Helen FieldsScience Writer

For a story I was just working on, I needed to remember how a synchrotron works. (It’s a component of a particle accelerator.) I kind of thought I remembered, but I was happy to come across this video. It’s a surprisingly lucid explanation of a synchrotron…by a nine-year-old boy. Seriously, it helped me, and it’s totally charming. Check it out.

Also, “synchrotron” is a fun word.

Here’s that sea chanty, “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” sung by the great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers:

“We’re homeward bound from the Arctic ground, rolling down to old Maui.” The sailors have been catching whales in the Arctic, which had to be just awful work, and they’re pretty excited to be going to enjoy the tropical pleasures of Maui. Kamchatka is the wayyyy Eastern bit of Russia that dangles down between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. It’s one of the places where humpbacks go in the summer to feed. (I think they would have been catching other kinds of whales, there, too.) A slightly different version of the lyrics is here.

Having blogged before on songs about the elements, and being a Japanese speaker, I believe I am in a position of unique authority to say: Yes, of course Tom Lehrer’s song about the elements needed to be translated into Japanese. Watch it here:

I learned about it from a blog post by Bethany Halford over at Chemical & Engineering News – she also explains how this version happened to come about and to be sung by these 13-year-old Japanese-American twins.

Over at Smithsonian magazine, blogger Sarah Zielinski has written about my Origins of Life story and the concept of primordial soup. I said in my story that it wasn’t exactly a chunky beef stew, more like a few molecules scattered here and there; Sarah came up with “Primordial Weak Tea,” which is excellent. And she continues the trend of Museum Videos You Know and Love with a video of Julia Child cooking up a primordial soup, which used to run in the Air & Space Museum. Read it here!

A friend asked if I referenced the CHON movie in my story about the origins of life. I did not. Which is tragic, really – the CHON movie is an absolute classic of science cinema, and for more than a decade now it’s been a required stop on the Helen Fields Tour of the Smithsonian. (It ranks below the Hope Diamond, which everyone wants to see despite the fact that it is just a sparkly rock, and above the artifacts from Troy, which are less exciting than you’d expect.) It plays in a little theater area off the dinosaur hall, although the last couple of times I stopped by, it was not running, which makes me nervous.

Enter…the internet. Now you, too, can watch and learn why we call it the CHON movie, even though its title is “Enter Life.” This version of the video doesn’t have the narration, but I think you’ll be able to follow it anyway. And no narration means you can pay more attention to the catchy tunes.

The internet has a lot of cats. But Maru, a Japanese cat who loves boxes, is really the best one. Just watch this one video – I think you’ll agree.

Many more Maru videos here. And thanks to CuteOverload (who else?) for introducing me to Maru.

A week or so ago I went to a party that was organized around singing the Pirates of Penzance in someone’s living room. It was a great party, and it reminded me of this excellent song, to the tune of the Major General’s big moment:

I grew up on Tom Lehrer records. Of course, the kids of today, or at least the ones with cool parents, are growing up on the songs of They Might Be Giants. So, here’s a new song about elements – which, I have to admit, is a lot more educational than the Tom Lehrer one.

Fun with science!

Update, 10/14/2010: A new version of the Tom Lehrer song, in Japanese pop style!

Someone I used to work with at National Geographic just drew my attention to this totally cool music video – it tells the story of a woman’s day through infographics:

It’s by the company H5, whose video Logorama just won the Oscar for best animated short. I also love the band, Röyksopp – they’re one of my favorites to listen to when I’m writing. (Is “band” the right word when it’s two guys playing electronica? I suspect not.)

Oh, man. I can’t believe it took me until now to think to look for sumo videos on youtube. Yeah, that’s right, sumo. I lived in Japan for two years in the late 1990s and spent a substantial part of that two years watching sumo tournaments – they’re on TV six times a year for two weeks each time, and I was right there watching them in their commercial-free glory.

I don’t feel the highlight reels (two big guys smash into each other! one of them falls over! two more guys smash into each other! etc!) remotely capture the experience – yes, the bouts are very short, but there’s several minutes of buildup before each one. The guys throw salt in the air to purify the ring, smack themselves, line up at the starting line, stare down the other guy, go back and get more salt, repeat, repeat – here, this shows a whole bout from the time they’re announced to the time the winner gets his prize:

(Fun fact: Both of these wrestlers are Mongolian.) A bout is lost when one of the competitors steps outside the ring or touches the ground with anything but bottom of his feet. It’s a tiny ring, and they’re big guys, so momentum is a problem. The shortest bouts are when one wrestler just steps out of the way and his opponent runs out of the ring. (Shortest and also funniest.) If a bout goes over a minute, it’s really, really long. If it goes four minutes, they get to take a break.

Why was I so obsessed with sumo? Well, all the preparation is kind of hypnotic, that’s one thing. The bouts can go a lot of different ways. The ring is really high, and 300-pound men routinely fall off of it into the front row of spectators – you don’t get with other sports. And it’s just so odd. I mean, the referee is dressed like a priest.

Ah, I miss Japan.