Thomas Hesselberg's blog

Only a few select students become enrolled and can attend lectures at the top universities in the world, where either very good grades or very good connections are required. However, a Danish student from the University of Aarhus has set about to change that so everybody can attend lectures from all over the world – via the computer.

Jakob Sandvad is the student behind Public University Online - a kind of Youtube for lectures, where you can up- and download links to lectures made public on their university homepages.

There are already more than thousand lectures online and although the majority are in arts and philosophy related areas, there are already many science lectures online.

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank database is a new free online service, which ranks scientific journals after quality. The database has been developed by Spanish researchers from the University of Granada in collaboration with countrymen from the universities of Extremadura, Alcala de Henares and Carlos III.

The popular science journal New Scientist had an article recently, which listed the 10 most bizarre science experiments ever conducted. Among others the list include experiments on giving elephants LSD (unluckily one died during the experiments) and resurrection of asphyxiated dogs by shaking them up and down, while injecting hem with anticoagulants and adrenaline (two dogs were actually successfully brought back to life after being death for 10 minutes. Unfortunately they turned out to be both blind and brain damaged).

Researchers from Belgium, France and Switzerland have published an interesting little study in a recent number of Science. They developed some small autonomous robots and used them in a simple experiment with cockroaches. The robots and the cockroaches were placed together in a circular arena with two small dark shelters. Since cockroaches are night active, they prefer to stay in the shelters. The individual cockroach is influenced in its choice of shelter by the choices of the other cockroaches in such a way that usually all cockroaches ends up clustering together in the same shelter.

Most of us have probably realised that online networks and online networking have become incredibly popular. In the past years, Facebook , especially is being mentioned everywhere and by everyone. In Facebook, you can stay in touch with friends or re-establish contacts from the past. Although Facebook can also be used for professional networking more dedicated sites such as LinkedIn exist for this use.