66 Teams of high school students have converged upon New York to participate in a battle of technology called the FIRST Robots regional championships. Every year, team must construct a robot capable of performing certain tasks, all the while being under attack by the other robots. Also, to encourage teamwork, the groups are allowed form 3-way alliances with other teams.

“Robotics is popular not just because of practical applications like self-driving cars, but because it captures the imagination of both scientists and the public,” said Henry Kautz, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

A long time ago I had a debate with a friend in college. He was a cynic who believed the internet dumbed people down and corrupted their use of the English language. I took the position that the Internet taught hordes of children to read in the first place and at a far younger age. While Internet grammar is far from perfect, its a commonly accepted notion that the best way to learn how to write is simply to read a lot.  

The above memory passed through my mind as I read this article on Fox Sci-Tech. Walden University conducted a poll of 1,000 K-12 teachers and discovered that only 60% of them sporadically used technology. Only 22% reported being frequent users. 

The relentless barrage of technology...Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPhones, Skype have provided children one thing many teachers have trouble supplying...motivation to learn.

Because technology delivers immediate ...

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A study released by my way-too-pricey alma mater USC explores the digital capacity of humanity to preserve information. Where do we keep all the data? How much can we store? Well, answering those questions require the use of Greek prefixes that people normally don't hear. 

The study found that humanity's storage capacity increases roughly 28% a year. This equates to a doubling every 3 years. So basically in 30 years from now, the storage capacity of all human civilization will be over 1000 times the size it is today.  

Authored by Martin Hilbert and Priscila Lopez, some other highlights of their study are:

-Humanity can currently store around 295 exabytes of information. "Exa" means add 18 zeros to the end.  A typical 500 gigabyte hard drive on a PC would add 9 zeros.

-2002 marked the beginning of the Digital Age. Why? Because that year humanity's digital ...

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Queensland University of Technology engineering student Bryan Huang has created a micro-blimp that can guide visitors through a building. Using three propellers, the 3 foot wide donut blimp was an experiment to see if the shape offered better maneuverability than the conventional football shape.  You can watch a video in the link above.  The device seems a bit loud and jarring for widespread use.

 

Photo by Navid Nourani - Bryan Huang's donut blimp helps guides visitors from reception to meeting rooms

Lol...This video requires no introduction. And I actually did learn a few things...

Students who hate reading Shakespeare may now rejoice. At first, you could use cliffs notes to avoid reading his plays. But now, thanks to AOL and reality show producer Mark Burnett, you won't even have to read the cliffs notes. They've entered an agreement to produce comedic video shorts based on the little booklets published by Wiley.  The shorts will be featured on AOL.com later this year.

Earlier last week, Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse announced the creation of several "biotic" video games involving players interacting with their favorite high-school one-celled organism...the famed paramecia. Games include "PAC-mecium" where players guide a single-cell organism to gobble up little balls (a la Pacman), "Biotic Pinball" and "CiliaBall", where players use paramecia hairs to knock around a virtual soccer ball.

The games rely upon various stimuli to motivate the single-cell organisms to move around, including the application of electrical fields and whiffs of various chemicals. Riedal-Kruse assures potential players that the paramecium feel no pain.

Suuurrrrreee.  Just kidding. This article's headline is all in good fun. Still, Riedal-Kruse hopes the pain question stimulates new bio-ethical questions and debates. He also aims to maximize the educational reach of his new games, with the eventual aim of crowd-sourcing biological research. After all, what's the real difference between a paramecia research ...

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Two days ago, I posted a video of Hoopgirl in San Francisco.  Very sexy, yes.  But, the idea that I could actually make a real blog post about her has been needling the back of mind.  Named Christabel Zamor, Hoopgirl used to weigh over 180 lbs and managed to get down to 130-ish by hula hooping. I actually considered hula hooping as a fitness regimen after I met her two years ago.  I eventually grew bored with it.  My Kinect seems to be a more reliable way to keep my interest.  Even so, if you want to lose weight, have fun and become sexily toned, hula hooping might just be an answer for some readers. You may visit Christabel at HoopGirl.com or find many of her videos on Youtube.

An inspirational 100 year-old man in India has decided to pursue his Ph. D. proving (yet again) that it's never too late to start anew. Every time you think you've reached the end of it all, it just becomes a new beginning.

(h/t) The Speculist