I just finished watching a video on how to dissect a human corpse in order to learn about skin, cutaneous nerves and lymph nodes (warning to the squeamish:  There’s no sugar-coating here–it’s a highly graphic lesson on how to do a human dissection).   I thought to myself:  “This is incredible.  I’m viewing a highly informative science video, for free.” I love reading about science, but it is a great change of pace to sometimes watch and listen, instead of always reading.

The site is SciVee, a site dedicated to “furthering the dissemination of science,” helping scientific researchers to get their message out.  It’s extremely impressive.  You could spend days at this site and barely dent the collection.  Here’s more of what SciVee is about (from its “About” page):

SciVee is changing the pace at which science is conducted and communicated. As the first Web 2.0 site that enables researchers to combine video with documentation and data in a media rich format, we enable scientists to make their research more visible, shareable, and accessible throughout the research cycle. Using our patent pending “virtual studio” technology, scientists can easily enhance their journal articles with “pubcasts” by linking and synchronizing video explanations to their published text. Similarly, video summaries can be associated and synchronized with scientific posters to create “postercasts” highlighting the key finding of the research. We also provide easy upload and hosting of videos on topics in all areas of scientific research.

Some of the presentations take the form of slide shows with narration, such as this presentation on order in spontaneous behavior.  Many of the presentation are lectures supplemented with powerpoints, such as this presentation by Cynthia Kenyon, on the biology of aging, focusing on that worm that was apparently made-to-order for scientists, C. elegans.  Scivee also offer “pubcasts,” a chance to view the abstract of a scientific paper while watching and listening to the author give a 5-10 minute talk about his/her findings.

If you click on “Videos,” you can then search the vast collection by subject matter, target audience (from young children to experts) and/or language.

Have fun!