Top Vídeos
From the SciFri Archive: This toilet floats. It's an outhouse and sewage-treatment plant in one, processing human waste through a "constructed wetlands." Adam Katzman, the inventor and builder of the toilet-boat, says it's meant to be more inspirational than practical. "Poop and Paddle" demonstrates how sewage and rainwater can be converted to cattails and clean water.
Brenda Tan and Matthew Cost, high school seniors from Trinity School in New York City, used a technique called DNA barcoding to find out what species were present in over 200 animal products. Their extracurricular experiment, which they completed with the help of Mark Stoeckle, of The Rockefeller University, suggests that buyers should beware!
http://www.patreon.com/scifri - Please Help Support Our Video Productions!
Meet the farmers who want to make cheap, environmentally friendly kelp America's next favorite vegetable.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Kurt Mann /NOAA
http://www.sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek
We all know that squids use ink to disguise themselves while making a quick getaway, but what other uses might ink serve? Stephanie "Stephalopod" Bush, a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), suggests that these crafty cephalopods might use ink to attract a mate, repel a predator, or even confuse their prey.
Produced by Christian Baker
Music by Audio Network
Pygmy squid footage courtesy Dr. Noriyosi Sato
Additional Squid Footage by MBARI
http://www.sciencefriday.com
In the third episode of our wine science series, Out of the Bottle, Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, explains how expectations, environment, and social cues can fool us into believing that our wine tastes better or worse than it is.
Featuring Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell University Food and Brand lab
And author of Mindless Eating (mindlesseating.org), and Slim by Design
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Location provided by Corkbuzz
Prop Master: Phyllis Shalant
Wine Wrangler: Sam Flatow
Additional Stills: Shutterstock, Proxy Design, Derek Skey
By studying tiger and cat tongues, Alexis Noel of Georgia Institute of Technology has discovered some surprising uses for their infamously raspy licking apparatuses. Noel research has demonstrated that not only do their tongues tenderize meat, but the conical and scoop-like form of their papillae are optimized for depositing allergen infused saliva baths. So basically every time you pet your cat you are just rubbing your hand over their evenly-distributed saliva.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Brandon Swanson
Music by Audio Network
Live Cats filmed at Happy Tabby Cat Cafe
Additional Footage ands Stills by Alexis Noel, Candler Hobbs, David Hu, Joseph Cebak,
Pond5, Youtube User Commissarius, Emmanuel Keller (C.C. BY 2.0), Shutterstock
Special Thanks to David Hu Lab and the Happy Tabby Cat Cafe
All tongues were donated post-mortem. No cats were harmed in the making of this video.
Although some were given a ton of catnip.
What can't 3D printers do? We've all heard news stories about 3D-printed food and medical prostheses—even cars and entire houses. But how does additive manufacturing, as it's also known, really work? And how can an at-home hobbyist get started? Ira teams up with Makerbot's Bre Pettis to present the ultimate beginner's guide to 3D printing.
Produced by Annie Minoff
Video by Luke Groskin
Lightning -- one of the great unsolved mysteries.
A new study in Science investigates the wisdom of crowds... well, schools. Andrew Berdahl, graduate student at Princeton University, explains that Golden shiner minnows prefer shady habitat. And he and his co-authors found that large groups of fish are better at tracking shady habitats than smaller groups or individuals--a demonstration of collective sensing.How do fish pool their senses? The researchers filmed fish and digitized their movement to try to answer the question.
In 2011, comet Lovejoy traveled through the sun's corona and lived to tell the tale. But its tail was the most telling. Reporting in the journal Science, Cooper Downs, an astrophysicist at Predictive Science Inc. in San Diego, Calif., says that the wiggly path of the comet's tail helps explain the sun's magnetic field.
The Rockaways, a Queens, N.Y. neighborhood, is still recovering from Sandy. Debris from fires lingers on the streets, and buildings torn apart by the storm are crumbling on the beach. But at least for those with restored heat and power (7,000 customers in the area are still without power), there is yet another worry: mold. Peter Corless, a community organizer in the Rockaways, gives us a tour of the neighborhood, while Joan Bennett, a mycologist whose house molded after Katrina flooding, describes the species of fungi she found in her own home after that hurricane and in New Jersey homes post-Sandy.
Ask a child with an imaginary companion if their pretend friend is real, and often they'll tell you, "I just made them up!" Of course, moments later they'll regale you with stories of the latest adventures with their companion with the utmost conviction. In the second episode of The Real Guide to Imaginary Companions, a trip into the lab of developmental psychologist Jaqueline Woolley reveals how children can become so enamored of their pretend friends that they blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Woolley also investigates whether a child's orientation toward fantasy play has ties to real-world creativity.
Produced by Science Friday with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation
Produced, directed, and narrated by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Katie Graham, Luke Groskin and Patrick Pelham
Editor by Erika Sutter
Animations by Gabe Darling and Candice Aquino
Music by Audio Network
"Fairy Godmother" voiced by Annie Nero
Additional footage provided by
Pond5.com, A Lost World (1925), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,
Special Thanks to Danielle Dana, Jennifer Fenwick, Becky Geer, Tracy Gleason, Elizabeth Delucia Landon, Alex Riviello, Jenny Shalant, Christian Skotte, Marjorie Taylor, and Jacqueline Woolley.
Scientists are experimenting with pumping CO2 deep beneath the sea floor. See the borehole where they practice.
http://www.sciencefriday.com
Up and down the West coast of the U.S., bees are leaving their hives, flying around at night and then suddenly dropping dead. Learn all about this parasitic horror that quietly zombifies these insects and how you can become a real-life zombee hunter.
Ice can be hard to get a handle on, literally and figuratively. It can be cloudy or clear, as hard as concrete or as soft as a snowflake. Ice experts Erland Schulson, head of the Ice Research Lab at Dartmouth College, and Shintaro Okamoto, founder of Okamoto Studio in Queens, New York, have staked their livelihoods on the slippery material. We asked them what fascinates them about frozen water. (Originally published Jan 27, 2012)
Science Friday salutes a great science teacher. "Office hours are some of my favorite hours of the week," says professor Tom Carlson, a medical doctor, ethnobotanist and instructor of 1700 students annually at the University of California, Berkeley. One of Carlson's former students, SciFri associate senior producer Christopher Intagliata, told us that Carlson's class was the reason he got into science. Listen here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/s....egment/05/31/2013/te
For honey bees, making is a new queens is a simple as adding royal jelly, a unique protein rich secretion, to the cell of a growing larvae. This fairly well studied addition causes a cascade of physiological changes in the growing larvae and voila! A queen is born. However, what causes a baby bumblebee (the fuzzier and more weather-hardy cousins to honey bees) to become royalty remains a mystery. They don’t produce royal jelly but they produce a unique barf for their young. Enter entomologist Hollis Woodard and her students at UC Riverside who hope that by understanding how queens are created, they can mitigate on-going extinction crises in bumblebees species. Woodard and company begin by heading up to San Bernardino mountains outside Los Angeles. Here, the researchers collect emerging queens as they buzz around the blooming Manzanita shrubs. These queens are brought back to the lab, where the establish their own (see through) honeypots. Lavished with food by the lab members, the queens lay dozens of larvae which become daughter drones. These drones are then “milked” for their barf which is analyzed for its chemical properties. Future larvae are hand fed the analyzed barf in various quantities and intervals to determine what factors lead to the generation of queen bees.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker
Audio Recording by Christopher Intagliata
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Woodard Lab, Creative Commons Media (C.C. BY 2.0),
Cees Van Hengstum (C.C. BY 2.0), Alex Murphy (C.C. BY 2.0),
Blue Line Apiary (C.C. BY 2.0), Pond5
Researchers are on a quest to find the lake trout that remain in Lake Michigan.
http://www.sciencefriday.com
Science Friday attended the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and had a conversation with Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia, the directors of the feature documentary film, "Web Junkie." Their film follows several teenage boys in a Chinese "Internet addiction" rehabilitation camp.
"Web Junkie" directed by Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia.
All footage from Web Junkie © Dogwoof Global.
Produced by Annie Minoff
Interview filmed by Manjula Varghese
Edited by Luke Groskin
