Category Archives: Podcast

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

The Inner Life of a Cell – Animation

Animation of the inside of a cell
The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created for Harvard biology students… illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

The online video is beautiful, see – Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell. Update: Unfortunately the webcast links on that page are not working but you can see a longer version than was available via: Inner Life of a Cell – Full Version.
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Oliver Sacks podcast

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and author of interesting and entertaining books including: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. He is most known for explaining the remarkable case histories of extreme brain trauma, and how those instances allow us to learn about the brain.

Listen to webcast of his interview on NPR’s Science Friday. More blog posts on science and engineering podcasts

The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks, Wired
Another Science Friday interview with Oliver Sacks from 1997.

Related: blog posts relating to health and biology – Weekly Science Podcasts – Google Tech Webcasts – k-12 Science Education Podcast

Open Access Education Materials

Watch a video of Richard Baraniuk (Rice University professor speaking at TED) discussing Connexions: an open-access education publishing system. The content available through Connexions includes short content modules such as:

What is Engineering??:

Engineering is the endeavor that creates, maintains, develops, and applies technology for societies’ needs and desires.
…
One of the first distinctions that must be made is between science and engineering.
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Science is the study of what is and engineering is the creation of can be.

and: Protein Folding, as well as full courses, such as: Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I and Physics for K-12.

Related: Google technical talk webcasts (including a presentation by Richard Baraniuk at Google) – podcasts of Technical Talks at Google – science podcast posts – Berkeley and MIT courses online

Google Tech Webcasts

Google provides video webcasts of speakers (engineers, scientists, software programmers, professors…) that present at Google. These videos offer a great way to take part in one aspect of work at Googleplexs.

Recent additions include:

The rate at which they add excellent videos is amazing. You might find yourself wanting to work at Google.

Previous post: Google Tech Talks also see Google related posts on our management improvement blog

MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’

MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’ by Mark Anderson:

David Jhirad, a former deputy assistant secretary of energy and current VP for science and research at the World Resources Institute, said no other institution or government anywhere has taken on such an intensive, creative, broad-based, and wide-ranging energy research initiative.
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Many of these projects are ongoing and will continue under the Energy Research Council banner. Others, such as a new effort to make cheap ethanol using a biochemical technique called metabolic engineering, apply the expertise of faculty and staff who had never worked on energy problems before.

The council will also hire faculty in fields, such as optimizing energy distribution and transmission, if it finds MIT hasn’t devoted enough resources to them.

Susan Hockfield, Inaugural Address, 16th President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
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Girls in Science and Engineering

Best of Our Knowledge podcast from December 2005, Queens University in Ontario, Canada.

In this podcast they explore the Smith College summer science program for high school girls.

According to Smith College, 75% of the program’s graduates say it increased their interest in science and their confidence. Each summer girls spend a full month in research courses as varied as: Designing Intelligent Robots; Telescopes and Astronomical Imaging; and, Genetics and Ecology.

In my opinion this is exactly the type of program we should encourage. I think given the data on diversity in science and engineering we need to make some efforts to encourage under-represented groups. And programs such as this can help increase the diversity in the pipeline.

Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics on the air offers related podcasts online, including:
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Solar Tower Power Generation

How Australia got hot for solar power

In Australia Enviromission looking to build a 1,600-foot tall “solar tower” that can power 100,000 homes.

The tower will be over there,” Davey says, pointing to a spot a mile distant where a 1,600-foot structure will rise from the ocher-colored earth. Picture a 260-foot-diameter cylinder taller than the Sears Tower encircled by a two-mile-diameter transparent canopy at ground level. About 8 feet tall at the perimeter, where Davey has his feet planted, the solar collector will gradually slope up to a height of 50 to 60 feet at the tower’s base.

Acting as a giant greenhouse, the solar collector will superheat the air with radiation from the sun. Hot air rises, naturally, and the tower will operate as a giant vacuum. As the air is sucked into the tower, it will produce wind to power an array of turbine generators clustered around the structure.

The result: enough clean, green electricity to power some 100,000 homes without producing a particle of pollution or a wisp of planet-warming gases.

View Discovery Channel segment on EnviroMission