The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny has post­ed online a free video lec­ture that focus­es on what hap­pens in our brain when we learn — some­thing that should pique the inter­est of pret­ty much any read­er here. (Just what hap­pens with those synaps­es when you come here every day?) The lec­ture (watch here) comes from a larg­er course called Under­stand­ing the Brain and is pre­sent­ed by Jeanette Nor­den, a pro­fes­sor in Cell and Devel­op­men­tal Biol­o­gy at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty.

Side Note: The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny is also offer­ing free access to anoth­er lec­ture (this one in audio) that sur­veys the “Mas­ter­pieces of Clas­si­cal Hol­i­day Music,” includ­ing Bach’s Christ­mas Ora­to­rio of 1734, Handel’s Mes­si­ah of 1741; and Tchaikovsky’s Nut­crack­er Suite of 1892. Lis­ten or down­load here.

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.”

A quick men­tion: The Roy­al Soci­ety, the UK’s nation­al acad­e­my of sci­ence, will cel­e­brate next year its 350th anniver­sary. To mark the occa­sion, a team of sci­en­tists and his­to­ri­ans have launched a new web site called “Trail­blaz­ing,” and it essen­tial­ly lets you take a vir­tu­al tour through three and a half cen­turies of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery (1660–2010). Mov­ing at your own pace, you can review key sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies (some of them famous, some of them less so) and read cor­re­spond­ing com­men­tary on each one. Quite nice­ly, all of the com­men­tary can be down­loaded via one big PDF file. (It runs about 110 pages long.)

Thanks to Phan­tom Engi­neer for the tip here. And thanks all for the many leads I’ve received late­ly. They’re all real­ly appre­ci­at­ed, and they frankly make the site much bet­ter. Keep ’em com­ing.

The pat­tern always repeats itself. Civ­i­liza­tions rise and fall. Then new ones take their place. But, some­thing else may be about to hap­pen. There might be an impend­ing col­lapse of our entire glob­al civ­i­liza­tion. Not one major civ­i­liza­tion, but the entire glob­al civ­i­liza­tion, gone. Or, so that’s how Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Paul Ehrlich sees it. Ehrlich, who has been called “one of the most influ­en­tial ecol­o­gists of our age,” sees one thing staving off dis­as­ter. A big shift in cul­ture first and fore­most. A cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion. Watch above.

Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was inter­viewed by Char­lie Rose and dis­cussed the trou­bled state of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge in Amer­i­ca, and how it threat­ens our democ­ra­cy. Before Richard Dawkins came along, Sagan was already out there, mak­ing the case for sci­en­tif­ic think­ing, argu­ing that it let us make progress and keeps our repub­lic vital. (Whether our repub­lic actu­al­ly remains vital at this point, it’s cer­tain­ly hard to say.) We need more fig­ures like Sagan, and we par­tic­u­lar­ly need the Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem to care more about pub­lic engage­ment — an area where it depress­ing­ly comes up short. But we’ll talk more about that at some oth­er point. Part 1 is above. Click for Part 2 and Part 3.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing and Carl Sagan Remixed