes an annotated copy of the Principia, the landmark work where the physicist developed his laws of motion and gravity. The initial archive features 4,000 pages of scanned materials (roughly 20% of the complete Newton archive), and eventually Cambridge will add material from Charles Darwin, another famous alum, and other scientific figures.
