ExplainistHere’s some geo-targeted content I can get behind: Vox cooked up an animated sneak peek of the August 21 solar eclipse in your neck of the woods. It also tells you how far you’ll need to drive to see the total eclipse.
Vox’s video explainer on eclipses is top-notch, too.
Das ist gut. In this video from an interactive art installation, Henning M. Lederer animates Fritz Kahn’s 1927 poster “Der Mensch als Industriepalast” (Man as an Industrial Palace).
Kahn, a former gynecologist, ran with the man-as-machine analogy like nobody else. That analogy has some problems, of course, but it makes a good foundation for beginners learning about human anatomy (you know, for kids).
Learn more about Kahn here and more about Lederer’s piece here.
Chemistry was the toughest of all subjects for me in high school, and I expect something like this would have helped immensely: a periodic table backed up by a punchy video explaining every element.
Here’s good ol’ boron:
You won’t master basic chemistry watching these videos, but they do a great job making each element memorable.
[via @leahjones, by way of Dave]
The celebrated English auto repair publisher Haynes is now offering an “Owner’s Workshop Manual” for Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket, command module, service module, and lunar module. That’s good nerdery.
And research shows even a terrible explanation does the trick.
From Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive:
“Because” makes any explanation rational. In a line to Kinko’s copy machine a researcher asked to jump the line by presenting a reason “Can I jump the line, because I am in a rush?” 94% of people complied. Good reason, right? Okay, let’s change the reason. “Can I jump the line because I need to make copies?” Excuse me? That’s why everybody is in the line to begin with. Yet 93% of people complied. A request without “because” in it (”Can I jump the line, please?”) generated 24% compliance.
This tidy site promoting alternative approaches to fishing exemplifies how to get a political message across: explaining the issue clearly and fully trumps hot air rhetoric every time. Nearly all the text on the site is integrated into crisp infographics, which gets you over the hurdle of making sense of a complex set of problems.
I’m not sure how else to describe these animated videos on tumor angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels leading to a tumor. The biotechnology company Amgen put the stunning mini-site together to explain new approaches to Cancer treatment.
While the animation and interface are wonderful, the site doesn’t do a great job explaining what’s actually going on, at least not for a general audience. In fact, the caliber of the animation actually makes it harder to absorb any details. Show me beautiful imagery set to soothing space music, and it’s nearly impossible not to tune out a British narrator spouting 10-syllable terminology.
How do you explain something that’s invisible? Making it visible seems obvious in retrospect, but I’ve never seen any representation of electromagnetic fields remotely like this before:
This is the work of of Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor Films, commissioned for Britain’s Channel 4. The shapes are based on actual electromagnetic activity:
The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF [very low frequency] audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons .
As part of their Revolutionary Minds series, Seed Magazine has profiled five people breaking new ground in science education. The stand-out is Drew Berry, a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. That’s a fantastic job title; as you might guess, Berry uses 3-D animation to depict various biological processes accurately and clearly.
This type of animation is a welcome bridge between scientists and the rest of us. From the article:
An unexpected side effect of Berry’s work has been that when laypeople view the animations, they intuitively grasp the cutting-edge science. Berry says, with some amazement, “The more hard-core it is, and the more complicated visually it is, the more people respond.” Seeing the cell’s activities conveys something fundamental to viewers, something that Berry sees in his mind as he digests the journal articles that contribute to each animation.
What I’d love to see now is a biological video game series.
