The Department of Energy recently issued its latest Open Government Plan, and the document recognizes the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for advancing open government and the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration by making scientific and technical information (STI) publicly available.
Scientific videos just became even more plentiful and even more accessible through OSTI’s multimedia search tool ScienceCinema. Over a three-month period and with the help of a wonderful summer intern working alongside OSTI staff, we have added 560 new science videos to ScienceCinema from DOE Labs. Now, ScienceCinema contains over 3,200 videos highlighting exciting research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and CERN. Using innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology, ScienceCinema allows users to quickly search videos, and identify the exact point in the video where the search terms were spoken.
Looking for a good summer movie? Over 600 new videos have been added to ScienceCinema recently. Learn more about the Higgs Boson, and what it means for the universe, in “Unraveling the Higgs Boson Discovery”. Or, watch “Breakthrough: Using Microbes to Make Advanced Biofuels” to learn how the Joint BioEnergy Institute is using microbes to convert non-food crops and agricultural waste into fuels for cars, trucks, and planes. Interested in harnessing the sun’s power?
At age 9, Roger Wiens and his brother built rockets, a whole fleet of rockets. They also built a telescope that allowed them to draw craters they saw on Mars when it neared close to earth. Little did Roger know that he would be putting a camera on Mars 40 years later. Roger Wiens is now a LANL planetary scientist and the principal investigator of the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s ChemCam team. The ChemCam instrument fires a laser at Martian rocks and looks at the resultant flash to determine the composition. Data obtained from Chemcam is helping to answer the question of about life on Mars. Visit DOE’s ScienceCinema to catch Roger’s excitement along with a team of 40 people at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the collabortaion of the French Space Agency IRAP as the Curiosity rover reaches Mars.
Scientific videos highlighting research and development (R&D) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are available on ScienceCinema. ScienceCinema uses innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology to enable users to quickly find video files produced by the DOE national laboratories, other DOE research facilities and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). When users search for scientific words and phrases, precise snippets of the video where the search term was spoken are provided along with a timeline.
Preservation Week was created in 2010 because there are over 630 million items in collecting institutions such as libraries that require immediate attention and care.
Preserving books, articles and other important information is no easy task because as many as 80% of these institutions have no paid staff dedicated to carry out these activities, and 22% operate without any collections care personnel. Complicating matters, it is estimated that 2.6 billion items are not protected by an emergency plan, which means these resources are in jeopardy should a disaster strike. One way to protect and preserve these resources, as well as make them more readily available to a wider audience, is digital preservation.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, it is not possible for matter to travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The speed of light (186,282 miles per second) has long been considered a cosmic speed limit, and much of modern physics is based on Einstein's work. Now there is a possibility that Einstein was wrong -- and physics may have to rethink the concept of matter and energy.
The science world was surprised when workers at CERN, the world's largest physics lab, recently announced that they had recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light. If their findings are proven to be correct, they would overturn one of the pillars of the Standard Model of physics, which attempts to explain the way the universe and everything within it works.
Standing in line at the DMV, sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, commuting to work on the bus or train, waiting for a meeting to start, whenever and wherever you get the urge to do a little energy-related research, you can do so now with your mobile phone via OSTI Mobile at m.osti.gov.
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