Microsoft Unveils the $50,000 PhizzPop Design Challenge
The PhizzPop Design Challenge is an open invitation to web design agencies to overhaul the website of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, a nonprofit organization which has been involved with philanthropic work focused on the youth of America for over 104 years. Microsoft has partnered with The Webby Awards for the design contest which features prizes in excess of $50,000. The Microsoft PhizzPop Boys & Girls Clubs of America Design Challenge was kicked off on January 11th, 2010, and all US-based web design agencies are welcome to participate for a chance at the grand price, by tailoring the Boys & Girls Clubs of America website for the Web 2.0.
“For 10 years, we’ve had the privilege of working closely with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America to witness the incredible work they do in transforming the lives of children,” stated Jon Roskill, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. Business and Marketing Organization and King County Boys & Girls Club board member. “As more tech-savvy kids connect through the Web, it’s critical the Clubs bolster their online presence to engage and inform people of their critical services. Read more
Invisibility One Step Closer?
Only a very small step mind you, as Japanese professor Yutaka Tamaru of Mie University unveils his newest creation, a transparent goldfish. Apparently the hapless creature was developed to make it easier for Japanese school students to study, so they wouldn’t have to cut them open, which has a certain irony considering some Japanese culinary practices… The skin and scales have no pigment so the heart, brain, eyes and other organs can clearly be seen. Since there’s no need for this animal to go under the knife it’s whole life cycle can be closely monitored and the good news for this specimen is that it is expected to live for around 20 years. Incidentally, this isn’t the first see-through animal developed in Japan and transparent frogs are apparently going to go on sale in the next few months.
How to Make the Planet Sustain Life for Longer
Astronomers have known for a long time that the Sun is currently at the middle of its life cycle, having already burnt for more than 4.6 billion years. As a yellow main sequence star, it is expected to live a full life of about 10 billion years, but naturally, during this time, it will evolve. Sadly for Earth, this implies it expanding as it turns into a red supergiant, eventually engulfing the entire planet within its mass. Things are considered to start getting pretty worse in about one billion years, when astronomers believe the heat will be so great that our planet will become uninhabitable.
However, this theory has recently been contested by a group of experts from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who say that we could make the planet able to support life even beyond the 1 billion years marker currently theorized. But, in order to do that, we’d have to get into some pretty serious geoengineering schemes. Read more
Infants Get Learning Lag from Watching TV
Infants who spend a lot of time in front of the TV may set themselves up for difficulties in learning later on in life, a new scientific research shows. It would appear that even babies under 1 or 2 years of age are capable of “zoning out” in front of the screen, and that this type of behavior may translate into less time spent with their parents, and, possibly, difficulties paying attention and learning when they grow a little older. The investigation was ordered and paid for by the LENA Foundation.
“We’ve known that television exposure during infancy is associated with language delays and attentional problems, but so far it has remained unclear why,” shared for LiveScience University of Washington School of Medicine professor of pediatrics Dimitri Christakis, who was also the lead researcher on the new study. Read more
How Music Would Sound in Other Worlds
How many of you have ever wondered about how a song played on, say, the Martian surface would actually sound? Assuming you pressed the “play” button on a Hi-Fi audio system, would Bach’s famous “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound the same as on Earth, as you would expect? Scientists say that no, it would not, and explain why. Just like the outer space causes sound to travel with extremely high difficulty, because it lacks a proper propagation medium, so does the less dense atmosphere of other planets.
This is why, in the Martian atmosphere, for instance, you would barely hear anything at all, let alone perceive every note or, even less likely, enjoy the richness of Bach’s music. “Sound doesn’t travel very far on Mars,” explained Amanda Hanford, an acoustics doctoral degree candidate at Penn State University. Read more
Why Drunk People Show No Fear
It is clear that alcohol consumption can turn a gentleman into a rude beast. For the first time, a new research study published in The Journal of Neuroscience explains why. Social drinkers intoxicated with alcohol have lowered sensitivity in brain nuclei controlling threat detection, while displaying higher activity in brain nuclei connected to reward.
“The key finding of this study is that after alcohol exposure, threat-detecting brain circuits can’t tell the difference between a threatening and non-threatening social stimulus. At one end of the spectrum, less anxiety might enable us to approach a new person at a party. But at the other end of the spectrum, we may fail to avoid an argument or a fight”, said Dr. Marina Wolf, at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. Read more
An Explanation of Happiness
We are all in the search of happiness, but the failure of finding it can cause us all kinds of frustrations and psychological issues. First of all, it is tricky to even define happiness: is it having what you want or wanting what you have? A new research published in the Psychological Science tested this. The results point that people can grow accustomed to their possessions, which in the end bring them less happiness. Nevertheless, people can keep wanting the things they have and it is precisely this category that experiences the highest level of happiness.
The team, made by Texas Tech University psychologist Jeff Larsen and Amie McKibban of Wichita State University, asked undergraduate subjects to fill in a questionnaire assessing if they possessed 52 different material items, like a car, a stereo or a bed. Read more
The Champs of Sex
Here come the results for the 2007-2008 Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey. It was made on a pool of 26,000 people from 26 countries around the world, and the results may be surprising or not.
The list is topped by the Greeks, 87% of them having sex at least once a week, followed by the Brazilians, with 82%. Third on the list, with 80%, are the Russians. 60% of the Australians have sex weekly.
Only 55% of the British have sex at least once a week; the number is 53% for Americans and Nigerians, and 34% (!) for the Japanese. Read more
Shirt Power for iPods
A week or so ago you may recall many newspapers carried a story about an odd looking contraption that you strapped to your legs, which generated power as you walk, enough to power up to 10 mobile phones one report said. Well, here’s something a tad more elegant. Researchers at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with an idea that generates power from nano fibres, that can be incorporated into everyday items of clothing, like shirts and trousers. Pairs of fibres are coated with zinc oxide nanowires and as they rub against each other they generate tiny currents using a piezoelectric effect. Read more
The Robot Invasion Begins
So be it then! We should at least look at the bright side of the whole deal. No more stepping out of the car, no more getting dirty or smelling of petrol after a quick refuel. The automatic refueling unit was developed by an inventor from Netherlands who is also a gas station owner, and is the first of its kind in the world working in a gas-pumping station. Ouch! That will really drive some unemployed people mad.
Nico van Staveren said in an interview that he got the idea while visiting a
farm and saw the robotic arm used for milking the cows, and started thinking that he could build a similar device that would fill the tank of a car on its own. If it were to go into mass production, a model could cost up to 110,000 U.S. dollars. However, it does not work on all types of cars, just on the models that do not require a specific key to open the gas cap in order to gain access to the fuel tank. Read more
