Explore, Play, Discover: Websites & Activities Search form Search Low-cost, teacher-tested activities for the classroom and the curious. Science of Cooking • Explore the science behind food and cooking with recipes, activities, and Webcasts.PreviousNext Explore, Play, Discover: Websites, Activities, and More Auroras: Paintings in the Sky Far north in the night sky, a faint glow appears on the horizon. Feeling Pressured Feel atmospheric pressure changes by stepping into a garbage bag. Camera Obscura Take the Beat Back Uncover the everyday origins of some extraordinary instruments. The Cold Water Candy Test Science of Baseball What's the science behind a home run? Arctic Seals These unique – and uniquely beautiful – seal species spend their lives amid the sea ice Plant Hybrids If you're a patient gardener, you can grow your own hybrid flowers. 2016 Total Solar Eclipse Telescope View Watch the telescope view of the entire 2016 total solar eclipse in Micronesia. Energy from Death Slinky in Hand Make waves without getting wet. Cheshire Cat Pages explore Connect
The WWW Virtual Library The Indian Economy Blog Could This Tiny $70 Box Be The Next Mouse? Maybe It’s so rare that technology feels like magic. That first time you sifted through thousands of songs in your pocket or used a touch-screen phone? Forgotten now. In using technology in our daily lives, the impossible is proven, again and again, to be entirely possible, and we grow numb to the magic around us. I only mention this because the Leap certainly looks like one of those magical moments in technology. About the size of a pack of gum, the device sits on your desk to read your gestures with 1/100 millimeter accuracy--or what the company claims is 200x more sensitive than anything on the market today. The company’s use case metaphor? To be honest, every bit of the story sounds too good to be true: From the CTO David Holz, who is just 23 (but has consulted for NASA) to the ridiculously low $70 asking price (on preorder now for release in early 2013). And already, I can’t help but wonder, what could happen if we aimed Leap at our faces rather than our hands? Pre-order Leap here.
Top10Links - best web sites in over 1000 categories! Find the top web sites fast! A wide angle view of India Machine Scans Twitter For Mentions Of Fruit, Then Turns Them Into Smoothies We tend to think of data in one way: numbers. We can change the fonts, or we can graph them out. Maybe we can even use advanced visualization to make someone really grasp a particular figure. But numbers are always using one sense: sight. Could meaningful data be consumed in other ways? Quite literally, yes it can. “The goal was to break free and think beyond traditional means of data representation and analysis,” the design trio tells Co.Design. Interestingly enough, the 1:1 representation of fruit as flavor wasn’t the project’s original intent. Their literal representation of data is equal parts elegant and brilliant. [Hat tip: FlowingData]
Library & Information Science Avenue The Times of India: Latest News India, World & Business News, Cricket & Sports, Bollywood This Sci-Fi Touchscreen Can Give The iPhone Real Buttons Most of us have adjusted to life with touchscreens. They lack tactile feedback, the rubber nubs that enable thoughtless use of our television remotes, but touchscreens create dynamic virtual buttons and open up vital screen real estate. They’re worth the thumb-numbing tradeoff. But what if we could have both, a dynamic touchscreen with real buttons? Impossible? Not at all. A startup called Tactus Technology has developed a thin “Tactile Layer” that sits on top of touchscreens in place of the normal surface (it’s no thicker). “If we look at high daily usage--say 100 times per day--we use less than 1% of a typical smartphone battery,” explains Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla. In their tech demos, an iPhone has physical number keys, and a tablet has a real QWERTY layout. “For the first generation of technology, the position of the buttons are pre-configured [in the factory],” Ciesla tells Co.Design. Now, ready for one last mind-bending trick?
5. Public, Private & Open - Online Learning - eduMOOC: Online Learning Today... and Tomorrow Is higher education "worth it." Online public, private, profit and open learning initiatives are all impacted by the public perception that higher education is over-priced and less relevant than it should be to today's job markets. What role does online learning play in this continuum of opportunities to learn? Live presentation On Thursday, July 28, at 2:00 pm Eastern, 1:00 pm Central, noon Mountain; 11:00 am Pacific time in the U.S. - 7:00 pm London time, we will host a live Web conference on the weekly topic. Joining us for the live session will be: Ray Schroeder, Moderator, Director, Center for Online Learning, Research and Service, University of Illinois Springfield Ray Schroeder is Professor Emeritus of Communication, and founding director of the Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service at the University of Illinois Springfield. As Director of Global Learning, Cable Green leads the Education projects at Creative Commons. Live Sessions Your screen will look like this: Blogs