Category Archives: National Geographic
How to regrow a rainforest – Willie Smits on TED Talks
Willie and the orangs
My Grade 12 class have looked at this story before, and now we can hear about it from Willie Smitts, a primatologist and conservationist who has led a huge project to replant and revive a section on rainforest in Borneo. They have taken over 8,000 hectares of scorched and cleared land and are returning it to a habitat worthy of orang-utans and many more endangered species.
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Smits was featured in TED2009 and here he is with his story of how they regrew the rainforest.
Nature’s YouTube Channel (and some others)
On the heels of the NewScientist YouTube channel we have the offering from Nature. Where NewScientist provides a news-style clip of current Science headlines, Nature’s YouTube channel takes the approach of a video background to articles published in their journal. So far they have ten videos, though they provide useful background to articles such as the Antikythera mechanism, whale evolution and this one on sequencing the platypus genome:
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It’s an encouraging trend to see these journals reach out into internet video publishing – cheap, easy and a great starting place for students getting involved in science. Let’s hope Nature can keep their channel going longer than ScientificAmerican, who started strongly but seem to have given up.
Of course, the bees knees of YouTube channels so far are NationalGeographic, with 847 videos to date. Here’s a gratuitous Great White clip:
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JoVE
Another great channel (though not on YouTube) is the Journal of Visualised Experiments – actually publishing scientific research papers as videos. A good idea, and some really effective videos – especially for letting us see what is going on in the experiment or operation. Unfortunately, their videos can’t be embedded, so get yourself on over there and have a look.
Now comes the question of citing online videos in your work – and here is the answer! (pdf)
Other ‘tube’ resources worth a look are DNAtube and TeacherTube.
2000 year-old Greek “computer” recreated
A British curator has recreated an ancient proto-computer, the Antikythera device, based on 2000 year-old salvaged parts, X-ray tomography and huge patience – and got it to work!
As you can see in the NewScientist video, it was an example of a mechanical computer – designed to pr
edict the relative positions of the planets, chart astrology and count down to the Olympics.It shows us just how advanced Greek science was, and makes us wonder – what would have happened if this technology had not been lost? Would the Greeks have been playing Spore in 200AD?
Some questions to think about:
– What makes this a computer?
– What sets it apart from an old alarm clock?
– Where do you think we would be now if this knowledge hadn’t been lost?
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel
Diamond came up on TED Talks this week, and he is a great example of Edge’s idea of the Third Culture – taking the sciences and humanities and putting them together to get to the roots of how the world works.
Jared Diamond specialises in how societies collapse and how cultures have become different, by not only focusing on the social and political but also the environmental and evolutionary. One of his books, Guns Germs and Steel, tells the story of how human history took different paths and is one of my top science-related reads.
National Geographic ran a 3-part series on the book, and here it is on GoogleVideo:
Here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
In this talk, the comb-over king discusses how societies collapse:
Jared Diamond’s Edge profile
American Scientist interview
Amazon search results for his books.
Shark vs Octopus – National Geographic Videos
1. Place bets.
2. Play video.
3. Oh yeah.
National Geographic have been playing the YouTube game for two years now and have posted over 600 videos on their channel. Just put ‘science’ into the search box to filter the videos.
i-Biology 