Videos – Spark Science

We have several seasons worth of videos and some videos created by WWU students as well.

Season 6 Short Videos
Student Videos
Full-Length Videos Season 5
Trailers & Interview Clips
Full-Length Videos Season 2-4

Season 6 Short Videos:

The Road to the Red Planet – Perseverance Rover

This video is part of an interview with WWU professor & NASA scientist Dr. Melissa in front of a live audience right before the pandemic in February 2020. The whole interview can be found in podcast form is on this site.

Clam Gardens in the Pacific Northwest

What are clam gardens? This short clip features Dr. Marco Hatch, a marine ecologist from Western Washington University explaining how this indigenous technology is used. Check out the whole interview on this site.

Science Narratives from WWU students:

The following videos were produced by Western Washington University students in a 2018 & 2020 WWU summer course. We hope you enjoy these science stories as much as we enjoyed making them.

Light! What is it?

One question our species has dwelled on since the beginning of our existence: What is light? This story follows one particular experiment conducted in 1801 by Thomas Young. It is a humorous take on the history of light, from a physics perspective, for a non-physics audience.

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

How does light really behave? When objects get very hot, they emit lots of radiation but the classical theory predicted that hot objects would radiate infinite energy which they do not, therefore scientists had to revise physics.

First, Max Planck came along and proposed that if the radiated energy had been quantized (in energy chunks) as opposed to continuously distributed, then the theory would match the experiments. Planck proposed quantization but had no explanation for why this might be physically motivated.

Solar Storms

Take a second: how many types of storms can you think of? Was ‘solar storm’ on your list? Probably not! Many of the ones that hit us go unnoticed, but they have the potential to be catastrophic. Let’s take a look at a big one from 1859 and what we learned from another in 1989.

The footage was created by Erin Howard, WWU DMC, and NASA.

Rare Diseases

Despite the word “rare” in “rare diseases”, hundreds of millions are negatively impacted by these conditions. Luckily, since a vast majority of them are genetic, by understanding how to alter genetics, blanket cures or treatments may be possible. This video emphasizes the varied forms of genetic modification and demonstrates the rapidly evolving maturity of our editing techniques.

This is a video that was produced by WWU math student Jordan Nguyen

Superbugs

What are SuperBugs? How did they come to be? What can you do about them? In this video, we briefly discuss all these questions about bacteria that are resistant to our antibiotics.