Category Archives: Podcast

Podcasts, webcasts, online video and audio on science and engineering topics.

Think Tech Hawaii Podcasts

Think Tech Hawaii provides webcasts of radio shows on topics such as: Why the College of Engineering at Manoa Is Important–and Why It’s So Hard to Get Students to Study Engineering, Hawaii Academy of Science and its 50th Science Fair and New Technologies for an Aging Population.

Encyclopedia of Life

Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

They are using wiki technology to create an encyclopedia of life as discussed by E.O. Wilson in his TED Prize Wish speech. It seems like a great idea to me.

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

Bee Die-Off Threatens Food Supply:

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Still threatening the food supply seems like an extreme claim to me, but maybe I am just too optimistic.

Colony Collapse Disorder podcast:

In our first episode, hear from Senior Extension Agent and Honey Bee Specialist, Maryann Frazier, about honey bees and why they are such important pollinators in Pennsylvania and the United States. Find out why this die off is getting the attention of experts, and learn about the characteristics and extent of the collapse. Finally, get a preview of who the key players are and what is being done to investigate Colony Collapse Disorder.

Stanford Center for Professional Development Seminars

Free, Stanford Center for Professional Development seminar webcasts

During the autumn, winter and spring quarters, the Stanford Center for Professional Development makes it possible for the public to view a series of thought-provoking seminars on a broad range of topics. The weekly seminars feature presentations by distinguished Stanford faculty, senior researchers and industry experts. They are available for viewing online via streaming video.
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Bioengineering and Biodesign Forum
Statistics for Research
Human-Computer Interaction
Entrepreneurship in Asian High-Tech Industries
Design and Manufacturing Forum
Lessons in Decision Making
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar
Broadening the Appeal of Engineering to Women

Via: Stanford Engineering Research Seminars

Lego Autopilot Project Update

An update to, The sub-$1,000 UAV Project from Chris Anderson – Lego Autopilot is Working!:

Our summer project is to create a sub-$1,000 UAV as a proof-of-concept for a drone competition for kids. This weekend we passed a major milestone with a successful ground test of the key elements. The video below shows the prototype working.

We’d initially intended to do all the autopilot functions in Lego, but the gyro programming turned out to be beyond our abilities. So we switched to a commercial stabilization unit to keep the plane level and just use the Lego Mindstorms for waypoint navigation.

Very cool.

Non-Newtonian Fluid Demo

via: A pool filled with non-newtonian fluid:

They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid. Video was recorded at Barcelona, Spain. A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid in which the viscosity changes with the applied strain rate. As a result, non-Newtonian fluids may not have a well-defined viscosity.

Karl Popper Webcast

Webcast discussing Karl Popper’s ideas by Melvyn Bragg with John Worrall, Anthony O’Hear and Nancy Cartwright, BBC (by the way, the BBC does a wonderful job of running web properties – presenting great material and they don’t break web links by removing content).

Karl Popper is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists’ theories could be proved true.

Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.

He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn’t be tested.

DNA Transcription Webcast

DNA Transcription webcast – via How DNA transcription works

Produced by The World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) at North Dakota State University faculty dedicated to developing internet-based educational software. Funded by NSF and the US Department of Education.

Light to Matter to Light

Light and Matter United (includes videos) by William J. Cromie:

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms. Next, she restarted the stalled light without changing any of its characteristics, and sent it on its way. These highly successful experiments brought her a tenured professorship at Harvard University and a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation award to spend as she pleased.
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Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa.

LEGO Sumo Robotic Championship

Lego Sumo Robotic Championship photo

DivX LEGO Sumo Robotic Championship – Round 2

DivX is a proprietary video player which can be downloaded for free. The quality of the videos is great which is offset by the annoyance of having to download another plugin to view the videos. The improved quality is quite nice though it does seem a bit buggy still. See more such videos via their No Screwdriver Needed channel.

via: Big Wheel Spikey – Lego Sumo Robotic Championship