Remember the good ole days of seventh grade science? Dissecting frogs, learning about mitosis, and watching grainy videos of cells swimming around in a test tube? Well, I don’t know what’s happening on the frog front, but the grainy video-watching days have the opportunity to be revolutionized by a couple of new science video sites. My personal favorite is JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experience). Admittedly, this goes significantly beyond the seventh grade biology student’s experience level, and instead shoots for an audience of researchers. The basic idea behind JoVE is that scientists have typically learned new protocols either by reading about them (and then trying to figure out what the heck the author meant) or by actually observing someone in their own lab carry out the procedure. JoVE uses peer-reviewed videos to demonstrate scientific techniques so that protocols can be learned by a broad community of scientists. This method has the potential to greatly standardize the way techniques are executed (not to mention minimize frustration levels when you realize the protocol author missed a step in their description).

Another option for science videos - more to the seventh grader’s liking - is ScienceHack. ScienceHack indexes any science videos from YouTube and anywhere else they can find them and packages them fairly cleanly in one spot. There is a greater audience range for ScienceHack, for example, the Chemistry section has videos with Jay Leno messing around with chemicals, a video explaining a basic weighing procedure, and some in depth chemical reactions. The tagline of ScienceHack says that “every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality.” This seems improbable (unless they have a different definition of “scientist” than I do) since the only references provided for the videos are from Wikipedia (no scientific journal articles), and the line between science and entertainment can be rather thin at times. In spite of this complaint, ScienceHack does have some quality videos included and would be well worth the time of the budding seventh-grade scientist or even the thirty-something armchair scientist.