The Habitable Planet
This is a great collection of multimedia Science resources, including lectures, notes, videos and interactives.
Get on and have a go!
It is produced by Learner.org, a huge and excellent resource for all Science topics (and other subjects, too).
Ben Goldacre: Bad Science Interview
Dr. Ben Goldacre is the author of the excellent Bad Science blog and column in the Guardian newspaper. His new book, BadScience, is out now and in it he explains how (with many, many examples), Science is misrepresented in the media and how some ‘quack’ disciplines present unscientific data as fact.
NewScientist has a review of his book here, and there is a short interview with Ben on their channel:
He has helped produce some teaching materials for schools, which are available here.
Top posts for IB Bio students to read:
2. The Media’s MMR Hoax (Wakefield trial, autism and vaccines non-link)
3. The Man Behind the Mop of Death (false-positive MRSA results from a garden-shed phony)
4. The Huff (statistics)
5. Anything to do with dodgy fish-oil trials, quack homeopaths (especially evil AIDS-denialists), BrainGym and nutritionists.
It’s all good.
Microdocs: Stanford’s reef sustainability documentaries
Stanford’s Microdocs project is a well-presented set of video and pdf resources for learning about sustainability and the coral reef ecosystem. Each video is a few minutes long and accompanied by a short article or links to useful sources.
It’s divided into useful topics and easy to navigate (and looks good, too).
And while we’re on the theme of the oceans (again) there’s a brilliant student activity resource centre at the UCLA’s OceanGlobe centre. Everything you could ever need to study marine science.
Chemical Party – LOLs from the Marie Curie Actions
(mature content) In keeping with the recent trend of serious scientists getting silly, here is the Chemical Party video from the European Commisions Research Marie Curie Actions:
Love water and potassium.
Classification
Here’s the presentation for the Classification topic:
Follow the links in the images to learn more.
There’s a good wiki article on Classification here.
Here are some decent links to free organism identification resources:
Rapid Color Guides do loads of pdf files on tropical plants, lichens and animals.
The Mekong River has been extensively catalogued in terms of invertebrate life.
Riverwatch has a more user-friendly identification guide, that goes to Order level.
And a couple of rocky shore guides can be found here and here.
You can even carry out a virtual rocky shore transect from the British Ecological Society.
And there are a load of awesome resources at the UCLA OceanGlobe Student Resources site.
XDRTB: Extremely Drug-Resistant TB
This came via TED Blogs, and is pretty harrowing. Don’t play the video if you are sensitive to images of human suffering.
The photographer, James Nachtway, has taken these photos on TB wards around the world, and his site highlights the problem:
“XDRTB.org is an extraordinary effort to tell the story of extremely
drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and TB through powerful photographs
taken by James Nachtwey. XDR-TB, or extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis,
is a new and deadly mutation of tuberculosis. Similar in creation to
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) but more extreme in its manifestation,
it arises when common tuberculosis goes untreated or standard TB drugs are
misused. James’ photographs represent these varying strains. Learn more about TB, MDR-TB and XDR-TB, and learn how you can take action to stop this deadly disease.”
There is a great talk on TED from James Nachtway here, as he receives his TED Prize:
His movie, War Photographer, is great – and even has a section in Indonesia!
Magnetic Movie: visualising magnetic fields
This animation, filmed in NASA’s laboratories (did you know NASA was 50 years old?) has won a couple of awards and is a really interesting visualisation of magnetic fields.
Go over to the main site and have a look: http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie
/Magnetic.htm
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Who says art and science have nothing in common?
The Ig Nobel Prizes 2008
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a celebration of weird, pointless and entertaining scientific research that, as the Improbable Research organisation puts it, “first makes you laugh, then makes you think.”
Some of the winners from this year include:
– Nutrition: making crisps crunch louder than they should
– Biology: “fleas that live on a dog jump higher than fleas that live on a cat”
– Chemistry: conflicting teams arguing over whether coca-cola is an effective spermicide
– Physics: mathematical proof that heaps of string will inevitably tangle up in knots
All geniuses, no doubt.
Here is the acceptance speech of last year’s prizewinners for Medicine: Sword Swallowing!
“JetMan” crosses the English Channel
From National Geographic:
“Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, aka Jet Man, practices flying his self-designed jet-propelled wing.
On September 26, 2008, Rossy became the first person to fly across the English Channel using a jet pack.”
Next week: IronMan flies around the world!
i-Biology 