The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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From the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Measuring the Universe! So how exactly do we measure things that are incredibly far away? Positioning over time, light, and math, math, math! This video contains a lot of information — even about sound waves and color shifts in light — but it’s such a great start to understanding how we see and measure what’s out beyond our Earth and our galaxy. And it demonstrates how important math and patience are in science!
via The Awesomer.
The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the world’s oceans, and the lowest elevation of the surface of the Earth’s crust. It is located in the western Pacific Ocean, to the east of the Mariana Islands. The Trench is 2, 542 km (1,580 miles) long and 69 km (43 miles) at the widest point.
The Mariana Trench is formed by the shifting between two tectonic plates: the Pacific Plate and the Mariana Plate. The Trench is 11,033 metres (36,201 feet), (6033.5) fathoms deep, with pressure at the deepest part of the Mariana Trench is over 8 imperial tons per square inch – and is home to a rich variety of fellow-creatures…
Be sure to check out the photo link if you or the kid have yet to see what lurks down in the deep! And for related watching: a Mariana Trench dive video playlist of James Cameron’s recent groundbreaking journey to the bottom, or this video of his return.
From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle DVD/BluRay a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound.
Why this video is great: shot in real time, a good look at the shuttle’s heat-absorbing ceramic tiles, the super-unique and riveting perspective of the booster, and the sounds! (I just wish I knew how “enhanced” the sound was from the original… it is such a powerful component of the storytelling.)
via Kottke.
Dive deeper into the amazing images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, when it flew by Jupiter in 2000, with the team of scientists and amateur astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center:
New movies of Jupiter are the first to catch an invisible wave shaking up one of the giant planet’s jet streams, an interaction that also takes place in Earth’s atmosphere and influences the weather.
I know the co-curator can’t help but take this sort of view for granted, but WOW: watching a jet stream on Jupiter! How amazing is that?!
via @NASAJPL.
Why do we explore? Simply, it is part of who we are, something we’ve done throughout history. NASA’s new video, “We Are the Explorers,” looks at that tradition of reaching for things just beyond our grasp, and how it’s helping lay the foundation for our greatest journeys ahead.
It looks like NASA took Reid Gower’s good advice about how to make more inspirational videos!
What is a year? It’s a question I get asked a fair amount around here… What’s a year? How many days until Saturday? How many minutes in an hour? How long until I can play games on your iPhone? But I digress…
Minute Physics explains what a year is. And if you and your kid(s) want more calendar mathematics after that, then follow it up with this explanation about leap year!
via Gizmodo.
More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.
The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a “janitor satellite” into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.
The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.
From guardian.co.uk.
On this day a half century ago, Mercury Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. On the morning of February 20, 1962, an anxious nation watched as Glenn climbed into his cramped Friendship 7 space capsule and was propelled by an Atlas 6 rocket high above the atmosphere. He circled the Earth three times before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. As the veteran space program reporter John Noble Wilford wrote last week in The New York Times, “Perhaps no other spaceflight–all 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds of it–has been followed by so many with such paralyzing apprehension.”
From OpenCulture.
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.
This film was a part of the 2009/2010 exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe. And it’s awesome.
