Interest of the day

Think It Up! is a new initiative to support students and teachers, and promote excitement about learning in America. The program airs live on September 11 at 8 PM ET on ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. The initiative comes from the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) and has support from universities. Many stars are contributing to the program that include Kristen Bell, Stephen Colbert, Scarlett Johansson, Matthew McConaughey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Renner, Ryan Seacrest, Jessica Williams, Jason Bateman, Halle Berry, Justin Bieber, Julie Chen, Terry Crews,
 Jennifer Garner, Taylor Lautner, Joe Manganiello, Seth Meyers, Kacey Musgraves and 
J.K. Simmons. EIF also partners with Donaorschoose.org to help teachers fund learning projects.

Intel, United Artist, and Turner broadcasting are creating A National Maker TV show to air in 2016. Makers compete for $1 Million in prizes.


Grand Prize Winner 2014: Nixie, the world's first wearable drone camera.

Harcoreta created and 3D printed a functional scale model of the GE 787 turbofan jet engine.

Popular Science has posted this cool infographic on A Timeline Of The Present And Future Of Electric Flight

The Discovering the Art of Mathematics website provides resources for teaching inquiry based learning methods. Inquiry based learning engages students to take charge of problem solving activities and explore solutions to problems. The site has courses, workshops, video to support teaching, and 11 books covering a broad number of subjects that include:

• Art & Sculpture
• Calculus
• Dance
• Games & Puzzles
• Geometry
• Knot Theory
• Music
• Number Theory
• Patterns
• The Infinite
• Truth, Reasoning, Certainty, & Proof

These books are all free to download. The materials were produced at the Westfield State University and with funding from the NSF.

The Wall Street Journal has a very nice field guide of the solar system called Frome Pluto to Sun. It makes me wonder why the number of moons orbiting planets tend to increase as the planets orbit farther from the sun.

Mars Trek is a cool interactive map of Mars that lets you explore the planet and follow the paths of the various rovers.


Kasei Valles

This short video written and edited by Brianna Ryan provides a nice summary of the standard model.

NASA has made its image library collection easier to search and use. There are 70 image collections available that include:

• Hubble
• The shuttle
• Human spaceflight
• Robotics
• Planets
• JPL
• Aircraft

This is just a few. I found one of my favorite photos in just a few minutes (see below). To copy the image location link, I had to select the printer friendly option and then right click on the image.

Richard Feynman gave lectures at Hughes Laboratories between 1966 and 1971. The lectures are now available and cover the following topics

• Volume 1 Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Cosmology
• Volumes 2 Relativity, Electrostatics, Electrodynamics, Matter-Wave Interaction
• Volume 3 More on Matter-Wave Interaction, Intro to Quantum Mechanics, Scattering Theory, Quantum Theory of Angular Momentum, Intro to Lie Group, SU 2 & 3 “stuff”, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), Pair Production
• Volume 4 Molecular Biology
• Volume 5 Mathematical Methods/Techniques in Physics and Engineering

The volumes are based on the notes that John T. Neer took during the lectures and are pretty amazing.