Interest of the day

YouCubed is a new website designed to help teachers and parents teach kids math. The site started as a result of the overwhelming response to Jo Boaler's OpenEdX course How to Learn Math.

A puppeteer and a carpenters have developed a RoboHand that has help a 170 kids with birth defects. The RoboHand can be printed on a 3-D printer for less than $150. The RoboHand can be easily reprinted in a larger size as the child grows. The plans are available on Thingiverse.

Lisa Randall will give a public lecture on The Implications of the Discovery of the Higgs Bosonat Princeton University on November 11 at 8PM.

Minute Physics has posted a neat Periodic table of magnetism. By adjusting a temperature slide the element property showing the type of magnetism changes. If you click on an element then a Periodic Table of Videos plays.

2Veritasium has a neat video on Quantum Cooling to (Near) Absolute Zero. In the Video, Professor Andrea Morello from the University of New South Wales explains how a 3He/4He dilution refrigerator works. It uses a very clever technique.

Minute physics has posted a video Magnets: How do they work?, and Veritasium has posted the complementary video How Special Relativity Makes Magnets Work. Both videos are nicely done and present magnetism in a way I haven't seen before.

Head Squeeze posted a short witty video answering the question How many dimensions are there? They talk about string theory, super string theory, M-Theory, and the Randall-Sundrum model. There could be 4, 5, 10, 11, or 26 dimensions depending on which model turns out to be correct.

The Maker Faire 2013 NYC talks are now on archive.

SpaceX shows a 3-D CAD tool interface that makes building in 3-D much easier and more efficient. Once a component has been designed, then the part can be fabricated with a 3-D metal printer. The printer deposites metal particles of Ti or Inconel and a laser then fuses them together. The part is build layer by layer.

Gizmodo has posted a list of the 14 Immense Scientific Instruments You Won't Believe Are Real but are very cool. They include the:

• Daya Bay neutrino detector
• Super-Kamiokande, a large Cherenkov detector
• ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) particle detector
• Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment
• Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO)
• Borexino Experiment (measures solar neutrino flux)
• Cockcroft Walton generator
• Z Pulsed Power Facility (largest x-ray generator)
• Gammasphere, a gamma ray detector
• Joint European Torus (JET) vessel, the largest tokamak in the world
• National Ignition Facility (NIF)
• NASA's cryogenic testing chamber
• Large Diameter Centrifuge (LDC)
• Large Space Simulator