Amazing NEW Periodic Table Song & Video!
If the Animaniacs and Science had a child, this would be it! Every element of the Periodic Table, sung, in order!
Do you know a mad scientist in training? A tiny Einstein? A miniature Mendel? A chibi Marie Curie?
Kids in grades K-8 can win $10,000 towards lab equipment for their school by entering our Science Challenge. Deadline extended to May 26th! Find the details on Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
What is Evolution?
Excellent video from Stated Clearly explaining just what evolution is … using great illustrations from Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon comics.
This is a great video to share with friends/enemies/confused relatives that might have trouble accepting evolution and how simple it can be to understand.
I’d like to add one thing to this video. Single amoebas, pairs of parents and a few children are used in these evolution illustrations to simplify the concept of evolution, but it’s important to remember that evolution is something that happens to populations, not individuals. The changes within a generation are random. It’s only after those changes have been passed on for several generations that a survival advantage or disadvantage (followed by either more or less individuals carrying the trait) occurs. That’s where evolution happens, it’s not in the change itself. And sometimes even harmful traits can become frequent in a population, like we see in diseases that are prevalent among isolated ethnic groups.
Bonus: I’d also recommend Understanding Evolution’s “Common Misconceptions” FAQ for those who want to dig deeper.
Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations
Images Credit: NASA, ESA; Visualization: Frank Summers (STScI); Simulation: Chris Mihos (CWRU) & Lars Hernquist (Harvard).
“What happens when two galaxies collide? Although it may take over a billion years, such titanic clashes are quite common. Since galaxies are mostly empty space, no internal stars are likely to themselves collide. Rather the gravitation of each galaxy will distort or destroy the other galaxy, and the galaxies may eventually merge to form a single larger galaxy. Expansive gas and dust clouds collide and trigger waves of star formation that complete even during the interaction process. Pictured above is a computer simulation of two large spiral galaxies colliding, interspersed with real still images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Our own Milky Way Galaxy has absorbed several smaller galaxies during its existence and is even projected to merge with the larger neighboring Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.”
The month of May is International Multiple Sclerosis Month
But what is Multiple Sclerosis? It’s easy to scroll over these things, but please take a minute to watch our newest video which breaks down the disease (which affects millions worldwide), and then help spread awareness by ‘sharing’ it with your friends and family, however you can.
Join the effort to erase MS!
A pretty eye-opening look at just how much “stuff” your body makes in a year, from BuzzFeedVideo.
Snot a bad video. Urine for a real educational experience. Hair’s a great video to not watch before lunch.
Your long wait is over … the new episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart is up! Whose air do we share?
I had a random thought while out jogging recently: With all of the deep breaths I take every day, how much of Earth’s atmosphere do I breathe in and out during a lifetime? Could I be sharing air molecules with Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin or Cleopatra?
And how big IS the atmosphere to begin with? I decided to calculate how many air molecules we might all share. It really makes you think about what we’re putting in the atmosphere, eh?
Thanks for watching, and stay curious! Share with your friends, click here to subscribe, and check out the rest of my science videos on YouTube!
The New Arctic
It’s time for a little Real Talk™, folks. We know that the climate is changing. Science has made it clear that humans are having a major effect in accelerating that change. What most people don’t realize is just how fast those changes are taking place.
The video above, from UT-Austin’s Dan Oppenheimer and featuring marine scientist Ken Dunton, is a cry for help. But if we’re not careful, it could be a funeral procession for the Arctic as we know it. Why?
Arctic ice, as it begins its spring melt, may disappear altogether in the very near future. This is because of an effect called “feedback”. Dark oceans and dark land, once covered by reflective ice, absorb more of the sun’s energy with their dark surfaces, and that leads to more melting, which leads to more heating, which leads to more melting … you see how this works.
I don’t mean to bring everyone down, but sometimes you have to stare a difficult situation right in the face in order to commit to making a change. So look. If you see something, say something. Then do something, change something.
The Science of Ant Mills aka Death Spirals.
“Imagine a complex society that can accomplish amazing things, but also has an error in its programming that, occasionally, causes many of its members to run amok and die tragically. This is the situation faced by some species of ants, and the behavior is called a death spiral or an ant mill. You can see several examples in the videos below. The ants seem to have gone insane, walking in an endless circle together.
Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, “with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest.”
The cause of this behavior is the technology ant societies use for ground navigation. They follow pheromone trails on the ground laid down by other ants, or they simply follow other ants visually. The system works well normally. A scout ant goes out and finds something. Other ants go back to get more by following the scent trail, or by following each other. However, if a loop gets created, the ants will march blindly, sometimes circling until they die.
You can see an ant pheromone trail being formed in this video: Fire ant pheromone.”
Watch more videos of ant mills here.
Beau Lotto: Optical illusions show how we see
One of the best TED talks I’ve seen in recent memory. Sit down and prepare to get a bit of a brain cramp as you are taken through a series of truly awesome optical illusions.
In the process, you will learn a bit about how we perceive the world. In a sense, these tricks show us how our eyes work, but more accurately it shows us how our brains make sense of all that visual information.
You begin with particular wavelengths of light, the purely physical thingness of things. You end with a perception of your surroundings, tricks and all. All the between bits are where the fun lives.
What IS an illusion???
(Source: youtube.com)
![Meet IBM’s “Boy And His Atom,” Stars of the Smallest Movie Ever Made
[Image Credit via ScienceAlert via D: All Things Digital]
“The image above shows two animated characters in what’s been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest movie ever made. It’s called “A Boy And His Atom,” and the medium of animation is, you guessed it, atoms.
It lasts all of 60 seconds, and depicts a boy — made up of individual atoms himself — encountering a single atom that he befriends and throws like a ball. He then bounces up and down on a tiny trampoline made up of atoms, then throws the original atom into the sky, where it erupts into a tiny commercial for the company that produced it: IBM.
What’s going on here is this: Scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, Calif., have figured out a way to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms. To do it they’re using a big piece of equipment called a scanning tunneling microscope that weighs two tons and operates at a temperature of minus 268 degrees Celsius (or 450.5 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale, according to the Unit Convert widget on my Mac). In the world of physics and nanotechnology, this thing is a big deal and led the two IBM inventors to share the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986.
So why is IBM using atoms to make crude animations? As has long been the case, everything inside computers is getting smaller all the time. According to Moore’s Law — named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore — individual transistors on chips tend to shrink every 18 to 24 months. So does the amount of space needed to store individual bits of data. Right now, IBM says, it takes about a million atoms to do that, but it can see a trajectory leading to a point in the future to where that number can be reduced to 12 atoms. At that scale, the media to store information will be so compact that every movie ever made, including “A Boy And His Atom,” could be stored on a device the size of your iPhone. That means the ability to move and manipulate individual atoms with great precision will eventually come in handy.
And here [below] is the obligatory “Making Of…” video that explains how and why the movie was made, including an interesting detail: What moving individual atoms sounds like.”
Read more here.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/6ce2e604f12035a9b2e4ccec00a0782f/tumblr_mm3tnzdgXq1r39hw6o1_500.jpg)
Meet IBM’s “Boy And His Atom,” Stars of the Smallest Movie Ever Made
[Image Credit via ScienceAlert via D: All Things Digital]
“The image above shows two animated characters in what’s been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest movie ever made. It’s called “A Boy And His Atom,” and the medium of animation is, you guessed it, atoms.
It lasts all of 60 seconds, and depicts a boy — made up of individual atoms himself — encountering a single atom that he befriends and throws like a ball. He then bounces up and down on a tiny trampoline made up of atoms, then throws the original atom into the sky, where it erupts into a tiny commercial for the company that produced it: IBM.
What’s going on here is this: Scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, Calif., have figured out a way to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms. To do it they’re using a big piece of equipment called a scanning tunneling microscope that weighs two tons and operates at a temperature of minus 268 degrees Celsius (or 450.5 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale, according to the Unit Convert widget on my Mac). In the world of physics and nanotechnology, this thing is a big deal and led the two IBM inventors to share the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986.
So why is IBM using atoms to make crude animations? As has long been the case, everything inside computers is getting smaller all the time. According to Moore’s Law — named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore — individual transistors on chips tend to shrink every 18 to 24 months. So does the amount of space needed to store individual bits of data. Right now, IBM says, it takes about a million atoms to do that, but it can see a trajectory leading to a point in the future to where that number can be reduced to 12 atoms. At that scale, the media to store information will be so compact that every movie ever made, including “A Boy And His Atom,” could be stored on a device the size of your iPhone. That means the ability to move and manipulate individual atoms with great precision will eventually come in handy.
And here [below] is the obligatory “Making Of…” video that explains how and why the movie was made, including an interesting detail: What moving individual atoms sounds like.”
Read more here.
Monty Python’s John Cleese almost explains our brains. In more serious – but no less humorous – insight, see Cleese on 5 factors to make your life more creative.
Childbirth vs Getting Kicked in the Balls
Which hurts more? A scientific breakdown to settle the score!
