Catalog Search Results
Science Reference Center
Full-text articles to support research in applied sciences, biology, chemistry, earth and space science, and energy. Includes the Science Image Collection, a database of high-quality science images from National Geographic, UPI, Getty, NASA, and Nature Picture Library.
Series
Language
English
Description
The world of mathematics contains some of the greatest ideas of humankind--ideas comparable to the works of Shakespeare, Plato, and Michelangelo. These mathematical ideas can add texture, beauty, and wonder to your life, without being a mathematician! This course explores the fourth dimension, coincidences, fractals, aesthetics, the allure of number, geometry, and how great mathematical ideas arise, along with learning to think abstractly, to grasp...
Language
English
Description
"In My Favorite Universe, the astrophysicist who directs the nation's most famous planetarium takes you on a spirited and intellectually engaging journey through the cosmos and all its history, from before the Big Bang to the most likely ways in which Earth, and perhaps the entire universe, might end. As Dr. Tyson notes, we are made of stardust, just as the planets are. And he has created a course that explains exactly how that came to be, beginning...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
You live with it 24 hours a day, but how well do you really know it? This course is an owner's manual to a remarkably complex, resilient, and fascinating structure: the human body. Using detailed color illustrations, life-sized models, and, even a video shot during surgery, this course examines the major systems of the body, explaining exactly how things work and why they sometimes don't. Each lecture concentrates on a particular organ or organ...
Author
Language
English
Description
An interdisciplinary approach to the fascinating subject of behavioral biology, investigating how the human brain is sculpted by evolution, constrained or freed by genes, shaped by early experience, modulated by hormones, and otherwise influenced to produce a wide range of behaviors.
Language
English
Description
Calculus has been one of the most influential ideas in human history. Its impact on our daily lives is incalculable, even with calculus. Economics, population growth, traffic flow, money matters, electricity, baseball, cosmology, and many other topics are modeled and explained using the ideas and language of calculus. However, as important as calculus is, many people have difficulty understanding the concepts of calculus. In these accessible lectures,...
Language
English
Description
Who was the greatest baseball hitter of all time? How likely is it that a poll is correct? Is it smart to buy last year's highest-performing stock? These questions all involve the interpretation of statistics, and this film is an introduction to this vitally important subject in today's data-driven society. Explanations for terms such as mean, median, percentile, quartile, statistically significant, and bell curve, and scores of other statistical...
Language
English
Description
Lecture series on sensation, perception and how these are affected and change with age taught from an academic psychology perspective. A recurring concern throughout the course is the understanding of human behavior. Behavior does not occur randomly or haphazardly. Behavior has reasons and happens in response to some detectable stimulus event that has taken place in our internal or external environment.
Language
English
Description
"This course aims to provide a non-technical and accessible description of the central foundational concepts and historical development of the topic in theoretical physics call superstring/M-theory. These lectures place this topic in the context of the more general development of mathematical and scientific thought that can be traced from the ancient realms of Egypt and Greece to medieval Iraq, Renaissance Europe, and the present."--p. 1 of course...
Series
Language
English
Description
There is more to the universe than meets the eye--a lot more. In recent years, scientists have discovered that 95 percent of the contents of the cosmos are invisible to our current methods of direct detection. Yet something is holding galaxies and galaxy clusters together, and something else is causing space to fly apart. Scientists call these invisible components dark matter and dark energy: "dark" because these phenomena do not emit light. Dark...
Author
Language
English
Description
Dr. Carroll explains the subject of dark matter and dark energy in 24 lectures. He explains why scientists believe we live in a smooth, expanding universe that originated in a hot, dense state called the Big Bang. He describes the features of the infant universe that led to the large-scale structure we observe today. He takes you through the standard model of particle physics and shows how it provides the framework for understanding the interaction...
Language
English
Description
Ready to exercise those brain cells? Professor Arthur T. Benjamin is renowned for his feats of mental calculation performed before audiences at schools, theaters, museums, conferences, and in this series, he shows that there are simple tricks that allow anyone to look like a math magician. Throughout these lectures, he shows how everything in mathematics is connected--how the beautiful and often imposing edifice that has given us algebra, geometry,...
Author
Language
English
Description
This course takes you inside this astonishingly complex organ to show you how it works. Recent decades have seen unparalleled advances in understanding how the brain does what it does. Today we can pinpoint the specific regions, or nuclei, where some of life's most mysterious processes take place, including: where light that enters the eye is converted into the subjective experience of sight; where pressure waves that reach the ear are processed into...
Series
Language
English
Description
Ninety-six lectures, about 30 minutes each, divided into ten sections, are designed to provide a non-technical description of modern astronomy, including the structure and evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole. Updated edition integrates discoveries reported in the 2003 course and includes recent findings (through mid-2006).
Language
English
Description
What is your definition of number? Defining the abstract idea of number is extremely difficult and today, we still struggle with the notion of what numbers mean. Numbers neither came to us fully formed in nature nor did they spring fully formed from the human mind. Like other ideas, they have evolved slowly throughout human history. Both practical and abstract, they are important in our everyday world but remain mysterious in our imaginations. If...