Incarnate (Three Degrees of Certainty II) by Maskull Lasserre. There is something kind of appropriate about carving a human skull out of outdated computer manuals.
Check it out! I made this last Monday for one of my classes! It’s a short interview montage about science and museums. I asked three questions:
1) What’s one science fact or idea that fascinates you? 2) What would your ideal science museum be like? 3) How would you describe your last visit to a science museum?
Btw, I tried to interview a diverse group of people, and I gotta say, I’m really happy with the results. All of these people have such great personality.
(Oh, and I’m actually really embarrassed about the quality. I was supposed to get a good camera and a mic etc, but there were endless technical difficulties, so I ended up using a flipcam and microsoft movie-maker. ugh!)
But what about you guys and gals, how would you respond to the questions (particularly the second)?
Over the course of the next week Im going to be filming a huge range of videos, including the introduction of explaining wider subjects. Topics on my mind include: dark matter, black holes, evolution and atoms, to name a few.
Im going to spend the next two days researching & writing for these…
Over the course of the next week Im going to be filming a huge range of videos, including the introduction of explaining wider subjects. Topics on my mind include: dark matter, black holes, evolution and atoms, to name a few.
Im going to spend the next two days researching & writing for these videos. If there’s a scientific concept you’ve always wanted to know more about, then let me know. Perhaps there’s something you could never quite understand at school; it might be something you’ve always wanted to know more about; something you’ve always been baffled by; or something you’re simply interested in & want more information without the jargon. If any of this applies to anything, then just let me know & I’ll look into it.
There’s often the stigma of ‘I don’t know anything about science’, ‘I was never any good at science’, ‘Everyone seems to understand this, I’m too embarrassed to say I don’t get it.’, or even ‘I’m not a scientist, therefore I can’t be interested in science.’
(Which is a little like saying ‘I’m not a musician, therefore I can’t be interested in music.’)
My aim is to do away with this stigma & allow people to be curious. I firmly believe that you can teach anyone anything, as long as it’s explained in the right way. Submit questions, ideas, and thoughts to me on YouTube, Twitter, or Tumblr (where you can even ask anonymously, if you wish).
And here’s Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and Tom Kalil sitting around at the White House reading my Tumblr answering science questions from folks on Twitter today.
Clara Lazen is the discoverer of tetranitratoxycarbon, a molecule constructed of, obviously, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. It’s got some interesting possible properties, ranging from use as an explosive to energy storage. Lazen is listed as the co-author of a recent paper on the molecule. But that’s not what’s so interesting and inspiring about this story. What’s so unusual here is that Clara Lazen is a ten-year-old fifth-grader in Kansas City, MO.
Kenneth Boehr, Clara’s science teacher, handed out the usual ball-and-stick models used to visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she’d made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn’t sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical.
Saturday’s Lunar Eclipse Will Include ‘Impossible’ Sight (Photo by Images In The Backcountry on Flickr)
This year’s second total lunar eclipse on Saturday (Dec. 10) will offer a rare chance to see a strange celestial sight traditionally thought impossible.
For most places in the United States and Canada, there will be a chance to observe an unusual effect, one that celestial geometry seems to dictate can’t happen. The little-used name for this effect is a “selenelion” (or “selenehelion”) and occurs when both the sun and the eclipsed moon can be seen at the same time.
But wait! How is this possible? When we have a lunar eclipse, the sun, Earth and moon are in a geometrically straight line in space, with the Earth in the middle. So if the sun is above the horizon, the moon must be below the horizon and completely out of sight (or vice versa).
And indeed, during a lunar eclipse, the sun and moon are exactly 180 degrees apart in the sky; so in a perfect alignment like this (a “syzygy”) such an observation would seem impossible.
Known as the MdBioBus, this custom-built mobile bioscience laboratory is dedicated to promoting science, enhancing laboratory experiences and encouraging STEM education among high school students.
Walk in and there are lab benches to the left and right. Look around and you’ll see equipment for gel electrophoresis, mini microcentrifuges, loads of micopipettes and of course, protective equipment like apparel and goggles. Sounds like a modern research laboratory—except this one’s on wheels and exclusively for use by Maryland high school students.
The FTL neutrino study was published first on arXiv, which is a unique repository of pre-peer review announcements. So how does that affect how this story has been playing out?
A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn’t actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It’s just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.
That’s the background you need to understand what’s going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, “Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we’ve done wrong,” as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.
Since that paper was published in September, there have been more than 80 follow-up papers, also published on arXiv, offering criticism of the original research or proposing theoretical explanations of how that seemingly crazy finding could fit into physics as we know it. And all of this is happening before anybody has gone through the peer-review publishing process.
The original research team has been able to gather criticism, find new ideas for checking their work and respond to questions because of this unique open-publishing format. It’s not a substitute for the traditional peer-review process, but I think it allows for stronger and better-reviewed data to make it out of the traditional filters in the end. It’s like a crowd-sourced pre-filter.
Now the CERN folks will take that feedback and repeat some experiments to strengthen or reject their claims. And that work will either make it or not make it into a traditional journal. Time will tell.
I agree with the final conclusion at Boing Boing:
Science benefits when scientists have more than one way to share information with each other.
