Symphony of Science – SmartBean

Symphony of Science – SmartBean

The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.

Seven videos have been created so far. Here's my favorite one. If you like it, check out the others on SmartBean.

We Are All Connected

10 Reasons Your Child Will Love Astronomy

10 Reasons Your Child Will Love Astronomy – SmartBean

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy and marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of a telescope. From October 22-24, the Galilean Nights Project is sponsoring events around the world to encourage amateur and professional astronomers along with the general public to point their telescopes to the objects that Galileo observed.

In parallel celebration, SmartBean offers 10 reasons why your child will love to learn about astronomy. An awesome post with links to fantastic resources (and great pictures too!).

Cool Science

If you want to get an idea of what the (Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment is all about - I've found this basic intro on Alice, CMS, Altas, LHCb and the Grid to be very well presented and organized.

Here's "Rock-star physicist" Brian Cox explaining the LHC on TED.

Prophecies of doom notwithstanding, this certainly sounds like a very exciting experiment - a hugely collaborative effort that will hopefully unlock some of the dark secrets of the universe. Here's the coolest science video I've come across :)



And if you want to get really spooked, check this one out...



But after that watch this one to be reassured - "YOU WON'T FEEL A THING!"

Science 2.0

Yet another space that admits to a web 2.0 avatar is Science!

Here's an amazing Scientific American article I came across this morning - Science teachers, please take note! It's called 'Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?' which is not just an article but a web 2.0 "experiment" in "networked journalism", since the article itself will be re-written with views of all those who comment on it. Probing the role of open, collaborative technologies such as blogs and wikis within an inherently "secretive" research communtiy, the issues that the article is urging readers and contributors to look at (in the context of scientific journalism) --

• What do you think of the article itself? Are there errors? Oversimplifications? Gaps?
  
  
• What do you think of the notion of "Science 2.0?" Will Web 2.0 tools really make science much more productive? Will wikis, blogs and the like be transformative, or will they be just a minor convenience?
  
  
• Science 2.0 is one aspect of a broader Open Science movement, which also includes Open-Access scientific publishing and Open Data practices. How do you think this bigger movement will evolve?
  
  
• Looking at your own scientific field, how real is the suspicion and mistrust mentioned in the article? How much do you and your colleagues worry about getting “scooped”? Do you have first-hand knowledge of a case in which that has actually happened?
  
  
• When young scientists speak out on an open blog or wiki, do they risk hurting their careers?
  
  
• Is "open notebook" science always a good idea? Are there certain aspects of a project that researchers should keep quite, at least until the paper is published?

Arvind Gupta and Toys from Everyday Stuff...

Ref. previous post.. here's another youtube video...

My first foray into video sharing...

I had the pleasure of watching toymaker and tinkerer, Arvind Gupta (also winner of the National award for Science Popularization) in action at Mallya Aditi International School, Bangalore where he was invited to spend a few days with 6th-graders. The children enjoyed their time with him immensely - building air and water pumps out of empty toothpaste tubes, straws and empty film roll cannisters, motors out of batteries, magnets and copper wire, sound-makers out of straw, toys and animals from paper and matchboxes and what not.

I uploaded a couple of short videos onto youtube to share it with the kids and teachers (and the whole world, I guess...)