Interest of the day

Don't for get the Robot film festival 2013 will be held July 20-21, 2013 in San Francisco. Hopefully some of the film will be posted on the website too.

MIT is at it again. Silkworms covered a dome substructure with silk. Will insects build our homes in the future. Swam manufacturing is a crazy concept that I never saw coming.

Calling all citizen scientist. There is a new science project that needs your help. The Worm Watch Lab asks user to mark the time when a nematode worm C lays an egg. The study is looking to understand the relation between genes and the neurotransmitter serotonin that is associated with egg laying in worms. Serotonin is associated with mood in humans and will help with understanding neurotransmitter in the brain.

This paper in Nature reports that spider webs can move toward flying insects by electrostatic attraction increasing the effectiveness of the web.

The Royal Institution of Great Britain produced this short video on a Levitating Superconductor on a Möbius strip. The Möbius strip contains 2000 magnets and the superconductor is made of Yttrium barium copper oxide. The magnet track must of cost a fortune, but it's pretty cool to see the superconducting "car" zip around the track. The only direction the "car" will move is where the magnetic field isn't changing due to the currents induced in the superconductor.

I missed the TEDx CERN talks but now some are on archive.

• Hiranya Peiris speaks on multi-dimensions.
• Ian Foster speaks about grid computing.
• Eliezer Rabinovici and Zehra Sayers speak about how science trumps politics.
• Steve Myers and Andrew Vanden Heuvel speaks how they used Google Glass to take students on a trip to the Large Hadron Collider.
• Gian Giudice speaks about what the Higgs mass might tell us about the fate of the universe.
• Becky Parker speaks about inspiring students.

Don Lincoln gives us the history and some background on those elusive neutrinos in his video Neutrinos: Nature's Ghosts? Neutrinos only interact with gravity and the weak nuclear force so they are very hard to detect. Wolfgang Pauli theorized their existence in the 1930 but it tool 30 years to detect the first one.

Gwynne Shotwell COO of SpaceX talks about STEM education and building space hardware in her TED talk. She points out that the US is slipping in education, innovation, and manufacturing. My T=0 for the start of our slide or failure to keep up with exponential innovation, is the cancellation of the Super Collider. I wish someone would provide some insight into why we don't produce stuff on the "Moon Landing" scale any more.

The World Science Festival had wonderful discussion on the Multiverse. The session was moderated by John Hockenberry and the speakers included:

• Andreas Albrecht
• Alan Guth
• Andrei Linde
• Neil Turok

Don Lincoln gives A 10-minute lesson in supersymmetry. Basically, a theory is supersymmetric if it treats force and mass as interchangeable. Supersymmetry helps the explain the mass of the Higgs boson, force unification, and provide a candidates for dark matter.