Swinging from pendulums and facing down wrecking balls, MIT professor Walter Lewin shows students the zany beauty of science.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Mar 14, 2008 - 10 comments

Open Culture's "10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube" features "intellectually redeemable" channels from UC Berkeley, @GoogleTalks, TheNobelPrize, TED Talks, FORA.tv, the European Graduate School, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, PBS, UChannel, MIT, Vanderbilt, and USC.
posted by Soup on Dec 27, 2007 - 21 comments

Is this guy an awesome teacher or just crazy? Or maybe it goes hand in hand. Think back to the days of high school and college science classes. For most people, it probably wasn't chalkboards full of endless physics equations that got them interested in the sciences, but rather the crazy, cooky and awe-inspiring professors who do dramatic and unique demonstrations to get students interested. What makes a good teacher or professor? Is this teacher really reckless or is it a legit demonstration that benefits students?
posted by RockBandit on May 25, 2006 - 65 comments

Gravity Monuments were erected on several college campuses in the 1960's and 1970's by the Gravity Research Foundation "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled." I regularly visited the one at Colby College, in Maine. Emory had one, and apparently SMU did as well. Anyone know of others?
posted by mmahaffie on Sep 7, 2004 - 15 comments

This year, MIT is free. Well, not really -- you won't get the degree, and you won't get to talk to the top minds in science or stay in a really cool dorm. But OpenCourseWare provides, as Wired puts it, "Every lecture [sometimes on video, sometimes only the notes], every handout, every quiz." Curious about Psycholinguistics? Urban Transportation, Land Use, and the Environment? Non-linear Programming? Cognitive & Behavioral Genetics? String Theory for Undergraduates? They are in Kenya.
posted by Tlogmer on Sep 4, 2003 - 14 comments

A fine football story for the year... Oklahoma won the National Championship, and Penn State did not do so well, however the local hero walks out of the hospital to get on with the rest of his life. Granted the injury was a bruise and Dr. Wayne Sebastianelli saved his life, but my question is how long before we'll see the successful repair of spinal cord injuries? Will Christopher Reeve walk again?
posted by brent on Jan 5, 2001 - 4 comments