Of course, the big news this week is that MIT and Harvard announced that they’re joining forces to offer free online courses starting next fall. We gave you the scoop on that yesterday. Now we give you another MIT announcement that has largely flown beneath the radar.
MIT is teaming up with Khan Academy (whose founder went to MIT and will deliver MIT’s commencement speech this spring), and together they will produce “short videos teaching basic concepts in science and engineering” for K‑12 students. The videos will be produced by MIT’s ever-so-creative students themselves and then be made available through a dedicated MIT website and YouTube channel. You can click the links to start watching the first batch of videos, or watch an example above, The Physics of Unicycling. H/T @HKPerkinson
Perhaps you heard the news this week. Four billionaires (Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot Jr. and Charles Simonyi) have thrown their financial weight behind Planetary Resources, Inc., a Washington-based startup with big and bold plans. Before our planet runs out of natural resources, this venture plans to start extracting water and metals from resource-rich asteroids flying near Earth. One asteroid, they speculate, may contain more platinum than we’ve ever mined from Earth. Above, the company gives you a quick introduction to their SciFi-esque plans. The first Planetary Resources spacecraft will launch within the next two years. via Devour
Presenting the keynote speech at the 28th National Space Symposium, the new public face of astrophysics, Neil deGrasse Tyson, continued making his case for funding NASA and funding it well. Here he tried out a new argument. NASA is not just good for scientific progress. It’s good for our creativity, imagination and collective culture. His argument begins at the 14:45 mark, which is where we start the video.…
Now discover more Culture from Around the Web (which all originally appeared on our Twitter Stream):
This week, The New York Times gave us some good news. According to an article by Gretchen Reynolds, a decade of research by neuroscientists and physiologists shows fairly convincingly that exercise can make you smarter. She writes:
Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.
There’s apparently a lot to be gained from a simple daily walk (assuming it checks out with your doctor). And, as the video below shows, the gains goes beyond cognition itself:
The photo above was provided courtesy of BigStockPhoto
Turn down your speakers … but not all of the way off. Now see what sound waves look like when they’re visualized and the geometric patterns they make. They’re called Chladni patterns, and they get their name from Ernst Chladni (1756–1827), a German physicist and musician whose work earned him the title, “The Father of Acoustics.”
Back in 1825, Michael Faraday, the venerated English scientist, established The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children. Faraday gave the inaugural lecture himself, hoping to get a younger generation interested in science, and the tradition has carried on ever since. Above, we’re skipping forward 166 years to 1991, when Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s best known evolutionary biologists, presented a five part lecture series called Growing Up in the Universe. It’s a rather brilliant look at life, the universe, and our place in it. And while it’s geared toward a younger crowd, adults will enjoy it too. Originally televised by the BBC, the lectures now appear on YouTube, courtesy of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
All of the lectures, whose titles are listed below, can be viewed in the playlist above. More RI Christmas Lectures for Children can be viewed online here. This series will be added to our collection. 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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In October 1946, American scientists, working in White Sands, New Mexico, shot a V‑2 missile 65 miles into the air. The missile (originally designed by the Nazis during World War II) carried a 35-millimeter camera aloft that snapped an image every second and a half. When the missile returned to Earth, the camera itself was demolished by the impact. But the film, protected by a steel casing, remained unscathed, according to Air & Space Magazine. And when the scientists recovered the film, they witnessed something never seen by humans before — the first images of our planet taken from outer space. As one scientist put it, we got to see (above) “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship.”
By the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force started working with a new line of missile, the Thor missile. And it made history in May, 1959. Launched from Cape Canaveral, the Thor Missile Number 187 carried a General Electric-manufactured “data capsule” and 16-millimeter camera in its nose cone. The flight lasted 15 minutes, covered 1500 miles, and ended in the Atlantic Ocean. According to the GE Film Catalog, when the data capsule was recovered:
General Electric scientists began the careful processing of the capsule’s contents. They were not long in finding the results they had hoped for—in the subdued light of a photographic dark room, on a still-dripping strip of developed motion picture film, the eyes of man beheld for the first time the image of the earth as it appears from beyond the atmosphere.
You can watch the historic video immediately above.
To get more recent views of the Earth from outer space, don’t miss these dazzling videos:
A couple of years ago, Maria Popova highlighted for us a 2009 talk by John Cleese that offered a handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity. Of course, John Cleese knows something about creativity, being one of the leading forces behind Monty Python, the beloved British comedy group.
Now, we have another talk, recorded circa 1991, where Cleese uses scientific research to describe what creativity is … and what creativity isn’t. He starts by telling us, creativity is not a talent. It has nothing to do with IQ. It is a way of doing things, a way of being — which means that creativity can be learned. The rest he explains in 37 thought-filled minutes.
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