Speak­ing of psy­che­delics, we’ve post­ed a doc­u­men­tary below (yet anoth­er BBC pro­duc­tion) that takes a not entire­ly flat­ter­ing look at the life of Tim­o­thy Leary, the Har­vard psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor who went coun­ter­cul­ture in 1960s and advo­cat­ed the ther­a­peu­tic and spir­i­tu­al ben­e­fits of LSD. I remem­ber see­ing him years lat­er when I was in col­lege. My mem­o­ry of the man: Spunky and about as non­lin­ear as you could get.

This video was appar­ent­ly devel­oped with scenes tak­en from the BBC series Walk­ing with Mon­sters. (But don’t com­plete­ly quote me on that.)

For more smart videos, see our YouTube Playlist.

In Novem­ber, Japan’s Kaguya space­craft orbit­ed the moon with a high-def cam­era onboard. You can see the first HD footage of an “earth­rise” and “earth­set” by check­ing out these still images (Earth­rise and Earth­set) or watch­ing the video footage below, which has also been added to our YouTube playlist.

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Some­times order seem­ing­ly comes out of nowhere. It just mate­ri­al­izes. It hap­pens in ant colonies, in cities, on the web, in the brain. This episode of Radio Lab (MP3 — iTunes — Feed) takes a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how groups orga­nize and direct them­selves with­out the help of a leader, or some kind of cen­tral com­mand. The show includes con­ver­sa­tions with biol­o­gist E.O. Wil­son, econ­o­mist James Surowiec­ki, and neu­rol­o­gists Oliv­er Sacks and Christof Koch. Also includ­ed in the mix is Deb­o­rah Gor­don, a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who has spent years study­ing ants, which are indi­vid­u­al­ly incom­pe­tent but do remark­ably com­plex things as colonies. There’s more to ants than you’d first think, so we’ve also includ­ed below Deb­o­rah Gor­don’s pre­sen­ta­tion at the TED Talks con­fer­ence. It’s called “How Do Ants Know What to Do?” And it’s added to our YouTube Playlist.

This is rather extra­or­di­nary. Here’s what Hur­ri­cane Dean looked like for the crew fly­ing in a NASA space shut­tle last August. You can check out more NASA videos on YouTube here. It’s also added to our YouTube playlist. Thanks to one of our read­ers for point­ing this out.

Great his­tor­i­cal footage. No com­men­tary real­ly need­ed. (If you want to see the liftoff, look here.)

Fun­ny and yet it counts as sci­ence.

Chris Hard­wick and Rainn Wil­son, star of The Office, “dive deep into the chem­i­cal guts of a com­mon house­hold prod­uct” to dis­cov­er “What’s Inside.” For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it https://www.pbs.org/wiredscience (Source: Boing­Bo­ing)