This gorgeous video of a cymbal (shot with a Phantom at 1,000 frames per second) made our morning. And then Kottke’s find below — brilliant footage of vibrating guitar strings — made our afternoon.
Hope you enjoy them as much as we did, and have a great weekend!
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
We reached deep into our archives and pulled out a list of our greatest hits — our favorite science videos from the past five years. 125 videos in total, and the list will grow from here. Right now, it covers everything from Astronomy and Space Travel, to Physics and Biology, and then Psychology and Neuroscience. Our recommendation? Just jump right in here. But if you want a little preview, then let’s start you off with ten slam-dunk videos from the collection:
(Note: In the future, you can access this collection by clicking the “Great Science Videos” link under “Essentials.” Top of the center column.)
Earthrise in HD – Video — In November 2007, Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft orbited the moon and captured the first HD footage of an “earthrise” and “earthset.”
Touring the Earth from Space (in HD) – Video — Give NASA 7 minutes, and they’ll show you the Earth’s most impressive landscapes — as seen from space.
“First Orbit”: Celebrating 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagaran’s Space Flight - Video — 99-minute documentary recreates the Soviet cosmonaut’s historic launch into space on April 12, 1961.
Arthur C. Clarke Presents the Colors of Infinity – Video – The futurist brings us inside Mandelbrot’s world of fractal geometry.
Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Inferno Inspired Galileo’s Physics – Video – Fascinating presentation by Mark Peterson, physics professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Lawrence Krauss: Every Atom in Your Body Comes From a Star- Video – Theoretical physicist talks about his work at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
What It Feels Like To Have a Stroke - Video — Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor recounts her experience having a stroke. One of the most popular TED Talks of all time.
Nature by Numbers- Video — Well-known geometrical and mathematical formulas (The Fibonacci Series and Spiral, The Golden and Angle Ratios, The Delauney Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations) present themselves in nature.
Tsunami Ripples Across Globe: Animated Video — Video — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Japanese tsunami rippling across the Pacific.
Daniel Pink: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - Video — Research reveals what really, truly motivates us. And it’s all shown with animation.
The Texas-based artist and videographer Jeremiah Warren mounted a wide angle lens camera on some fireworks to give us the fireworks’ angle on their own brief, bright trajectory. Not surprisingly, the very cool two-minute video — equal parts Strangelove, Pynchon, and vertigo — went viral over the weekend.
For more information about Warren’s camera set-up, check out his Flickr page.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
After 30 years and 134 flights, America’s space shuttle program draws to a close. And it feels pitch perfect to wind things down with a documentary narrated by William Shatner. Of course, you know him as Captain Kirk from Star Trek, the iconic sci-fi TV show that ran from 1966 to 1969, smack in the middle of NASA’s heyday. (Note: Star Trek has just been added to Netflix’s streaming catalogue.)
The 80 minute documentary takes you through the history of the Space Shuttle program, which first got underway during the Nixon administration. The film spends ample time looking at the design challenges NASA engineers faced in trying to create a reusable shuttle, while also showing early prototypes. Once the design phase was complete, construction began on the first orbiter in June, 1974 and wrapped up two years later. NASA called its first craft Space Shuttle Enterprise, paying homage to the fictional Starship Enterprise. Next, it was time to boldly go where no one had gone before.
When Charles Darwin finished reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a book suggesting that there are clear limits to the variation of species, he wrote in the margins: “If this were true adios theory.” It’s a great piece of marginalia. And it’s just one of many comments that adorn books in Darwin’s personal library, and help illuminate his intellectual path to writing On The Origin Of Species(1859).
In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney personally engineered a loophole in the U.S. energy bill exempting companies that use an oil- and gas-drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result, tons of diesel fuel and assorted chemicals–some of them toxic, like benzyne–are injected at high pressure into the earth at the sole discretion of the companies doing the injecting. One of the chief beneficiaries of Cheney’s string-pulling is the company that invented the procedure, Halliburton, which employed Cheney as chairman and CEO just prior to his becoming vice president. (A coincidence?)
In the wake of the Halliburton Loophole, as it has come to be known, there have been a growing number of water pollution cases, from Pennsylvania to Colorado, associated with fracking. Some of those cases were documented in last year’s Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary, Gasland, by Josh Fox, who said in a PBS interview, “I could take a car battery and throw it in the watershed and go to federal prison, but these guys can take the same chemicals and inject it by the thousands of gallons, and they’re exempt. It makes no sense.”
It’s a serious issue involving two of America’s vital interests–the need for energy and the need for safe drinking water–but a group of journalism students in New York University’s Studio 20 master’s program, in association with the public-interest journalism group ProPublica, has taken a light-hearted approach, creating a music video to raise awareness of fracking. It’s called “My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song).” The purpose of the project, according to group leader David Holmes, is to encourage people to read ProPublica’s reporting on the issue. “We were concerned with building a better entryway into that investigation,” Holmes told Poynter.org, “and we figured a song would be the perfect way to do it–especially since it’s called fracking.”
If you were stuck somewhere far away from yesterday’s lunar eclipse, here’s some consolation courtesy of NASA. The Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center has compiled this two and a half minute video from over a year’s worth of data recorded by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been orbiting the moon at 50 kilometers above its surface for over a year.
The results are pretty spectacular, and might render the pain of missing a chance to watch the moon turn red a little more bearable, especially for all you heartbroken Cancers (we’ll get through this.)
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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