cool stuff from research

“No TV until you finish that level.”

Can you imagine? Recent research shows that video games, once considered public school enemy number one, might just be one of our greatest assets in delivering an effective education.

The Lone Signal project is taking a different approach to discovering extraterrestrials: sending messages into deep space

Can’t get your kids to stop playing video games? That may be a good thing, according...

Feeling unhappy? Learn how increasing your happiness is within your power, and how doing so directly influences your success.

Seriously.

A so-called ‘studio school’ which promises to bring the workplace into the classroom is set to open on Tyneside

Just how real is virtual reality? A recent study on avatars in a virtual environment shows the extent that our physical selves can be fused with customized versions.

When gamers create personalized representations of themselves, the challenges and joy that their avatars encounter can have real physical and emotional effects. To find out just how important that customization factor is, communications researchers did a study with 121 college-aged participants.

In my day job as an education innovator, I do a lot of work in virtual worlds. In fact, I'm the director of a Master's degree that runs entirely in a virtual world called Second Life. Over the past...

The Omni is a new virtual reality gaming device that launched a funding campaign Tuesday in  Kickstarter and, in a matter of hours, more than doubled its

NPR
Is Virtual Reality Gaming Destined For A Comeback?
NPR
With headphones on, I was effectively sealed off from the real world. Looking down, I could see "my" virtual body. The urge to raise my hands was irresistible, but the hands didn't move.

"Racetrack Playa" sounds like the screenname of an online teenager you're competing against in Need for Speed, but scientists recognize it as the name of a dried-up lake in Death Valley. For a century, scientific minds have been puzzled by a well-documented, poorly-understood phenomenon occuring at Racetrack Playa: Enormous stones, some up to 700 pounds, appear to have somehow moved themselves across the lakebed floor in random patterns, leaving a furrowed trail behind them.

No one had ever seen these "sailing stones" move, but many photographed the end result. The original thought was that the lakebed forms a thin sheet of ice on it, and that the wind then blows the rocks across it; but that theory was discounted after researchers calculated it would take wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour to move the rocks, while the wind at the Racetrack maxes out around 90 m.p.h. And if you're wondering why they don't just strap a GoPro camera onto a rock to see what's going on, scientists returning to the site over the years have calculated that the rocks move for short periods of time, just once every three years. That's a bit longer than your battery's likely to last.

However, a fortunate collision between two of these magic rocks provided planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz with an interesting discovery:

Lorenz, studying the trails left by the stones, observed that one rock had collided against another and been deflected. "There was a rock trail and it looked like it hit another rock and bounced, but the trail didn't go all the way up to other the rock, like it was repelled somehow," Lorenz told Smithsonian Magazine. In other words, there was some kind of force-field-like barrier around each rock that prevented total contact.

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Cities of smooth stone and steel may turn into floating forests – with buildings that can think , breathe and cool themselves, says architect Philip Beesley.