Frontiers of Science lectures featured on iTunes U

Apple's iTunes U is featuring the Frontiers of Science video collections from the Columbia University iTunes U channel. These videos present lectures from Columbia's innovative core course, Frontiers of Science, and cover topics including neuroscience, astronomy, biodiversity and earth science.

For more than eighty years, Columbia College has sustained an extensive Core Curriculum, required of all students, which serves as an intensive introduction to the great ideas of western literature, art, music and philosophy. In the University's 250th year, the College launched Frontiers of Science to complement those from the humanities and the social sciences.

The course is designed both to introduce students to exciting ideas at the forefront of scientific research and to inculcate in them the habits of mind common to a scientific approach to the world. Each semester, four scientists in different disciplines deliver a series of three lectures each describing the background, context and current state of an area of research; readings and other activities supplement the lectures. Consistent with the Core tradition, the course also includes small seminar sections in which students discuss these topics.

The videos were produced as part of the Frontiers of Science Public Repository, a resource that makes lectures, additional media, activities, problem sets, seminar guides and other educational materials available to instructors for free.