An excellent series by the American Chemical Society starts with the basics of, “How to Write a Paper to Communicate Your Research,” but also addresses the question of why publish your research. It ought to help my students understand why I’m so insistent on lab reports.
Category: video
Ocean Currents
NASA’s Perpetual Ocean visualizations are excellent animations of the oceans’ surface currents.
The True Costs of Gas
CIR tallies the price of gas, including the externalities — the costs that are not included in the price we pay at the pump.
The End of the Earth
The Earth will end with fire, non-metaphorically. It will be consumed when the sun expands as it runs out of fuel, 5 billion years from now.
The History of the Moon
In the early solar system, 4.5 billion years ago, the planets were still coalescing, something enormous hit the Earth.
After it formed, huge impacts shaped the surface of the moon into what we see today. NASA takes up the story:
These videos are awesome introductions to the early history of the Earth, Moon, and solar system.
Why Feburary 29th?
CGP Grey explains why we need leap days to fill in the calender.
Arresting Joseph Kony and Ending the LRA
Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been a brutally destructive force in central Africa since the 1990’s. In the last few years the Army has been decimated and pushed out of Uganda, but it still exists and is still kidnapping children and destroying families.
My former students, Sutton and Sage, brought to my attention this video from the human rights organization, Invisible Children, that is making a final push against Kony and the LRA:
Phases of the Moon
BadAstronomer has posted an awesome video of the moon going through its phases for an entire year.
(it’s particularly awesome in full screen and HD.)
The video is based off a NASA webpage that will generate a picture of the moon for any hour, of any day, in the year of 2012 (and only if you’re in the northern hemisphere near the equator, but close enough). They have lots more videos and images.
Interestingly, the images are all computer generated — they’re not real photos. They are based on high-resolution images and topography data taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.