Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Podcast

General Biology Berkeley Course Webcast

curiouscat — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:04:19 +0000

General Biology Course at University of California - Berkeley, Fall 2007. Instructors John Forte, R Fischer and R Malkin. “General introduction to cell structure and function, molecular and organism genetics, animal development, form and function. Intended for biological sciences majors, but open to all qualified students.” A great service from Berkeley with video and audio… Topics include: Macromolecules structure and function, How cells function-an introduction to cellular metabolism and biological catalysts, Microbes - Viruses, Bacteria, Plasmids, Transposons and Homeostasis: The body’s defenses.

Robot Fish

curiouscat — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:54:08 +0000

Pretty cool swimming fish robot from Essex University.

Huge Ant Nest

curiouscat — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:30:47 +0000

Very cool webcast. The ant nest covers 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. The nest is engineered with vents to promote the flow of air, bringing in fresh air and expelling carbon dioxide created by the large fungus gardens. The scientists filled the ant next with concrete to excavate it: 10 tons of concrete were needed.

Engineering TV

curiouscat — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:20:31 +0000

Engineering TV offers some nice videos. The site needs more content and some better usability (almost no webcasts are returned on clicking the tags - though they can be found by searching, videos play with sound automatically (without user approval), the ad sounds are way too loud…) but it is another site that might provide some interesting webcasts. I am still most hopeful about SciVee (based on the tie to PLoS) - though the progress has been slow so far.

Lighting in Slow Motion

curiouscat — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:38:32 +0000

The videos provides a super slow motion lighting strike. A separate lighting related item, from NASA: Gigantic Jets:

They are extremely rare but tremendously powerful. Gigantic jets are a newly discovered type of lightning discharge between some thunderstorms and the Earth’s ionosphere high above them. Pictured above is one such jet caught by accident by a meteor camera in Oklahoma, USA. The gigantic jet, at the lower left, traversed perhaps 70 kilometers in just under one second.

Science and the City: Science Barge

curiouscat — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:46:38 +0000

Science and the City is (among other things) an excellent podcast series from the New York Academy of Science. The latest podcast discusses the science barge project we posted about earlier. They discuss looking at commercially viable urban farms (on rooftops in NYC) and the establishing educational gardens at schools.

See the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Podcast Directory for some great resources for podcasts. Don’t miss the naked scientists from the BBC.

Awesome Robot: uBot-5

curiouscat — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:30:32 +0000

Cool video on the uBot-5 from UMass Amherst.

The uBot-5 is dynamically stable, using two wheels in a differential drive configuration for mobility. Dynamically stable robots are well suited to environments designed for humans where both a high center of mass and a small footprint are often required.

via: Pop Culture and Engineering Intersect

Toyota has long been interested in personal robot assistants. And the uBot-5, under development at UMass-Amherst, is also looking to meeting that need: Robot developed by computer scientists to assist with elder care:

Baby boomers are set to retire, and robots are ready to help, providing elder care and improving the quality of life for those in need.
…
The uBOT-5 carries a Web cam, a microphone, and a touch-sensitive LCD display that acts as an interface for communication with the outside world. “Grandma can take the robot’s hand, lead it out into the garden and have a virtual visit with a grandchild who is living on the opposite coast,” says Grupen, who notes that isolation can lead to depression in the elderly.

Grupen studied developmental neurology in his quest to create a robot that could do a variety of tasks in different environments. The uBot-5’s arm motors are analogous to the muscles and joints in our own arms, and it can push itself up to a vertical position if it falls over. It has a “spinal cord” and the equivalent of an inner ear to keep it balanced on its Segway-like wheels.

Such robots have a huge market waiting for them if engineers can provide models that can be useful at the right price. The future of such efforts looks very promising.

Science and the Excitement, the Mystery and the Awe of a Flower

curiouscat — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:28:28 +0000

Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman is a great explanation of how scientists think: “The science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower”

I did post on this before. Related book: Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character.

Magnetic Movie

curiouscat — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:42:13 +0000

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo

Magnetic Movie was shot in NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories at UC Berkeley for Chanel 4 in association with the Arts Council of England.

In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a “very most beautiful thing.”

Magnetic Movie is the aquavit, something not precisely scientific but grants us an uncanny experience of geophysical and cosmological forces.

Cool video: I must admit I am confused at how extensive the artistic license taken with the animation is.

Cell Signals Webcast

curiouscat — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:24:40 +0000

Very cool animation, by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Interactive Knowledge, of the working of the inner workings of our bodies as they react to a cut. If you want to get right to the science, skip the first minute. Providing these types of educational animations is a great way for educational institutions to take advantage of technology to achieve their mission in ways not possible before.

It is annoying how many of those “educational” institutions don’t provide such educational material online (and even take material offline that was online). Have they become more focused on thinking and operating the way they did in 1970 than promoting science education? It is a shame some “educational” institutions have instead become focused on looking backward. I will try to promote those organizations that are providing online science education.