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New Yorker – How Methods Videos Are Making Science Smarter

Jamie Holmes: “..[The] Journal of Visualized Experiments…[f]ounded in 2006, JOVE now has a database of more than four thousand videos, with about eighty more added each month. They are usually between ten and fifteen minutes long, and they range in subject from biology and chemistry to neuroscience and medicine. “For a scientist trying to explain a methodology in writing, it’s very difficult to describe all the necessary details of a multi-stage technical process,” JOVE’s co-founder, Moshe Pritsker, told me. “Confusion over the smallest details can result in months of lost effort.” Replicability—researchers’ capacity to reproduce their colleagues’ experimental findings in order to build on them—is a bedrock principle of scientific progress. But copying an experiment often requires visiting the original lab and seeing it performed. Simon’s fruit-fly protocol, for instance, demands that various minutiae be precisely tuned—lighting, temperature, humidity, and even whether you’ve cut new vials from their plastic bags far enough in advance to let out the stale air. “Video makes replication more efficient,” Pritsker said.”

 

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