The Inner Life of the Cell (video)

This animated video is quite serene and gives you an idea of the tremendous activity taking place. I only wish I knew what the heck was going on. PopTech gives a helpful overview of the task at hand:

“Harvard University’s BioVisions project, which is on a continuing quest for new and more powerful ways to communicate ideas in biology, creates precise, yet otherworldly animated visualizations of the molecular processes of cells. Powering the Cell: Mitochondria is one of a handful of animations they’ve created.”

~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

A Three Pound Brain, Contemplating Galaxies
Rob McGinley Myers, Associate Producer

[Online editor’s note: For a better, more immersive experience, I recommend filling the screen by clicking the outward-facing arrows icon in the lower-right hand of the video. And, for good measure, put on a set of headphones.]

Science was never my best subject in school, but as an adult I’ve become a total science geek. And our recent program with novelist Mary Doria Russell was full of topics, from Neanderthals to alien communication, that got my geek juices flowing. I especially loved what she said about looking at a recent diagram of the universe, showing how it might expand and contract over time.

I thought, “It’s the breath of God.” That God breathes in and God breathes out. And when he breathes in, the universe is contracting, and when he breathes out, the universe is expanding. And I immediately was charmed by the metaphor…. God is the largest, most complex, most inclusive, most explanatory idea that human beings are capable of imagining. Now, that said, we’re primates and our brains are like two and a half to three pounds. You know, we’re doing the best we can. But I would hate to say that we’ve got a lock on the universe and deity at this point.

I was reminded of an interview with astrophysicist Howard Smith that we’ve had on the shelf since the summer of 2008. Our production schedule is such that we’re sometimes unable to use every interview that we do. But there were parts of Howard Smith’s interview have stayed in my mind for months. He is a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the author of Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah, a New Conversation Between Science and Religion. I loved how he described what it’s like for him to stare into the heart of a galaxy and discover something that no one else knows. That moment, he says, is a spiritual moment.

I wanted to see Howard Smith doing that work, peering out at the universe through the tiny window that is his computer screen, using his three pound brain as best he can to understand what he sees. So with help from Howard Smith, NASA, and Flickr, my colleagues and I gathered images to create this slideshow, exploring how we can find spiritual meaning in the stars.

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Repossessing Virtue: Greg Epstein on Human Solutions and Not Divine Ones
» download (mp3, 11:47)
Rob McGinley Myers, Associate Producer

We last spoke to Greg Epstein in the wake of a Pew poll on the American religious landscape, finding that 16 percent of Americans identified themselves as unaffiliated, atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. Greg Epstein is the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, and he has been an emerging leader in trying to unify that growing population of the non-religious — to create a community driven not by a stance against religion, but by positive ethical beliefs and actions.

So as we turned to Greg Epstein again, we wanted to know how he’s seen his community experiencing the current economic crisis. Epstein once defined humanism as “philosophy of life without supernaturalism that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.” It turns out that the current economic crisis has refocused his community’s vision of what that “greater good” should look like.

Robert Coles: “Children Consider Human Conflict”
Trent Gilliss, Online Editor

As promised in our show with Robert Coles, “The Inner Lives of Children,” we are finally able to bring you the video of Robert Coles’ Lowell Lecture at Harvard Extension School in April 2008. We had a few technical difficulties and permissions procedures to clear, but we think it’s worth the hour. In particular, he talks about his first encounter with Ruby Bridges in New Orleans, and his subsequent conversations with her.

If you’d like to take the video on the road, you can download the file from Harvard’s presence on iTunes U.