TAM Panel – Our Future in Space from JREF on Vimeo.

A vigorous discussion of “Our Future In Space” between Pamela Gay, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. This panel was one of the most memorable moments of TAM 2011 Las Vegas. We invite you to enjoy the video of this great panel discussion.

What is the Internet doing to our brains? Dr. Paul Howard Jones distills 178 scientific studies to examine whether there’s any merit to the popular fears about what technology is doing to us. More in these 7 essential books on the future of the Internet, as well as the most recent EDGE question, asking 172 contemporary thought-leaders how the Internet is changing the way they think.

Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks on the future of NASA. No other part of government has the inspirational bang for the buck that the space agency has, but we are currently squandering it.

Google Science Fair Experiment, featuring another Rube Goldberg machine from Synn Labs, who were behind the brilliant OK Go video. Check out the behind the scenes, which goes along with a cool profile of Synn Labs in this month’s Fast Company.

Via: laughingsquid

The Symphony of Science series just gets better and better.

“The Big Beginning” is the eighth installment in the Symphony of Science music video series. It deals with the origins of our universe, covering the Big Bang theory, expansion and cooling of the universe, formation of galaxies, the interplay between matter and anti-matter, and cosmic radiation. The music video features Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Tara Shears, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Videos sampled for this installment include Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking; God, The Universe, and Everything Else; The Universe (History Channel); NOVA ScienceNOW; interviews with Richard Dawkins and Tara Shears, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Otherwise paraphrased on Firefly as:

Tracey: When you can’t run, you crawl. And when you can’t crawl, when you can’t do that…
Zoe: …you find someone to carry you.

YouTube user Philhellenes recently posted this passionate pro-atheism video in which he discusses a recent epiphany he had regarding the astronomical wonders that surround us. It’s a long video, but extremely thought-provoking in a Sagan-esque way.

“A Brooklyn dad built a carrier for an iPhone out of a takeout box, tied it to a weather balloon, and let it go with the camera running. It reached a height of nineteen miles, or about 100,000 feet, which is high enough to show the earth’s curvature and a black sky above the atmosphere.”

Source: nymag.com via huffingtonpost.com

I love this video, but I never imagined that a space station would look so much like my Mom’s basement. I think I’d suffer a severe bout of claustrophobia living in that giant astro-habitrail like that. And can you imagine the smell?

This beautiful video presents a visual explanation of the Fibonacci sequence and demonstrates how prevalent the golden ratio is in nature. However, it should be noted that the notion that the Nautilus shell forms a perfect Fibonacci spiral is only a popular misconception – a fact that this video’s creators actually acknowledge on their website. (I did a paper on the Fibonacci sequence once, and the misuse of the Nautilus as an example has been a pet peeve of mine every since.) Still, this is a great video.

To learn more about this video and the Fibonacci Sequence, visit the website of Etérea Studios.

Discover amazes you with Ten things you don’t know about the Earth.

Is it time to rethink space exploration? Sir David King suggests thinks we need to “re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society’s inner attitudes towards science and technology.”

When its time to move to the Moon, we may be building our homes out of lunar dirt.

Biology

Scientist have discovered a method of Determining your Country of Origin from you DNA.

The world’s first cloned Dog has fathered his first liter.

“Water Bears” are tiny six-legged creatures that can survive in the vacuum of space, making them the only lifeform that will survive the coming alien-precipitated apocalypse.

Your Mercedes’ seat may be making you sterile. Serves you right.

Physics

The New York Times examines Science’s Ten Most Beautiful Experiments.

The true story of How two students built an A-bomb.

Technology

20 Marvels of Modern Engineering.

Racetrack memory, which uses nanowires to store data may be The Key to Smaller, More Powerful Gadgets.

Stanford’s ‘autonomous’ helicopters teach themselves to fly in a manner eerily similar to that of sci-fi films.

Switched-on new nanotechnology paints for hospitals could kill superbugs.

• A useful tools for the paranoid: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?
• The BBC reports that the “Big Bang experiment” has started well.
• Get a first-hand view of the end of the world… I mean, the First Beam via live webcast.
• Has Dr. Gordon Freeman infiltrated the Large Hadron Collider? More importantly, will the LHC trigger an unexpected “resonance cascade?!” Wait. Is that a crowbar?!!
• If you ever get curious about what all those impressive LHC photos are, Knowledge is Power has explained many of them.
• In light of this landmark event, Scientific America asks the hard questions, such as, “How long would it take the LHC to defrost a pizza?“
• Popular Mechanics actually steps in to inject a little science in 5 Things You Need to Know About the Large Hadron Collider Now.
• Stephen Hawking explains why the Large Hadron Collider is vital for humanity, and no, it’s not so we can repel aliens.
• The LHC claimed its first fatality before it even went live when a sixteen year old girl committed suicide in fear of the apocalypse its activation would bring. Let’s hope this isn’t like the suicides at the beginning of those Omen flicks. (Que ominous organ music.)
• To ease your fears, Maxim magazine, leader in all things science, share 8 Fictional Doomsday Devices More Dangerous Than the Large Hadron Collider.
• You can check out even more webcam footage, this time of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment.
• You know that the LHC is totally legit, cuz it’s got its own Twitter Feeder
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