ScienceHack: YouTube Meets Chemistry

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million. ScienceHack offers a service that helps users find free videos in a variety of scientific fields, including chemistry.

Perhaps more noteworthy than the service itself is how ScienceHack works. Rather than relying on robotic indexing agents, ScienceHack claims to use real scientists to screen its links to videos.

Given the wealth of free chemical information sources appearing in a variety of formats, from blogs to videos to databases, could the ScienceHack model of expert-selected scientific information be the start of a new trend in scientific Internet startups?

Currently, ScienceHack's links point to mostly standard general chemistry demonstrations found on YouTube and Google Video. This could get considerably more interesting if research chemists begin to experiment more with video as a medium for communicating results. Regardless, ScienceHack demonstrates the value of indexing free stuff in science.