Fotoclix - Andy Bitterer Photography - Tumblr. Launching the Data Science Toolkit. Let the geek worship begin. Jennifer Ouellette, contributor As The New Cool by Neal Bascomb shows, classroom robot wars can inspire the celebration of invention "IT IS almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry," Albert Einstein once observed, expressing his frustrations with his early formal education.
"For what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom. " He would have found a kindred spirit in Amir Abo-Shaeer, a physics teacher at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, who is the heart and soul of Neal Bascomb's new book. For Abo-Shaeer, it's all about engaging and inspiring students. That's why the crowning achievement of his engineering academy is having the final-year students design and construct their own robot to enter into the annual FIRST schools robotics competition. Amir Abo-Shaeer (Image: Amanda Edwards/The John D. and Catherine T. March 24, 2011 - High-temperature Superconductor Spills Secret: A New Phase of Matter. Menlo Park, Calif. — Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that a puzzling gap in the electronic structures of some high-temperature superconductors could indicate a new phase of matter.
Understanding this “pseudogap” has been a 20-year quest for researchers who are trying to control and improve these breakthrough materials, with the ultimate goal of finding superconductors that operate at room temperature. "Our findings point to management and control of this other phase as the correct path toward optimizing these novel superconductors for energy applications, as well as searching for new superconductors," said Zhi-Xun Shen of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), a joint institute of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. Shen led the team of researchers that made the discovery; their findings appear in the March 25 issue of Science. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. The Myth of the Permanent Rich - The Wealth Report. By Robert Frank Researchers and journalists (myself included) often refer to the rich as a fixed group. There are the “the rich” who keep getting richer, with ever-rising shares of the nation’s income and wealth.
And then there are “the rest,” who aren’t getting much of either. The rich also fall At a time when the American Dream is supposedly dead for most Americans, while Wall Streeters are seen as permanently ensconced in government-backed luxury, the chances of moving up or down would appear slim. But the rich and poor may be far more fluid than the conventional wisdom would have us believe. What is most surprising is the churn at the top of the income ladder. A Census Bureau study shows that from 2004 to 2007, about a third of the households in the highest income quintile (the top 20%) moved down to another income group. “One of the most enduring economic myths in our society is that the rich keep getting richer, while the poor keep getting poorer,” he writes.
Willow garage. The Sleepless Elite. Hot Rocks: Geology Photo Contest Winners | Wired Science An Incredible Discovery: Graphene Transistors Self-Cool. Graphene is an unusual single-atom thick carbon semiconductor. (Source: i09) Researchers measured the heat of a graphene transistor for the first time using atomic force microscopy. The results were surprising -- the material significantly self-cools. (Source: Alex Jerez, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology) Future computers may not need a heat-sink -- their thermal electric properties result in net-cooling effect Heat is a sad fact of life for current generation electronics.
But that could all soon change, according to the results of a new study by researchers at the University of Illinois. I. Graphene is somewhat like a miniature "fence" of carbon. The material behaves like a semiconductor, despite being made of organic atoms. A variety of methods exist for producing graphene. Other techniques promise to drop the price even further. Graphene is fascinating from a physics perspective. II. III. "Vista runs on Atom ... Recalls, Market Withdrawals, & Safety Alerts. How Will You Measure Your Life? Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success. The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers.
The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay? | Magazine. This mutant pig fetus was collected near Chernobyl in 1988. Photo: Guillaume Herbaut The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February afternoon, about 2 miles from the concrete sarcophagus that now entombs the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Gennadi Milinevsky, a physicist from a university in Kiev, walks along a path carpeted with pine needles and patches of recent snow.
This is the poisoned heart of the Red Forest, nearly 4,000 acres of pine trees that were blanketed with radioactive isotopes of strontium, cesium, plutonium, and microscopic pieces of uranium that roiled from the blazing core of reactor number four over 10 days in April and May of 1986. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone now encompasses more than 1,600 square miles of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus, a ragged swatch of forests, marshes, lakes, and rivers. Pages: 1 2345View All. Up close and personal with an active volcano. One man, 100,000 toothpicks, and 35 years: An incredible kinetic sculpture of San Francisco » Design You Trust – Social design inspiration!
Thirty five years ago I had yet to be born, but artist Scott Weaver had already begun work on this insanely complex kinetic sculpture, Rolling through the Bay, that he continues to modify and expand even today. I have used different brands of toothpicks depending on what I am building. I also have many friends and family members that collect toothpicks in their travels for me. For example, some of the trees in Golden Gate Park are made from toothpicks from Kenya, Morocco, Spain, West Germany and Italy.
The heart inside the Palace of Fine Arts is made out of toothpicks people threw at our wedding. vimeo.com/22461692 Full article. Spread your love! Video: MIT's New Nav System Turns the Entire Dashboard into a Huge 3-D Interactive Display. Back in 2009, we wrote about a little robotic dashboard companion called AIDA (for Affective Intelligent Driving Agent), an MIT creation that essentially read a driver's facial expressions to gauge mood and inferred route and destination preferences through social interaction with the driver. Apparently that was deemed too distracting, so now MIT is back with AIDA 2.0, which swaps the dashboard robot for a massive 3-D interactive map that covers the entire dashboard--because that's not distracting at all.
But it is pretty cool. Essentially, AIDA 2.0 would aid the driver by turning all of that unused dashboard real estate into a gesture-controlled three-dimensional display that can control everything from the stereo to the AC, as well as display mapping information in the driver's peripheral. Like its predecessor, AIDA 2.0 also learns your route and destination preferences and habits.
[Smartplanet] Incredible Star Wars Propaganda Posters. World's largest model airport the Knuffingen goes on show. An incredible model airport has gone on display in Germany. Picture: Getty Images Source: Getty Images A detail shot at the opening of the new miniature model Knuffingen Aiport. Picture: Getty Images Source: Getty Images PLANES take off, passengers wander through terminals and workers tend to the jets, but this is no ordinary airport.
The world’s largest model airport/railway, the Knuffingen Airport, has gone on display in Germany. In pictures: Amazing model airport Scroll down for video The incredible model is based on Hamburg Airport and features 40 planes and 90 vehicles that autonomously move around the airport. It took seven years to build and cost a staggering $4.8 million. The model includes a “carsystem” that manoeuvres the vehicles by computer. The model airport, also the world’s largest, goes into operation following seven years of development and construction. Passengers appear to walk around the terminals and the vehicles even feature flashing lights and indicators. The tent that turns into concrete in less than 24 hours. A Practical Way to Make Invisibility Cloaks. A new printing method makes it possible to produce large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials designed to interact with light in ways no natural materials can.
For several years, researchers working on these materials have promised invisibility cloaks, ultrahigh-resolution “superlenses,” and other exotic optical devices straight from the pages of science fiction. But the materials were confined to small lab demonstrations because there was no way to make them in large enough quantities to demonstrate a practical device. “Everyone has, perhaps conveniently, been in the position of not being able to make enough [metamaterial] to do anything with it,” says John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who developed the new printing method.
Metamaterials that interact with visible light have previously not been made in pieces larger than hundreds of micrometers. Inflatable Shark Among 300 New Species Discovered in Philippines | 2011 California Academy of Sciences Expedition | Deep-Sea Armored Corals. A treasure trove of hundreds of new species may have been discovered in the Philippines, including a bizarre sea star that feeds exclusively on sunken driftwood and a deep-sea, shrimp-eating shark that swells up to scare off other predators. Scientists braved leeches and a host of venomous creatures from the mountains to the sea to uncover more than 300 species that are likely new to science. These findings include dozens of new insects and spiders, more than 50 colorful new sea slugs and a number of deep-sea armored corals "which protect themselves against predatory nibbles from fish by growing large, spiky plates," said researcher Terrence Gosliner, dean of science and research collections at the California Academy of Sciences and leader of the 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition.
Challenging field work Working in the field is always a challenge, Gosliner noted. Hot hotspots. Die Smiling On This Hoverbike | Autopia. By Duncan Geere, Wired UK An Australian chap named Chris Malloy has built a hoverbike from motorbike parts, and he claims it can fly at 173 mph at an altitude of 10,000 feet. [partner id="wireduk"]Those are theoretical figures for the time being because the contraption hasn’t flown too far yet. Malloy bases those outlandish specs on the 231-pound device’s thrust-to-weight ratio. It consists almost solely of a pair of massive propellers powered by an 1,170-cc engine good for 107 horsepower. The fuel tank contains enough juice to give it a range of 92 miles at a cruising speed of 92 mph.
The pilot’s right hand controls the thrust of the rotors, while the left adjusts the angle of the control vanes, pitching the nose down or up to move forward or backward. There isn’t much in the way of safety features with the prototype, but Malloy plans to add a pair of explosive parachutes, or require riders to wear a ‘chute, and cover the props with a mesh to prevent limbs from being lopped off.
Cash Rules Everything Around Me - Home - The Inductive. Universe Sandbox | screenshots. The many faces of Universe Sandbox. Random moons and the new user interface. The Milky Way & Andromeda galaxies colliding 2.5 billion years from now. Adding an Earth to the Simulation Use Chart Mode to line up the one hundred largest bodies in our solar system. Our amazing inner solar system in anaglyph 3D Saturn, its rings, and its many moons.
Gravity Flower - A grid of particles colored by their velocity are distorted by the mass of a slow moving planet. 12-Year-Old Genius Expands Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong. Could Einstein’s Theory of Relativity be a few mathematical equations away from being disproved? Jacob Barnett of Hamilton County, Ind., who is just weeks shy of his 13th birthday, thinks so. And, he’s got the solutions to prove it. Barnett, who has an IQ of 170, explained his expanded theory of relativity — in a YouTube video. His mother Kristine Barnett, who admittedly flunked math, did what every other mother would do if her genius son started talking mathematical gibberish. She told him to explain the whole thing slowly while she taped her son explaining his take on the theory.
(More on TIME.com: See the top 10 troubled-genius movies) While most of his mathematical genius goes over our heads, some professors at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey — you know, the U.S. academic homeroom for the likes of Albert Einstein, J. “Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize,” he added. (More on TIME.com: See the 15 smartest toys for young geniuses) World's Largest indoor Photo: Strahov Philosophical Library, Prague - 40 Gigapixel 360º Panorama. About this photo This image was created from 3,000 individual photos stitched together into a single image that is 280,000 x 140,000 pixels. That's around 40 gigapixels, or 40,000 megapixels. If you printed this photo it would be 23 meters (or 78 feet) long!
To control this image, use the controls on the screen or click and hold your mouse button on the photo, and move your mouse around. If you would like us to create a large gigapixel panorama like you see here, please contact 360Cities. Commission a gigapixel like this one We will shoot and deliver a specially commissioned spherical gigapixel photo for you to use in connection with your marketing campaign, tourism promotion, etc. About 360cities.net We show you the world's most beautiful places in 360º. We publish, license, and distribute the world's largest collection of geolocated panoramic photos, created by our talented community of member photographers. About this photo Commission a gigapixel like this one About 360cities.net. Var.to | Link shortening with variable endpoints. Media Matters for America. How To Turn A Laser Into A Tractor Beam. Colin Osburn's Stream.
Octopart - Electronic Parts, Electronic Components, Datasheets. The Benefits of Eating Insects. Google Rolls Out Two-Factor Authentication For Everyone. You Should Use It. Latest Geminoid Is Incredibly Realistic. Escher's Waterfall. An Interview With Bernie Madoff. Cubelets: modular, affordable robotics for kids and students.
Overview : Technology in Austin : Business : The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. Stack Overflow Careers. Sign, edit, and fax documents online | HelloFax. Teach Parents Tech. Communications overload. Atom-Thick Material Shows Electronic Promise. Isolani - Javascript: Breaking the Web with hash-bangs. Isotope. Nano Hummingbird, drone, spy plane, Pentagon: Pentagon, AeroVironment to unveil Nano Hummingbird, an experimental mini-spy plane - latimes.com.