How does your body know what time it is? – Marco A. Sotomayor

13/12/2016

Being able to sense time helps us do everything from waking and sleeping to knowing precisely when to catch a ball that’s hurtling towards us. And we owe all these abilities to an interconnected system of timekeepers in our brains. But how do they work? Marco A. Sotomayor details how...

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Awesome Oceans

14/10/2016

Awesome Oceans is a video made by Edeos, an agency that specializes in the design and production of audiovisual educational materials. This illustrated explainer video shows the fascination of the ocean, but also it biggest threats. More information about Edeos

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How a single-celled organism almost wiped out life on Earth – Anusuya Willis

19/09/2016

There’s an organism that changed the world. It caused the first mass extinction in Earth’s history … and also paved the way for complex life. How? Anusuya Willis explains how cyanobacteria, simple organisms that don’t even have nuclei or any other organelles, wrote a pivotal chapter in the story of...

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How the Königsberg bridge problem changed mathematics

07/07/2016

You’d have a hard time finding the medieval city Königsberg on any modern maps, but one particular quirk in its geography has made it one of the most famous cities in mathematics. Dan Van der Vieren explains how grappling with Königsberg’s puzzling seven bridges led famous mathematician Leonhard Euler to...

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Why do we make irrational decisions?

07/06/2016

Often people make decisions that are not “rational” from a purely economical point of view — meaning that they don’t necessarily lead to the best result. Why is that? Are we just bad at dealing with numbers and odds? Or is there a psychological mechanism behind it? Sara Garofalo explains...

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How do we know what color dinosaurs were?

20/01/2016

The microraptor was a four-winged carnivorous dinosaur with iridescent black feathers. But if our information about this dinosaur comes from fossils, how can we be certain about its color? Len Bloch shows how making sense of the evidence requires careful examination of the fossil and a good understanding of the...

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Animated Science. Episode 2. Shades.

23/12/2015

UB divulga releases the project Animated Science which aims to create a collection of audiovisual resources to bring children closer to scientific concepts in an amusing way. The current chapter is titled Shadow and discusses how the position of the sun influences the direction of the shadows. This second episode has had the scientific...

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Upcycling the Oceans Project

22/12/2015

Ecoalf Foundation has begun to remove trash from the seabed via fishermen off the coast of Levante (Spain). The project Upcycling the Oceans, organized in three phases, aims to show that cleaning the oceans is possible and the portion of the collected materials can be recycled into pellets, thread, fabric and...

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The Tapir: a living fossil threatened with extinction

09/11/2015

Although the Tapir is one of the world’s largest land mammals, the lives of these solitary, nocturnal creatures have remained a mystery. Known as “the living fossil,” the very same Tapir that roams the forests and grasslands of South America today arrived on the evolutionary scene more than 5 million...

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Kano, a computer designed and constructed by children

13/10/2015

Alex Klein is the developer of KANO minicomputer. This computer can be constructed and programmed by seven years old children. As a game of Lego, children can learn to design their own games, watch high-resolution videos, connect to the Internet, fly a drone… As the designer explains, the children will...

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Can we, as adults, grow new neurons?

Neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret says that we can, and she offers research and practical advice on how we can help our brains better perform neurogenesis—improving mood, increasing memory formation and preventing the decline associated with aging along the way.

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A visual history of human knowledge

08/09/2015

How does knowledge grow? Sometimes it begins with one insight and grows into many branches; other times it grows as a complex and interconnected network. Infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the thousand-year history of mapping data — from languages to dynasties — using trees and networks of information. It’s a...

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Cities of learning

07/09/2015

Cities of learning is a project that presents a new concept of city where the training of young people is in accordance with the requirements of the XXI century. It is organized a network of activities in different places of the city that allow users learn and develop skills and...

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Levadura. Residence program for artist-educators

14/07/2015

  Levadura is an educational program of residencies for artists-educators was aimed to promote understanding of contemporary art by elementary students. The program focused on introducing creative projects in the elementary classroom where children were the protagonists. The program involved four artists-educators from four countries (Phase A: Chile and Poland, and...

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ChangSchoolTalks 2015: Stephen Downes

06/07/2015

Stephen Downes, Senior Researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and co-creator of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), speaks about personal learning in a networked world at the “ChangSchoolTalks 2015: Digital Learning Reimagined” event hosted at Ryerson University on February 19, 2015. More information: http://changschooltalks.ryerson.ca/2015/

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Blood donation and citizen education

  The Banc de Sang i Teixits de Catalunya has conducted the project “Donació de Sang i educació per a la ciutadania” that aims to involve young children and minors in the task of spreading the need to donate blood. Thus, young people learn content related to blood donation and...

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Learning the Physics of Skateboarding Engages Kids in Science

23/06/2015

  Skate veteran and educator Bill Robertson, also known as “Dr. Skateboard,” teaches students who might have otherwise fallen through the cracks about speed, velocity, and momentum at the local skate park. His inspiration for choosing skateboarding to teach physics came from his work with middle school students who were not...

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Microbial Mats

16/06/2015

Rubén Duro Pérez is a graduate in biology from the University of Barcelona, Member of the Spanish Society for Microbiology and is devoted to scientific photography. Ricardo Guerrero is professor emeritus of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Barcelona, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA and...

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Love between dogs and their owners

The veterinarian Takefumi Kikusui with a research team from three Japanese universities (Azabu University, Jichi Medical University and University of Tokyo Health Sciences) recently published an article in Science about hormonal changes that dogs and their owners produce to each other. Researchers put 30 dogs to interact with their owners...

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2015 International Year of Light and Light-based Technology

02/06/2015

2015 has been declared by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Light and Light-based Technology (IYL2015). By proclaiming the IYL2015, the United Nations, together with 100 partners over 85 countries, is recognising the importance of light and light based technology in the lives of the citizens of...

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Greg Gage: How to control someone else’s arm with your brain

04/05/2015

Greg Gage is on a mission to make brain science accessible to all. In this fun, kind of creepy demo, the neuroscientist and TED Senior Fellow uses a simple, inexpensive DIY kit to take away the free will of an audience member. It’s not a parlor trick; it actually works....

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“The Empty Classroom” Film

17/04/2015

Under the creative direction of Gael Garcia Bernal, eleven award-winning directors tell the story of the high school dropout crisis in Latin America in an anthology of narrative and documentary film as beautifully diverse and complex as the region. The Empty Classroom is a feature film by GRADUATE XXI, an initiative to end...

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Not only do Chameleons change color to camouflage itself, but also to flirt and fight

16/04/2015

The research team of Laboratory of Artificial & Natural Evolution, University of Geneva, led by Michel Milinkovitch, published this year in the Nature Communications Journal their latest findings on the dynamic color change of chameleons. The results of the research, based on the study of Panther Chameleon (Furcifer pardalis), indicate...

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Animated Science. Episode 1. The Scientific Method

06/02/2015

  The first episode of Animated Science project describes the scientific method and each of the phases that compose it. The main character observes the phenomenon that is going to be analysed, in this case the growth of a plant and factors affecting it. First, he makes a hypothesis. Then, together...

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