String Theory In Two Minutes

Brian Greene, who you may know from his television series and book The Elegant Universe, ran a contest asking people to produce a video of no more than two minutes' duration, explaining String Theory.

He recently announced the winner.

Most of them are pretty good. But, it's still far too complex for my depleted set of brain cells.

I think I'll continue to confine my study to the much simpler subject of G-String Theory :-).

The Elements Of A Good Shower

I discovered this wonderful periodic table shower curtain via Neatorama.

I'd love to get one. Sadly, though, it seems to be designed for a much large shower than the tiny cubicle in my bathroom.

Quite Interesting

There's a wonderful quiz comedy show hosted by Stephen Fry called QI, which stands for "Quite Interesting".

You learn all sorts of fascinating things while watching it. For instance, some wag named this organic compound Penguinone. I can't imagine how they came up with that :-).

At least it's slightly more succinct than

3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dienone
If you like that one, Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to compounds with unusual names.

The Tree Of Man

I found this video from the television series Cosmos, narrated by Carl Sagan's (aka Butt-Head Astronomer), on Neatorama.

It's quite long, but gives a nice explanation of the evolution of our little branch of the evolutionary tree.

Awesome!

I found this timeline of Earth's future over at Dump Trumpet.

As they say there, it's a "scientific theory in glorious Hollywood-style pictures and sound". I really like the blockbuster soundtrack. I wonder where it's from.

Universcale

I heard about this on Leo Laporte's podcast a while back, but only got around to checking it out this evening.

The Universcale website, kindly hosted by Nikon, allows you to experience the various scales of nature, from far off galaxies, right down to a single Hydrogen atom and beyond.

The interface is extremely well done.

A similar, but less visually appealing, site is Powers of Ten. Still worth a look.

Computer Aided Science

Seed magazine has a nice video that illustrates some of the ways in which scientists use supercomputing and data visualisation to perform virtual experiments.




Click To Play

Solar Scapegoat

National Geographic is running an article that points to NASA data showing that it's not just the Earth that is experiencing global warming.

Data from the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions apparently show that the carbon dioxide ice caps at the South pole have been getting smaller for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, a scientist from the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, suggests that this provides evidence that the amount of heat being generated by the sun has increased and this, rather than what we humans have been doing, is the cause of global warming.

Later in the article, other scientists point to "wobbles" in Mars's orbit as the underlying reason for the changes.

Just another example of the complexity of these issues.

Free High School Science Texts

I couldn't help myself. I got caught up reading some of the articles at World Changing.

This one, about Mark Horner and his OpenText Science Book project is particularly inspiring.

Grand Illusions

In case you didn't notice, the inkless pen mentioned in a previous post was being sold on a site called Grand Illusions.


Since reading about the pen, I've had a browse of the rest of the site and it is truly wonderful! They sell a number of items, but there's also a toy collection that the owner has built up from various sources.

For most of them, there is a small video showing the toy in action. Before you started looking, though, make sure you're not close to your download quota ... it's very addictive!