Science Quick Picks » Science

Amazing Videos: The Symphony of Science

Jorge Goncalves — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:32:14 +0000

The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell. The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of him that he aims to combine, in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience. Here you can watch music videos, download songs, read lyrics and find links relating to the messages conveyed by the music.

The project owes its existence in large measure to the wonderful work of Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steve Soter, of Druyan-Sagan Associates, and their production of the classic PBS Series Cosmos, as well as all the other featured figures and visuals.

My favorite video: We Are All Connected (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye)

You can watch more videos here or at the Symphony of Science’s YouTube Channel.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

Amazing Videos: The Symphony of Science

Highlighting Key Discoveries: Nature Milestones

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:16:29 +0000

Nature Milestones highlights key discoveries that have shaped different scientific fields and enables the wider recognition of these classic findings that are often recognized only by those in the field.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

Highlighting Key Discoveries: Nature Milestones

World University News Special Report: Research and the World Cup

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:34:26 +0000

‘Hundreds of thousands of football fans from around the world descended on South Africa last week to watch the 2010 FIFA World Cup which kicked off on Friday. The mega-event has gripped the imagination of the nation, including its students, academics and universities.

The World Cup has generated reams of research into the event and its multiple impacts. At the Second World Conference on Soccer and Science last week, academics presented studies into the ‘beautiful game’. Universities are housing fans and staging events, and students are helping out as volunteers. There have been lectures, including a seven-part Extra Time series on soccer delivered by academics from South Africa and Germany, the 2006 World Cup host.’

Continue reading Research and the World Cup.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

World University News Special Report: Research and the World Cup

Nature’s Scitable

Jorge Goncalves — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:39:07 +0000

Scitable is an open online teaching/learning portal combining high quality educational articles authored by editors at Nature Publishing Group with technology-based community features to fuel a global exchange of scientific insights, teaching practices, and study resources. Scitable currently contains articles in the field of genetics, and is intended for college undergraduate faculty and students. Future plans involve extension of Scitable to other fields within the life sciences, as well as to other audiences.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

Nature’s Scitable

ScienceWatch: The Hottest Research of 2007-08

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:26:14 +0000

ScienceWatch: The Hottest Research of 2007-08. ‘It’s time again for Science Watch from Thomson Reuters to take its annual look back at the hottest of recent research. The first table below lists the researchers who, during 2008, accounted for the the highest numbers of Hot Papers published over the preceding two years. The second table features the papers published during 2008 (aside from reviews) that were most cited by year’s end.

Among the scientists, none fielded more Hot Papers during 2008 than Kuo-Chen Chou of the Gordon Life Sciences Institute and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His 17 Hot Papers published since 2007 cover a variety of sequencing tools for predicting protein location (e.g., “Euk-mPloc: a fusion classifier for large-scale eukaryotic protein subcellular location prediction by incorporating multiple sites,” J. Proteome Res., 6[5]: 1728-34, 2007). Thirteen of these reports were coauthored with another of the featured scientists, Hong-Bin Shen.’

Scientists with Multiple Hot Papers.

The Red-Hot Research Papers of 2008.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

ScienceWatch: The Hottest Research of 2007-08

Science NetLinks

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:09:30 +0000

Science NetLinks is part of Thinkfinity, a partnership between the Verizon Foundation and 11 premier educational organizations. The Thinkfinity partners include the AAAS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Council on Economic Education, the National Geographic Society, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and the Literacy Network.

The Thinkfinity partnership provides free, Internet-based content across academic disciplines. Science NetLinks’ role is to provide a wealth of standards-aligned resources for K-12 science educators, including lesson plans, interactives and reviewed Internet resources.

Thinkfinity.org. Thinkfinity.org is the Verizon Foundation’s free, comprehensive program and online portal to 55,000 educational resources. Thinkfinity offers standards-based, grade-specific, K-12 lesson plans and other student interactives provided in partnership with many of the top education and literacy experts and organizations in the U.S.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

Science NetLinks

United Nations University Our World 2.0 Beta

Jorge Goncalves — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:07:30 +0000

Our World 2.0 is brought to you by the United Nations University and asks the question: What can we do when faced with complex, inter-connected and pressing problems like climate change, oil depletion and food security?

In responding to these challenges, innovation will be the key. This webzine and series of video briefs will report on and analyze these innovations in order to inspire people to learn.

And while understanding is a precursor to motivation, innovation and technology alone will not solve these problems. These are just examples of how to bring about change. A global priority shift is perhaps first necessary, so we must consider the question: Why change? And you are best placed to answer this.

Our World 2.0 speaks to you, the general public and shares stories on how and why we can re-make this world into a newer, better version.

For Our World 2.0, the central tenet is that we can use our collective knowledge, technology and design to facilitate creativity, innovation, and, most notably, collaboration amongst people.

United Nations University (UNU). UNU is dedicated to the generation and transfer of knowledge, and the strengthening of individual and institutional capacities in furtherance of the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

The mission of UNU is to contribute, through research and capacity building, to efforts to resolve the pressing global problems that are a concern of the United Nations, its Peoples and Member States.

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

United Nations University Our World 2.0 Beta

Telegraph: Top Ten Greatest Experiments

Jorge Goncalves — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:54:43 +0000

Top Ten Greatest Experiments. ‘George Johnson celebrates the great thinkers whose home-brewed experiments transformed our world: A few years ago, while reading stories about superstrings vibrating in 10 dimensions or quantum computers solving problems in parallel universes, I began to feel nostalgic. I love these grand speculative theories and admire their creators, but sometimes the layers of abstraction are piled so high that they induce vertigo. I felt a need to get back to the ground.

I also found myself lamenting how much of science has become a team sport. The experiments so often celebrated in the newspapers – sequencing the genome, proving the existence of the top quark, discovering a new planet by analysing the wobble of a distant star – cost millions of pounds and are carried out by crews that have grown to the size of small corporations.’ [continue reading]

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

Telegraph: Top Ten Greatest Experiments

TEAM 0.5: The World’s Most Powerful Microscope

Jorge Goncalves — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:42:17 +0000

Debut of TEAM 0.5, the World’s Best Microscope. ‘TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope capable of producing images with half angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The TEAM Project (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) is led by Berkeley Lab in a collaboration with DOE’s Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Frederick Seitz Materials Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and two private companies specializing in electron microscopy, the FEI Company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and CEOS of Heidelberg, Germany.

Now that TEAM 0.5′s basic systems are operational, additional components and facilities are being completed and tuned, including a state-of-the-art control room display that shows the sample under the microscope on a flat panel resembling a wide-screen, high-definition TV. After a long series of rigorous tests and adjustments, TEAM 0.5 will become available to outside users by October, 2008.’

TEAM Project Homepage. ‘(…) In 2009, exactly 50 years later, a group of scientists will meet the Feynman challenge with delivery of the TEAM microscope, an instrument to provide unprecedented opportunities to observe atomic scale order, electronic structure and dynamics of individual nanostructures.’

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

TEAM 0.5: The World’s Most Powerful Microscope

Scientific American on Science 2.0: An Experiment

Jorge Goncalves — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:55:04 +0000

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?: Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.

‘Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it’s a feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0.—just post your inputs in the Comment section.’

Related: Columbia Journalism Review: Journalism 2.0 on Science 2.0 – How the Web is shaping next-generation reporting. ‘Web 2.0 – the “second generation” Internet of user-oriented social networks, wikis, blogs, and information-tagging devices – has spawned at least two progeny since Tim O’Reilly coined the term in 2004: Journalism 2.0 and Science 2.0.

Scientific American made conjoined twins out of them last week with its latest experiment in networked journalism: an article about networked science. Last Wednesday, the magazine’s Web site published a 2,700-word story by veteran freelancer Mitch Waldrop titled, “Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?” An introduction explains, however, that the piece is a work in progress, and invites readers to post comments and questions that will be incorporated into a final version, which will be published in the May issue of the magazine.’

This is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog with quick links to the world of Science.

Scientific American on Science 2.0: An Experiment

Science Quick Picks » Science

Amazing Videos: The Symphony of Science

Related posts

Highlighting Key Discoveries: Nature Milestones

Related posts

World University News Special Report: Research and the World Cup

Related posts

Nature’s Scitable

Related posts

ScienceWatch: The Hottest Research of 2007-08

Related posts

Science NetLinks

Related posts

United Nations University Our World 2.0 Beta

Related posts

Telegraph: Top Ten Greatest Experiments

Related posts

TEAM 0.5: The World’s Most Powerful Microscope

Related posts

Scientific American on Science 2.0: An Experiment

Related posts