Adobe Flash Player is not installed. Please download and install it to listen to audio.
(download mp3)Now with even more video!
A note on the series:
Welcome to Brains and Beakers, a new Youth Radio series where young people bring science to life.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Youth Radio wants to change the way young people think about science--and scientists. What better way to do that than to make science a media event? Youth Radio joined forces with David Pescovitz from the website Boing Boing and the Institute for the Future to invite a stellar line-up of inventors, engineers, and investigators to our studios in Oakland, Calif. For each segment in the series, our guests provide interactive hands-on demos and then take questions from Youth Radio interviewers.
Brains and Beakers I: Inventors and Explosions
Tom Zimmerman dreamed up the technology behind the Nintendo Power Glove. Now he’s a researcher at IBM, but he also makes bottle rockets and drum machines out of plumbing parts, and he helped create a device that keeps airbags from killing children.
For our first segment [2:13- see player above] Tom talks about being an inventor and his work with IBM's supercomputer.
In this video, Tom demonstrates the scientific principles that took down the Hindenburg. Or to put it another way, he makes things go BOOM!
In our second video, Tom breaks down his electronic drum kit: improved through the use of PVC piping to create an inline drum machine.
In the final part of our discussion, Tom fields a question about scientific ethics, reveals how long it took the Data Glove to become a reality, and more. [1:32]






Comments