glaad:

Bad news. Boy Scouts of America executives have killed approval of 18 year-old Ryan Andresen’s Eagle Scout application after an official Eagle Board of Review unanimously approved the application. Executives have also smeared Ryan’s name. 

Help spread the word.

adventuresingender:

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upworthy:

5 Family Portraits That Were Illegal In The U.S. Just 2 Years Ago: Just two years ago, these families were legally required to hide their existence. Now, after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” these families still face major hurdles to full rights and recognition under the law. See the rest here.

lgbtlaughs:

hookersam:

hey guys guess what you get when you google lesbian scholarships

a list of all the scholarships that are available for straight allies

the list keeps going but i got tired of screencapping

mind you this is in order of posting and no i have not yet come across one that isn’t offered to straight allies as well as you know the actual lgbt community

welp

8bitfuture:

Self-filling water bottle draws water from the air.

The water bottle draws inspiration from the Namib Desert beetle, which is able to draw in 12 percent of its weight in water from the air using hydrophilic areas on its back which cause water to condense.

“We use nanotechnology to mimic this beetle’s back so that we too can pull water from the air,” Sorenson told PRI. “We see this being applicable to anything from marathon runners to people in third-world countries, because we realize that water is such a large issue in the world today, and we want to try to alleviate those problems with a cost-efficient solution. We are looking to incorporate this in greenhouses or green roofs in the immediate future, and then later on, we’re looking to see how far we can really scale this up to supply maybe farms or larger agricultural goals.”

Arguably the most remarkable part might be that fact that Sorenson insists the technology does not require much energy; he said the company’s showed how solar cells and a rechargeable battery can be enough. This means the device could potentially be attached to vehicles, buildings, or even a running human, and still be able to grab all the power it needs supply to move the air over the specially-coated surface.

(Source: thenextweb.com)

Google invests $75M in a 50MW wind farm, has contributed almost $1B to the renewable energy sector

Google on Thursday announced an equity investment of $75 million in a 50MW wind farm in Rippey, about an hour outside of Des Moines. At the same time, the company revealed it has now committed almost $1 billion, “more than $990 million” quoting directly, to the renewable energy sector so far.

(Source: engineeringfuckyeah)

joshbyard:

Chinese Researchers Achieve Quantum Teleportation at Macro Scale

So by entangling two photons, for instance, physicists have demonstrated the ability to transmit quantum information from one place to another by encoding it in these quantum states—influence one of the pair and a change can be measured in the other without any information actually passing between the two. Researchers have done this before, between photons, between ions, and even between a macroscopic object and a microscopic object.

But now Chinese researchers have, for the first time, achieved quantum teleportation between two macroscopic objects across nearly 500 feet using entangled photons…

The two bundles of rubidium atoms that served as sender and receiver are more or less analogs for what we hope will someday be our “quantum Internet”—a system of routers like the ones we have now that, instead of beaming information around a vast network of fiber optic wires, will send and receive information through entangled photons.

So in a way, this is like a first proof of concept, evidence that the idea works at least in the lab. Now all we have to do is figure out is how to build several of these in series so they can actually pass information from one to the other. To do that, we only have to somehow force these quantum states to exist for longer than the hundred microseconds or so that they last now before degrading. Sounds easy enough.

(via Researchers Achieve Quantum Teleportation Between Two Macroscopic Objects For The First Time | Popular Science)

gigabits:

Self-taught African Teen Wows M.I.T.

15-Year-Old Kelvin Doe is an engineering whiz living in Sierra Leone who scours the trash bins for spare parts, which he uses to build batteries, generators and transmitters. Completely self-taught, Kelvin has created his own radio station where he broadcasts news and plays music under the moniker, DJ Focus. 

Kelvin became the youngest person in history to be invited to the “Visiting Practitioner’s Program” at MIT.

quantumaniac:

Should Students Use Wikipedia?

• Imagine the following fake conversation with a student:

Student: The instructor in another course said something about antimatter. What is antimatter? Where could I read about that?

Me: Well, you could go to Wikipedia. I am sure the page on anti-matter has a nice summary.

Student: Wikipedia??? Really? I thought all faculty hated Wikipedia. We were told it’s not a good thing to use.

Interesting. What do faculty think about students using Wikipedia? I have this unjustified feeling that it is a fairly straightforward source for basic information. Let me take a look at a few pages:

• Antimatter.
• Cave Diving.
• The Momentum Principle.
• Rhett Allain.

Looking at this sample, how accurate are these pages? The antimatter page seems to have a good summary of the topic with no obvious errors.

Apparently, there isn’t a Wikipedia page on the Momentum Principle. I thought that was odd. Well, the page on Impulse (physics) seems to be essentially the same as the momentum principle. It isn’t exactly what I would write, but it isn’t wrong either. Of course, I could probably say the same complaint about many of the physics textbooks. Finally, the Rhett Allain page is brief — but again not wrong.

Is Wikipedia evil? I don’t think so. Wikipedia is a tool, just like a lot of other things. It can be abused or it can be used for the good of mankind. Really, it isn’t much different than the information you would find in a textbook. Perhaps in the early days of Wikipedia, there was some unreliable stuff in there. However, I think that Wikipedia has matured enough that you won’t find too many seriously wrong things in there. You still find incorrect things in textbooks, so … not much different.

Then can students use Wikipedia? I think the problem some faculty have is that they don’t want students to use Wikipedia because it makes the assignment too easy. My feeling on this is that perhaps there should be a different assignment. Really, it depends on the learning goals. If the goal is to process and synthesize information, I think Wikipedia should be included in that process. If the goal is to learn how to find things in a library, then clearly Wikipedia shouldn’t be used.

Wikipedia is like a calculator in math classes. What if there was a math assignment where students were to do long division? Would it be wrong for the students to use a calculator? I think it depends. Why are they doing long division? In the past, long division was taught in schools so that students could divide numbers. But if the goal is to divide stuff, a calculator would make more sense.

There is another reason to teach long division: to give insight into how division works and what place value means. If this is the goal, the calculator actually doesn’t help. It just skips the whole processes, so it would be a bad-thing.

I need to make another post about long division. You know what is cool about long division? Doing long division with binary numbers.

(Source: Wired)

engineeringisawesome:

Google engineer builds $1,500 page-turning scanner out of sheet metal and a vacuum

The scanner uses air suction from an ordinary vacuum cleaner to isolate individual pages, scanning the front and back in one pass along the device’s prism-shaped body. After a quick 40-second setup, it can digitize a 1000-page book in a little over 90 minutes (although that could be easily improved with a faster motor), and unlike many popular scanners on the market it doesn’t require anyone to man the controls once it’s been set in motion. But what makes the project really intriguing is that all of the plans have been open sourced with open patents, meaning you’re free to experiment, build on Qumsiyeh’s design, and even sell derivative scanners without worrying about Google’s army of lawyers swooping down on you. With half of Qumsiyeh’s $1,500 price tag being eaten up by the scanner he tore apart for parts, we’d say there’s still a lot of room for optimization.

The Verge

theatlantic:

In Focus: Israel Steps Up Attacks, Gaza Returns Fire

Over the weekend, Israeli air strikes pounded dozens more targets in the Gaza Strip, as Hamas militants launched rockets into southern Israel and toward Tel Aviv. Israel’s recent air barrage has targeted individuals and buildings in more densely populated areas, and the civilian death toll is mounting. Local officials in Gaza have placed the death toll at more than 90 since Wednesday. International mediators are working hard to forge a deal that would lead to a truce. However, Israeli forces are still massing on Gaza’s border, and Hamas refuses to negotiate while Israel continues its air strikes. Gathered here are images from a weekend of violent exchanges between Israel and Gaza, with no clear indication whether the situation will worsen or reach a cease-fire any time soon.

(Source: pennyfournasa)

Scientists read dreams with brain scans

By reading brainwaves and observing the visual processing regions of sleeping brains, Japanese researchers were able to interpret a select bunch of dream images simply from neural activity. By comparing how certain regions of an awake brain fired in response to images in photos, and then comparing these to dream journals and brain activity, they were able to reconstruct exactly when the brains had the dream experience.

It’s not exactly television of the mind, but pretty cool nonetheless. Unfortunately, Pluto was not involved in this research, although his dreams are pretty easy to read.

(more at Nature News)

crookedindifference:

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever.

They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

The Kiss, today (23/10/2012) in Marseille, France. 

Two young women kissed in front of anti same sex marriage/adoption protesters.