Video of the Week: A Tribute to Rachel Carson and Silent Spring

"Over increasingly large areas of the United States spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song." 

-- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring 1962 

Fifty years ago this week, Rachel Carson's now-famous book Silent Spring rolled off of the presses. It drew widespread attention to the effects of pesticides like DDT on wildlife and human communities and is often credited with launching the modern environmental movement in the United States. The title laments the loss of songbirds to unintentional poisoning.

As a child growing up on a farm in Western Pennsylvania, Carson learned to love and respect birds and other wildlife. Our video of the week is a tribute to Carson and her enormous impact on public understanding of ecology and environmental toxicology in the United States. The Eastern Towhee shown here is one of many birds Carson likely heard singing on her farm during her formative years.  Thanks in large part to Carson's eye-opening book, broad applications of pesticides have been reduced, and there's hope that we will never experience a truly silent spring.

LEARN MORE
Read a brief biography of Rachel Carson and excerpts from her often lyrical writings

Learn more about the Eastern Towhee (including listening to other audio clips of their songs and calls) as well as many other bird species on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site

Read the first chapter of Lind Lear's Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, a detailed biography of Carson's life


Have you read Silent Spring or other writings by Rachel Carson? What did you think?

Video of the Week: NASA's Perpetual Ocean Proves Data can be Art

Video courtesy: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Who says data have to come in a dry table? The scientists and animators at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) have made a career out of doing just the opposite. Using some of the same software tools employed by Pixar, they create images and animations that bring data sets to life and make them easier to understand--for both the public and the scientific community. Our video of the week, Perpetual Ocean, is one artful example of their work that recently became popular on social media. By synthesizing a numerical model and a slew of different types of data collected between 2005 and 2007, the SVS team has created a beautiful visualization of the "swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents."

Enjoy.  Happy Friday.


LEARN MORE
Read a Q&A with Dr. Horace Mitchell, Director of NASA Scientific Visualization Studio from Mashable

Learn how the process of visualizing data can help scientists interpret it more easily in our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data

Video of the Week: Critical Thinking on Climate Change

Our video of the week is a bit longer than usual: it's a full-length lecture by Dr. Richard Milne from the University of Edinburgh entitled "Critical Thinking on Climate Change: Separating Skepticism from Denial."  Dr. Milne offers a clear and compelling explanation of the difference between true skeptics (who help move science forward by asking tough, legitimate questions) and deniers (who cherry-pick data, rely on false experts, and use other questionable techniques to advance a viewpoint in the face of scientific evidence).

Learn More
For more discussion about what constitutes true scientific controversies and how they are resolved (or not), read our module Ideas in Science: Scientific Controversy.

For more about how visuals, such as graphs, are used and misused, check out our module Data: Using Graphs and Visual Data.

You might also be interested in other lectures in the University of Edinburgh's series "Our Changing World."

And, as always, we love getting your comments. Please let us know what you think! 

Video of the Week: Science of the Olympics

In addition to being an outstanding athlete, Olympic
weightlifter Sarah Robles is a model for scientists
working in biomimitics. Image courtesy: NBC Universal 

Only two days, 1 hour, and 1 minute to go until the 2012 Summer Olympic Games kick off in London. We tend to think of the Olympics as a contest of strength, endurance, and human will--and indeed it is. But there's another, less-talked-about aspect of the games that has major implications for athletes in training and competition: science.  From designing "anti-gravity" training treadmills and high-impact safety helmets to making fluid dynamics work for an athlete in the pool, science and engineering are at work behind the scenes in all of our favorite Olympic sports.

Our video of the week looks at how scientists studying biomimitics (the practice of using nature as a model to solve engineering problems) can apply techniques used by champion weightlifter Sarah Robles to the development of robotic arms.  It's one of ten videos in the new series "Science of the Olympic Games: Engineering in Sports" produced by the National Science Foundation and NBC Learn. The other nine videos cover topics ranging from the biomechanics of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt's impressive speed to the importance of accuracy and precision in timekeeping.

 

Congratulations and best of luck to all the athletes competing in London this summer!

Video of the Week: E.O. Wilson's Advice to Young Scientists about Facing Math and Excelling in Your Field

For many students, even those majoring in science, math is a four-letter word. But renowned evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has a message for aspiring scientists:  "If you are a bit short in mathematical skills, don't worry."

Wilson--who didn't take algebra until his freshman year of college or calculus until he was 32 and a tenured professor at Harvard--wants students and young scientists to know that they can catch up. 
In our video of the week, Wilson offers advice on how to tackle fear of math, how to find the field of study that fits you, and how to excel even if math isn't your strong suit. He implores young people to go into the sciences, saying: "The world needs you, badly."

At Visionlearning, we know that many students struggle with the mathematical components of their science courses.  That's why we're excited to begin work on a series of new modules covering mathematical concepts and skills commonly used in the sciences, from biology to geology. We'll let you know when the first module is ready, and we hope you'll give us your feedback. 

In the meantime, is there a mathematical concept that you (or your students) struggle with?  Has there ever been a time when math held you back in your career or studies?

Video of the Week: EU's 'Science, It's a Girl Thing' Stirs Controversy

This week the European Union launched a new initiative called "Science: It's a Girl Thing" aimed at encouraging more young women to pursue STEM careers.  Their promotional video clip drew a lot of attention--although not the kind they had hoped. In fact, they were so besieged with complaints that the video was superficial and filled with stereotypes that they withdrew it and issued an explanation and apology.  The clip, still available through YouTube, is our Video of the Week.

We hope you'll watch it and share your opinion in the comments below or on our Facebook page:

What Others are Saying
Mary Ann Rankin, President and CEO of the U.S. National Math and Science Initiative, calls the video "a viral disaster" but notes that many of the other materials for the initiative are "quite good."  In particular, she points to a series of video profiles featuring female scientists produced by the campaign and a section called "Six Reasons Science Needs You," which makes the case for women to get excited about STEM opportunities.

In a statement, the European Union explained the rationale behind the video clip and said it will continue the "Science: It's a Girl Thing" campaign sans music video:

The 45-second clip was intended to put this in a lighter context, to grab the attention of teenage girls aged 13 to 18 who have up until now been very hard to reach with messages about science. The goal was to attract their attention so that they might look at the campaign in detail, visit the website where there is lots of information on science and careers in research, including video-profiles of role models.

The concept of the trailer was to combine images of science (such as electronics, mathematics, chemistry, physics) with images closer to cosmetics and fashion to show teenage girls that science is already part of their life.

What do you think?  Is the video effective?  Offensive?

Image of the Week: Has the Elusive Higgs Boson been Found?

Unless you were hiding under a rock this week, you likely heard the buzz about the Higgs boson (or perhaps more accurately the "Higgs-like particle"). The sub-atomic particle, proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs and other theorists, has eluded scientist for decades. But on Wednesday July 4th, scientists announced that they had amassed enough evidence to officially describe a new sub-atomic particle--one with characteristics closely matched to the long-sought-after Higgs boson.

Image © 2012 CERN

For two years, physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland have been smashing protons together at high speeds and observing the crash sites with sensitive detectors. They were looking for signs that the collisions had (at least occasionally) emitted a Higgs boson, which according to its theoretical properties would immediately decay into other particles. Our image of the week is a computer rendering of one of the experimental collisions. The yellow dotted lines and green towers radiating out from the crash show characteristics matching what scientists would expect to observe as a Higgs boson decayed into a pair of photons.

By examining the subatomic shrapnel from trillions of collisions, the scientists were able to conclude that they had indeed shaken loose this new Higgs-like particle.  This is big news because the Higgs boson is the last piece "missing" (undetected by science) from the "Standard Model" of particle physics that describes the structure of matter and our universe.

While the researchers are cautious about saying that the particle they have observed is definitely the Higgs boson, they are certain that it's a huge discovery for physics. And the possibility that it's a different, as-yet-unpredicted particle is equally as exciting. To gain a clearer picture of the discovery, the research teams will gather as much data as possible before the LHC shuts down for a two-year period of maintenance and upgrades.


Bonus footage! We selected an image of the week, but we couldn't resist sharing this video as well. NOVA produced it last year when scientists were still searching for evidence of the Higgs boson. It's a little dated in that respect, but it gives a nice, quick explanation of the Higgs boson and an interview with Peter Higgs.

Watch The Higgs Particle Matters on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Dig Deeper
Learn more about the LCH, the massive (27-kilometer-long) particle accelerator, where scientists labored to find evidence of the Higgs boson

Read the Science News story "Higgs Found" by Alexandra Witze

Video of the Week: Science (and Math) on Ice

Tonight the Los Angeles Kings and the New Jersey Devils will suit up and hit the ice for the first game of the National Hockey League (NHL) Stanley Cup Finals. The players probably won't be thinking about Newton's Laws of Motion while being checked against the glass or how they make use of kinetic and potential energy to launch that 160 kilometer per hour slapshot, but a hockey game is a fast and furious demonstration of many of the key concepts of physics.

In fact, a careful observer can see physics, statistics, geometry, and biology all at work in the rink. Even if you're not a hockey fan, the speed, power, and reaction time of NHL players is undeniably impressive, and the Science of NHL Hockey video series from the National Science Foundation and NBC Learn offers a view you can't get from the nosebleed seats. We're crowning the segment entitled "Work, Energy, and Power" our video of the week, but they are all worth a watch.



For more videos from the Science of NHL Hockey series, visit the NSF's Science360 Network.

For ideas from the National Science Teachers Association about how to incorporate these videos into lesson plans for high school and junior high students, visit NBC Learn. (Scroll down, select a lesson plan, and then click on full-screen mode to read the document.)

Video: Virtual Tour of Vesta Asteroid with Data from NASA's Dawn Spacecraft

Call it a giant asteroid. Call is a planetoid. Scientists call it Vesta--a 300 mile wide celestial body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that, in some ways, bares a striking resemblance to a rocky planet like Earth. NASA's Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting Vesta since July 2011 collecting data and taking photographs.

Last week, scientists released a bevy of images and information about Vesta, including data confirming that Vesta is indeed structured like a planet with an iron core and that it separated into layers (crust, mantle, etc.) as it formed. (For more information about the structure of our own planet, see our module on Earth's Structure.) Vesta's topography is also quite varied, exhibiting landslides, craters, and a mountain twice the height of Mt. Everest. Using data from Dawn, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory created this ethereal virtual tour of Vesta's surface.

Video Courtesy: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

For more information, check out NASA's Dawn news page or some of the widespread media coverage from the New York Times, Nature, and the LA Times, among others.