We’ve already seen a video about how proteins are made. That video, from 1970, used humans to illustrate the science in a fun and energetic (if a touch weird) way.
Well now someone has made a new video explaining the science of protein synthesis using cut-out paper set to a rock soundtrack. Gotta love it 
I found this very cool video about scientists studying ant colonies. They found a large grass-cutter ants colony and studied how the colony is ventillated. In another colony, they poured a ridiculous amount of cement to freeze the colony’s structure underground, which they then excavated.
What they found was utterly amazing. Check it out!
Finally a sensible (and civil!) interview with Prof Dawkins in a mainstream news channel, AlJazeera English. The interviewer, Riz Khan, explores the whole evolution/creationism/intelligent design debate (as if we needed one…) in very broad strokes with Prof Dawkins and takes 2 questions via email and one by phone.
My favourite answer is the one that starts around 5:30 min into the interview.
One of the key experiments in physics is called the double slit experiment. The experiment very elegantly demonstrates why quantum physics is so counter intuitive. The double slit experiment shows that light is both particles and waves. It also tells us that electrons, subatomic particles themselves, can behave like waves. This so-called wave-particle duality is one of the key concepts in quantum physics.
Today’s video is a cool cartoon that explains this concept and describes the experiment in simple terms. It really is one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the subject.
Finally, if you want a reference to dive into further, check out this Physics World article.
How many lectures and seminars have you attended that sounded a lot like this one?
One of the harder concepts I grappled with when I was a kid was pi. Where on earth did that number come from? Now, we know the answer to that, but a very good way of visualizing it has surfaced on Wikipedia. In essence, it’s an animation of a circle rolling out once. If you measure how many diameters the roll covers on the ground, you get pi.
This is the classic basic chemistry experiment: a (very!) small piece of sodium is dropped into a water beaker. The violent reaction causes the sodium to ignite and whizz on the surface of the water. The reaction is very exothermic, meaning it releases a lot of heat, and produces sodium hydroxide, which makes the water turn alkaline. This is a dangerous experiment if done wrong.
So post World War II, the USA had a few tons of sodium to dispose of. How did they do it? By dumping it in batches into a lake. The lake was already alkaline, so not (too) much harm there. But the beauty of this is the demonstration of just how violent the reaction between sodium and water is: it’s explosive, even if the water is icy cold. With this little intro, I leave you with the video below:
[tags]science experiments[/tags]
One of the most famous science experiemnts attributed to Galileo, was him going up the tower of Pisa and dropping two balls of different masses from a height. The experiment was meant to show that the balls reached the ground at the same time - i.e., irrespective of their differing masses.
Earlier this month, someone posted the NASA video of this experiment done on the moon. It’s a very cool short clip of what really happens when you take away the effects of air resistance from this experiment. David Scott and Jim Irwin conducted the experiment on the Moon during their Apollo 15 mission.
I’ve embedded the video below, and you can download the original source from NASA’s website.
[tags]Galileo, NASA, video[/tags]
This is a great video by the one and only David Attenborough about how crows in Japan have devised a clever way to eat nuts, a food that they naturally wouldn’t be able to eat otherwise.
[tags]video, crows, nuts, David Attenborough[/tags]
Note: This is an experiment in putting videos on blogSci.com. I would love to hear your comments/feedback about this. Thanks!
