Every year for the past decade, Duck Tape brand duct tape has held a contest for the creative use of their tape in prom dresses and tuxedos. Winners earn scholarship money. Gallery at the link. Link via DudeCraft Oh, and congratulations to Paul Overton, the dude behind DudeCraft, on his first blogiversary!

The experimental Quest to Learn School in New York City opened last September. In the hopes of preparing students for high-tech careers, it teaches students almost entirely though video games:

This year’s 72-student class is split into four groups that rotate through five courses during the day: Codeworlds (math/English), Being, Space and Place (social studies/English), The Way Things Work (math/science), Sports for the Mind (game design), and Wellness (health/PE). Instead of slogging through problem sets, students learn collaboratively in group projects that require an understanding of subjects in the New York State curriculum. The school’s model draws on 30 years of research showing that people learn best when they’re in a social context that puts new knowledge to use. Kids learn more by, say, pretending to be Spartan spies gathering intel on Athens than by memorizing facts about ancient Greece.

Most sixth-graders don’t expect to ever need to identify integers, but at Quest, it’s the key to a code-breaking game. In another class, when creatures called Troggles needed help moving heavy objects, the class made a video instructing how long a ramp they should build to minimize the force they needed to apply. “They’re picking concepts up as well as, if not better than, at other schools,” says Quest’s math and science teacher Ameer Mourad. Beyond make-believe, Quest is the first middle school to teach videogame design. Salen says building games teaches students about complex systems, which will prepare them for growing fields such as bioinformatics.

http://www.popsci.com/entertainment-amp-gaming/article/2009-12/new-school-teaches-students-through-videogames via Fast Company | Official Website | Photo: Claudio Midolo

A team of scientists led by Keizo Tomonaga of Osaka University determined that a virus dating from 40 million years ago is embedded in human DNA. This infection, known as the bornavirus, might be the cause of schizophrenia and passes from generation to generation inside human cellular nuclei, filling out 8% of human genetic code:

The assimilation of viral sequences into the host genome is a process referred to as endogenization. This occurs when viral DNA integrates into a chromosome of reproductive cells and is subsequently passed from parent to offspring. Until now, retroviruses were the only viruses known to generate such endogenous copies in vertebrates. But Feschotte said that scientists have found that non-retroviral viruses called bornaviruses have been endogenized repeatedly in mammals throughout evolution.

Bornavirus (BDV) owes its name to the town of Borna, Germany, where a virus epidemic in 1885 wiped out a regiment of cavalry horses. BDV infects a range of birds and mammals, including humans. It is unique because it infects only neurons, establishing a persistent infection in its host's brain, and its entire life cycle takes place in the nucleus of the infected cells.

Link via io9 | Image: US Department of Energy

(YouTube Link)

Jordan Breindel of Urlesque compiled thirteen student-made music videos about Advanced Placement courses and tests available in many American high schools. Those subjects featured are: calculus, chemistry, economics, European history, U.S. history, English, statistics, Spanish, art history, government, psychology, world history, and physics.

The video above was created by students of Ms. Seckar-Martinez of McCallum High School in Austin, Texas.

Link

Artist Elisa Strozyk took discarded wood veneer, sliced it into tiny triangles, and repurposed it into an upholstery replacement. The end result looks like a pixelated image which can be used to cover chairs, couches, and tables. More at the link.

Link via Make | Official Website | Photo: Elisa Strozyk

(YouTube Link)

Roombas and similar commercially-available robots can plug themselves into docking stations when they need to recharge. But that requires having a designated recharging station. Marvin, a robot by Intel Labs, can search for an electrical outlet and plug itself in. This approach is superior to the alternative solution.

Link via Make

A physicist at Fudan University in China is working on a material that might be used to render objects invisible:

The fluid proposed by Ji-Ping Huang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and colleagues, contains magnetite balls 10 nanometres in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometre-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping.

In the absence of a magnetic field, such nanoparticles would simply float around in the water, but if a field were introduced, the particles would self-assemble into chains whose lengths depend on the strength of the field, and which can also attract one another to form thicker columns.

The chains and columns would lie along the direction of the magnetic field. If they were oriented vertically in a pool of water, light striking the surface would refract negatively – bent in way that no natural material can manage.

This property could be exploited for invisibility devices, directing light around an object so that it appears as if nothing is there, or be put to use in lenses that could capture finer details than any optical microscope.

Well, I suppose. As always in these situations, I offer this caveat from Ph.D Comics.

Link via Popular Science | Image: TSR/Marvel | Previously on Neatorama: First Steps Toward an Invisibility Cloak

Writer Adam Bertocci imagined the movie The Big Lebowski as a play by William Shakespeare entitled The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. From Act 1, Scene 2:

[The bowling green. Enter THE KNAVE, WALTER and DONALD, to play at ninepins]

WALTER
In sooth, then, faithful friend, this was a rug of value? Thou wouldst call it not a rug among ordinary rugs, but a rug of purpose? A star in a firmament, in step with the fashion alike to the Whitsun morris-dance? A worthy rug, a rug of consequence, sir?

THE KNAVE
It was of consequence, I should think; verily, it tied the room together, gather’d its qualities as the sweet lovers’ spring grass doth the morning dew or the rough scythe the first of autumn harvests. It sat between the four sides of the room, making substance of a square, respecting each wall in equal harmony, in geometer’s cap; a great reckoning in a little room. Verily, it transform’d the room from the space between four walls presented, to the harbour of a man’s monarchy.

WALTER
Indeed, a rug of value; an estimable rug, an honour’d rug; O unhappy rug, that should live to cover such days!

DONALD
Of what dost thou speak, that tied the room together, Knave? Take pains, for I would well hear of that which tied the room together.

Fear not, for the Knave abideth.

Link via Nerdcore | Image: Wikimedia Commons

Since 1987, illustrator Martin Handford's Where's Waldo? (Where's Wally in the UK) books have challenged the pattern recognition skills of children and adults. In the many books featuring Waldo, Handford has occasionally hidden strange if not a touch scandalous images. Adrian Beiting of of the geekery blog Topless Robot has compiled nine of the oddities, such as an Aztec human sacrifice:



Link | Images: Chadwick House Publishing

That's 123 billion digits more than the previous number. Computer scientist Fabrice Bellard ran his calculations on a desktop computer, taking 131 days to run the program and then check the results:

Previous records were established using supercomputers, but Mr Bellard claims his method is 20 times more efficient.

The prior record of about 2.6 trillion digits, set in August 2009 by Daisuke Takahashi at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, took just 29 hours.

However, that work employed a supercomputer 2,000 times faster and thousands of times more expensive than the desktop Mr Bellard employed.

I blogged about that record at the time.

Link via Geekologie | Image: flickr user Paul Adam Smith, used under Creative Commons license

Artist Rob Vargas created this graphic using data from a study by the University of California at San Diego. Americans consume 3.6 zettabytes a day. A zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes. That's a lot of LOLcats!

http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo.php via Fast Company | Artist's Website

Last October, I posted about a drug that binds antibodies to cocaine to diminish its pleasurable effects in users. Well, it's not working out terribly well because some users are responding by taking enough cocaine to overwhelm its protection:

Nobody overdosed, but some of them had 10 times more cocaine coursing through their systems than researchers had encountered before, according to Kosten. He said some of the addicts reported to researchers that they had gone broke buying cocaine from multiple drug dealers, hoping to find a variety that would get them high.

Thankfully, the drug was able to help some test subjects avoid cocaine.

Link via Popular Science | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services

Cartoonist H. Caldwell Tanner drew a version of the expulsion from Eden narrative in Genesis 3 using only Internet catchphrases. He writes "Genesis would have been a lot cooler if it featured blue hedgehogs." Probably.

Link via Urlesque

Luke Skywalker survived the arctic conditions of the planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back only because Han Solo killed his tauntaun (a native beast of burden) and shoved Luke inside the animal's warm carcass. This led the blog Wolf Gnards to ask, as a practical question, how long could Luke really survive in a tauntaun's body?

In a normal environment, a carcass gets cold in 8 to 36 hours losing an average rate of 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. However, the ice world of Hoth is not an average environment. The Star Wars database lists that Hoth reaches nightly temperatures of -60 F. In a frigid, sub-zero environment, body heat can be lost almost 32 times faster. This means a Tauntaun's body heat could drop almost 51.2 F every hour. Considering that Han Solo's Tauntaun died of severe hypothermia even before it was cut open with Luke's light saber, one could assume it's core body temperature was already well below normal. The problem for Luke is if the Tauntaun's body temperature reaches freezing point those once toasty guts, blood, and assorted alien goo, will in fact become a frozen coffin. If the Tauntaun died of cardiac arrest due to hypothermia with an average body temperature of 75 F (23 C), and if Tauntaun blood freezes at 28.4 F (-2 C), then Han has roughly 56 minutes to set up a shelter before Luke once again is in danger of losing his life in the barren wasteland of Hoth.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but it should be followed with rigorous scientific testing. Any volunteers?

Link via Forces of Geek | Image: Lucasfilm

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A (presumably) abandoned ship near a US nuclear test is swamped by the resulting massive wave. The video is courtesy of Atom Central, a site filled with pictures, videos, and information about nuclear weapons.

via Urlesque | Atom Central