A collaboration between Kikim Media, the Public Library of Science and PBS
Episode 5: Dark Matters from Science Bytes on Vimeo. Dark matter makes up 85% of the mass of the universe and is responsible for its underlying structure. Yet it doesn’t emit or absorb light. We can only observe how it pulls and tugs on other things. But scientists at Stanford have pioneered new visualization methods, [...]
We live in a world where our eyes and ears are almost constantly bombarded with colors, shapes, textures and noises of all types. How exactly do our brains translate these sights and sounds into meaningful images and words? At the University of California, Berkeley, two groups of scientists are finding tantalizing new answers to this [...]
Why do our bodies wear out as we grow old? Meet Charles Mobbs, a scientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. By trying to answer this mysterious question, he and his team have found what could be a way to do something long thought impossible: reverse kidney damage caused by diabetes. The [...]
When we touch something, how do sensations from our hands get translated into perceptions by our brains? Meet two scientists who are trying to answer that question with a curious tool: rat whiskers. Just like hands are to humans, whiskers are rats’ primary sensors of touch. Analyzing how whisker sensations get processed by rats’ brains [...]
How can three pounds of jelly inside our skulls enable us to do everything that makes us human? For centuries, scientists have been fascinated and puzzled by the mysterious workings of the brain. Now, for the first time, they can re-create in the computer the shapes of every one of the billions of nerve cells [...]
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Welcome to Science Bytes, a series of videos we hope will become the next step in the natural evolution of science communication. This project is based on a simple premise: scientists around the world are making incredible breakthroughs on an almost daily basis, but most of us never hear about their discoveries. Either their work gets published in prohibitively expensive scientific journals, or the articles are written in a style that’s so technical and esoteric it’s virtually incomprehensible. And that’s where we come in. We’ve been making science documentaries for public television for many years, and we use the skills we’ve developed making those programs to translate some of today’s most interesting scientific articles into short videos you can watch online. We’re drawing our content from the Public Library of [...]
Science Bytes is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation