Educational Videos

Steven Fowkes video presentation on Alzheimer Reversal

Steven Fowkes has a PowerPoint/YouTube presentation broken into 9 parts that explains the initiating cause of Alzheimer Disease. This is a very detailed an in-depth presentation. Some details are targeted for doctors. However, anyone can benefit from watching to learn the general concepts.

The presentation says that mercury toxicity is a risk factor. Gluthathione is the cell’s main antioxidant and detoxifier of mercury. When gluthathione is abundant enough to be dominate over mercury, then we are in good shape. But when mercury overwhelms gluthathione’s ability to do its job, then that is when Alzheimer’s disease may initiate. Fowkes says that “Alzheimer’s is caused by loss of glutathione cycling.” Glutathione’s antioxidative ability can be recycled, but that requires cellular energy such as ATP.

This energy comes from foods we eat. The presentation talks about how the body can burn glucose as well as fats for fuel. It talks about the glucose pathway and insulin resistance. You may have heard that insulin resistance is a risk factor of Alzheimer’s. It also talks about ketosis and how the body can burn fat as fuel.

The presentation goes into talk about mitochondria, antioxidant system, inflammation as a risk factor, cortisol as neuro-toxin.

The term “Alzheimer Reversal” may be debatable. Certainly, the initiating processes of Alzheimer such as inflammation and mercury toxicity can reduced or reversed. But this is typically at the stage prior to clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Once late-stage Alzheimer where neurons death has set in, then it is much more difficult.

You can find the rest of the nine parts at his YouTube page.

If you like his presentation, you may also want to see his talk at GoogleTechTalks about “Nutrients for Better Mental Performance“.

How Dr. Richard Bernstein Reversed the effects of Diabetes

On YouTube is a series of videos of Dr. Richard Bernstein who had Type I diabetes and what he did to control his blood sugar and reversed the harmful effects of diabetes. This was a talk that he gave tat the Nutrition and Metabolism Society in May 8, 2010 in New York City. Dr. Richard Bernstein had diabetes for over 60 years. He was an engineer and so he got a device to measure his blood sugar through the day and performed experiments to see what affected his blood sugar. At age 45, he went to medical school and became a doctor in this field.

He found that he was able to control his blood sugar by primarily using low-carb diet, weight training, and aerobic exercise.

YouTube Videos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

Nova’s “Fabric of the Cosmos”

The PBS program Nova aired a documentary called “Fabric of the Cosmos” which you can watch on pbs.org in the link provided.

The program stars physicist Brian Greene and is based on his book of the same name.  The first part talks about what empty space really is and what it is made of.

It turns out that space is not as empty as we thought. The weight of empty space is 70% of the weight of the universe. This ingredient of empty space is called dark energy and it is causing our universe to be expanding and the expansion is accelerating.

We learned that mass can wrap and twist space like a fabric. We learned that space is bubbling at the quantum level as evidenced by the Casimir effect. Scientist are now looking for the Higgs particle.

Steve Jobs Documentary

PBS did had an one hour documentary on Apple’s Steve Jobs called “Steve Jobs: One Last Thing” — the video of which you can watch online in the link. This was in reference to the fact that when Jobs did product presentation, he tended to say “and one more thing” as part of his showsmanship in product presentation.

Steve Jobs had died on October 5th, 2011 of pancreatic cancer. Walter Isaacson released the biography of Steve Jobs 19 days later. It was Steve Jobs idea. Steve Jobs called Walter Isaacson and asked if Isaacson would write a biography of him. This was when Jobs found out about his cancer, but Isaacson was not aware of it yet.

Jobs picked the right guy for the job (no pun intended). Because Isaacson had written about Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Kissinger. Isaacson is CEO of the Aspen Institute and has also been Chairman and CEO of CNN and the managing editor of TIME. In part, Jobs asked Isaacson

Jobs cooperated with the book, but left the control of the book in Isaacson’s hand — it is Isaacson’s book. Isaacson interviewed over 100 people for the book including Jobs family members, friends, colleagues, and even adversaries. Isaacson also did over 40 interviews with Jobs himself.

After the book came out, Isaacson was in the media talking about Steve Jobs. Some of which you can see on PBS, 60 Minutes, and NPR.

Terry Gross of Fresh Air on NPR talked with Isaacson about the biography. Isaacson said that Jobs is able to connect art with technology and was able to take a concept into reality.

In the media, you can learn some of the difference between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Both Jobs and Gates were born in 1955 and both dropped out of college. But they are different. Jobs was into Zen Buddhism and knows what appeals to people. But he did not know how to program. Gates did.

Although Jobs knew the concepts of Zen, he did not have the calm of Zen as evidenced by the fact that sometimes he would become very angry.

Microsoft and Apple are rivals, but there were collaboration as well. In the PBS documentary, you can see footage of both Jobs and Gates on stage — and you can see that they both had respect for each other.

Douglas Adams Humorous Talk about Conservation

Science function writer and satirist Douglas Adams gave this humorous talk…

But it has a serious message about conservation of our planet. He talks about his adventures tracking down exotic animals and what he learned from them.

Atlantis Space Shuttle Launch Video

Have you ever watched a space shuttle launch before?

You can watch on YouTube, this video by NASAtelevision of Atlantis STS-129 launch to the International Space Station. You see the countdown, launch, and solid rocket booster separation. You also get commentary on what exactly is happening as well as hearing the crew in the shuttle and controllers.

The commentator gives interesting facts and explanation (providing stats on the shuttle speed and time of the flight)

Indian Farmers commit suicide every 30 minutes

Video report on DemocracyNow.org with a report from Smita Narula in 2011…

According to statistics, a quarter of a million Indian farmers committed suicide in the last 16 years. Doing some math, this is equivalent to one suicide every 30 minutes for years.

This is due to insurmountable debt caused by government’s removal of agricultural subsidies and global competition with genetically modified cotton seeds which are resistance to pests. Farmers go into debt in order to purchase these more expensive seeds in order to compete. Unfortunately these seeds require more water than traditional seeds. And since most farms in India are watered by rain and have lack of irrigation, the crops often fail. Trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, some farmers consume the pesticide that they purchased in order to kill themselves. Some write suicide notes to government hoping that someone would listen.

One farmer had to put her teenage children to work in the 7 acre farm. After daily toiling for a year, they probably earn about $250 for the entire year.

Video Lecture on Time Travel

The Vega Science Trust video collection has a video linked here of Professor Paul Davies giving a scientific talk on wormholes and the possibility of time travel. The lecture is targeted to the general audience so you do not need to be a physicist to understand it. In fact, Davies showed only two equations and one of them is the famous “e equals m c squared”.

Watch video »

There are very interesting ideas and some time travel paradoxes presented. Another article explains some paradoxes of time travel.

He made reference to singularity, anti-gravity, relativity, black hole, world line, and space time diagrams. The idea to get out of this lecture is that physics does not preclude the possibility of time travel. And in fact time travel into the future is possible and the effects can be measured. It is time travel into the past that is tougher. It is not that the laws of physics prevent it, but that to achieve it would be so great of an undertaking that practicality precludes it. There were some bits of humor in the lecture and Davies concluded with a great ending.

There was a small question and answer session at the end where Davies made a point that if in fact a time machine can be invented, it can never bring a person back to a time before the machine’s invention.

Whether time travel is possible or not is a question that physicists are still debating. They may not come up with a definitive answer until the quantum mechanics and general relativity have been unified under the grand unified theory (of which they are still working on).

Video: Steven Levitt analyzes drug dealing economics

In this 2004 TED.com video, Steven Levitt presents analysis of drug dealing economics.

Steven Levit is the author of Freakonomics. Drug dealing is not as lucrative as some people might think, or as what is portrayed in the movies. It turns out that the lowest tier drug dealer makes the equivalent of $3.50 per hour — this is lower than the minimum age — which is why some drug dealer have to work part-time at McDonalds.

Worse than that is that it is a dangerous profession, with the chances of being killed on the same ballpark as that of soldiers in a war zone. Inner city drug dealers has about a 25% chance of getting killed over a four-year period.

In the video he compares the organization of drug gangs to that of the organization of McDonald’s where there are different tiers, levels, and hierarchy. Unlike the low-tier drug dealer, drug gang leaders (equivalent to that of a McDonald’s franchisee owner), however can make substantial amount of money — about $100,000 a year.

The video does have some humor injected into it by the presenter.

NOVA Video on Hydrogen Fuel Cars

Watch this Nova video documentary about the technology of using hydrogen fuel cell in powering cars. The video is hosted by Robert Krulwich and starring Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the CarTalk brothers who does the weekly Cartalk radio show.

The video is 14 minutes long. The promise of fuel cells is very appealing as it makes cars emit nothing except water as a by product. However, the difficulty is getting enough hydrogen and storing it in the fuel tank. You can learn more about how fuel cells work in this Clickable Car.