As time marches relentlessly on, it slowly erodes what you think you know – especially those things you never knew in the first place. Despite all of its cruft, marketeering, and self-promotion there’s still a small corner of the internet that hews to its educational roots. The structure of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons is not conceptually easy, the mathematics reserved for a few. Eugene Khutoryansky’s colorful and surreal videos do a great service in making abstract concepts concrete. The underlying classical music soundtrack is in subtle contrast to the extremely non-classical physics.
Integrated electronics make us forget about them. Tiny packages with millions of transistors encapsulate so many functions so effectively that we don’t or can’t know what all they do. This is a boon to manufacturers since repairing anything is all but impossible. In the not-too-distant past, these functions or a small subset of them, had to be implemented in metal. Techmoan does a stellar job of rediscovering old technology. Prof. Bill Hammack of UIUC is also a master of this. Here he explains how the whiffletree mechanism enabled the IBM Selectric typewriter to work its magic. Beware – it is easy to lose a day watching his other videos and searching on the nuggets he finds.
Facility with calculus, specifically integration and differentiation, is mandatory for just about any technical discipline. Slog the first is setting up the problem, Slog the second is hacking through whatever differential equations and/or integrals present themselves. For those of us of a certain age, getting to calculus in high school was a badge of honor and being able to evaluate difficult integrals through clever substitutions and grit a point of pride.
Time has passed and the standards have gone up. Way way up. The kids these days are learning more, learning it earlier, and are scaling peaks we didn’t know existed. The mathematics subculture on the Internet is fueling this fire and a particular segment of Youtube is devoted to these calculations both for fun and for education. MIT has even held an “Integration Bee” for many years where students go head-to-head under time pressure.
Leading this pack is Jens Fehlau, an early twenty-something bro from Germany whose skills and presentation style make us glad we aren’t in a class where he’s ruining the curve. His Flammable (formerly Fappable) Maths channel has a strong following with early videos in German and more recent ones in excellent English with calming sounds of chalk on a chalkboard. Fehlau also reminds me of a college classmate of mine who did exactly that and is now an eminent professor of chemistry.
Here’s one of his playlists. Fair warning – the language can get salty at times.
So, is he a wunderkind, discovered young and educated for future Math Olympiads and a Fields Medal? Nope. He’s trained as a baker and hopes to teach school.
Narrator Carol Meier has a meticulously researched, splendidly detailed, and wonderfully delivered update on the twin Voyager spacecraft and their epic journey of discovery from Pasadena to the outskirts of the solar system. It isn’t clear if this is a commissioned piece or one she did on spec. It is engrossing either way.
These videos provide excellent overviews of proteins and enzymes – what they are and why they are important. They are produced by the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), a part of the worldwide Protein Data Bank Archive. The RCSB site has additional educational information for non-specialists through its PDB-101 subdomain including curricula for teachers, video challenges for high school students, and a “molecule of the month” providing interactive views into complex protein structures.
Eric Betzig‘s lab at the Janelia Research Campus has just released a jaw-dropping high-definition 3D movie of cellular machinery in motion. Words are not sufficient to describe the beauty of the data and the impact of the method which will soon be made available to researchers interested in using or developing it.
I met the man a few times during my postdoctoral life at Bell Laboratories where he was a research scientist. An acknowledged star in a building full of brilliant people, his Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope was considered Nobel worthy. The Labs went down the tubes a few years later when the MBA visigoths took over. Betzig left, reinvented himself a couple of times, and came back with even more pathbreaking ideas in microscopy that overcame what he felt were insurmountable limitations of his first breakthrough. He went to Stockholm in 2014 for the newer inventions and the doors they opened. The Prize has not slowed him down.
The Janelia public release has details and links to several videos, including the one below.
The technical paper appears in the latest issue of Science Magazine.
Observing the cell in its native state: Imaging subcellular dynamics in multicellular organisms
T. Liu et.al.
Science 360, eaaq1392 (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq1392
The Abstract is also available through PubMed
Soon after LIGO‘s first detection of a black hole-black hole merger, the astronomical community was hinting about a potentially more scientifically exciting event within the interferometer’s grasp: The merging of two neutron stars. When two dark objects coalesce, the product is unsurprisingly dark. Colliding neutron stars on the other hand might emit light of some kind and the collision product need not necessarily be a black hole. More intriguingly, so-called kilonovae resulting from neutron star collisions have been proposed as the actual origin in our universe of many elements heavier than iron, challenging the conventional wisdom of these coming from supernovae.
Here’s a prescient talk by Prof. Brian Metzger of Columbia University and coiner of the term ‘kilonova’ on the consequences of neutron star binary mergers. He discusses their signatures in the gravitational wave record and across the electromagnetic spectrum to their ultimate role in nuclear synthesis. Given at Harvard on 16 March 2017, it is quite accessible for a technical colloquium presentation. A mere five months later on 17 August 2017, LIGO and its European counterpart VIRGO indeed detected the merger of two neutron stars and set of a flurry of observational activity across the globe and in space which confirmed at least qualitatively the predictions by Metzger and his group.
The details are still confusing. For example, we can assume that it takes a long time for two neutron stars to form, presumably from the death as a supernova of each of a large, but not too large, binary pair. These violent events will eject a lot of material into the interstellar medium. The neutron stars then spiral slowly and combine, releasing a lot of neutrons to stick to light elements, transmuting them up the periodic table through the r-process. But, where do these light elements come from if the ejecta from each of the progenitor stars has had a very long time to spread? (*)
Harvard’s Edo Berger has a concise summary of the multimessenger gold rush incited by the event in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Many of the papers are free to download. As an aside, I was acquainted with Edo when he was an undergraduate physics student at UCLA while I was a researcher in the same department. I had no idea then he’d become one of the Dukes of Earl of high energy astrophysics.
(*) Addendum 20 April 2019: After a year of futility in not finding an answer to this question, I emailed Prof. Metzger and asked. In a prompt and gracious reply he said that the ejecta from the merging neutron stars create the seed nuclei required for the r-process. There are sufficient protons (10-30%) in the ejecta to form nuclei of mass number ~100 within milliseconds. These then absorb further neutrons within the constraints of beta decay to create very heavy elements within a few seconds. So, it seems that neutron stars aren’t neutrons all the way down!
30 May 2020: New video source; prior channel was deleted.
Andrew Robinson celebrates the high notes in the mathematician’s inimitable musical oeuvre.
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Lehrer agrees with mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (one of the builders of the atomic bomb) that rhyming “forces novel associations … and becomes a sort of automatic mechanism of originality”. As he told me in 2008: “If ‘von Braun’ didn’t happen to rhyme with ‘down’ (and a few other words), the most quoted couplet in the song would not exist, and in all probability the song itself would not have been written.”
The young Canadian behind the NileRed Youtube channel loves chemistry, even more than most of us who spent years studying it. Likewise Nurdrage, who may or may not be NileRed’s alter ego. I have no idea how they get access to fume hoods, chemicals, rotary evaporators, and other bits of expensive labware. And I similarly have no idea what would happen to any American who tried to have a home lab capable of such things. Let us not forget the young man who got arrested just for bringing his science fair project to class.
Here’s how to extract the heat from chilies with a dandy introduction to the Soxhlet extractor.