Cool Sciency links
Organismal behavior:
- Plants in motion (videos)
- Lyrebird song and dance (video)
- Octopus camoflague (video)
- Swarm Behavior | National Geographic Magazine
Photos of atmospheric phenomena:
- Storm photos, from a storm chaser
- Atmospheric optics (rainbows, halos, etc.)
How to find reliable information about scientific topics (especially medicine):
- National Academies Press; publicly available reports, videos, and more.
- Mayo Clinic health information.
- MedlinePlus from the National Institutes of Health
- KidsHealth
Understanding measurements and statistics:
- Absolute Zero: A Sense of Scale | PBS:NOVA
- Inaccurate NH Polls, The Madness is in the Method | Daily Kos
- Relationships among statistical distributions
Programming stuff for non-professional programmers
- Robot Turtles (child’s game)
- Scratch (animation system)
- Alice (3-D animation system)
- NetLogo
- Hour of Code
- See the tutorials and tools on my free software page.
- Project Euler (mathematics/programming puzzles)
Sciency Humor:
Metric system conversion:
- Wikipedia: Metrication in the United States
- Organizations
- US Metric Association
- American Association of Physics Teachers: Committee on SI Units and Metric Education
- NIST: the International System of Units
- Whitehouse petition
Doing science and what science is:
- Ten Simple Rules: a collection of articles providing advice to scientists and would-be scientists.
- Four stages of a scientific discipline; four types of scientist. An essay describing the contirubions of different types of scientists, and how that relates to the needs of a particular field. Only the abstract is free, but that is enough to get the basic point.
- The Problems of Philosophy: Appearance and Reality by Bertrand Russell
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Includes many articles on the philosophy of science.
- Science on the Solstice | Nature: A composite description of scientific activities all over the world.
Undergraduate research opportunities:
- Berkeley Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
- HHMI undergraduate programs.
Great Scientists::
- Herbert Simon archives (I had the honor of meeting him twice)
- Albert Einstein archives
- Brad Efron: my favorite statistician.
- George Washington Carver. I don’t know what I’d do without peanut butter.
- Runner up: Justus von Liebig, the inventor of culinary yeast extract (e.g. Marmite, Vegimite)
- E.O. Wilson & James Watson on Charles Darwin | Charlie Rose
- 25 Greatest Science Books of All Time | Discover Magazine
- The official site of the Nobel Foundation. Features biographies and info on Nobel laureates
- Peter Venkman.
Genomes:
- Bacterial genome sizes. Roughly 0.5 to 15 Mb.
- Beginner’s guide to comparative bacterial genome analysis using next-generation sequence data
- Human microbiome analysis
And more:
- Flatland: A romance of many dimensions.
- PhageDB: the Phage Hunters program.
- Skeptics@StackExchange
I want to do this some day (make an aluminum cast of a Fire Ant colony):
