science

SAN FRANCISCO--You are the blob. And you are the paint, too, if you let the art collective here known as Anticlockwise Arts have its way with you.

Last night at the Academy of Sciences' weekly NightLife event, the group debuted a new project called "Watercolor Walls" that mixes basic tech tools and audience participation to give new life to your stodgy old silhouette.

As one of the nearby DJs spun remixes of pop hits from the likes of Justin Timberlake, the crowd of more than a thousand walked, strutted, and shimmied between Watercolor Walls' camera and projector and a 15-foot-tall screen on its way from one end of the museum to the other. Using infrared light, the camera and projector would outline the silhouettes of people moving in front of the screen -- but there was more to it. … Read more

Forget those old stereotypes of scientists as gray-haired men in laboratories wearing bottle-cap glasses. Rapper Coma Niddy tells the world that it doesn't matter who you are, as you too can be a scientist. He does, however, say you have to be curious and never give up.

The video was produced as part of a PBS Digital Studios project, and Comma Niddy is science educator who raps on everything from nanotechnology to dark matter. … Read more

BlackBerry co-founder and former CEO Mike Lazaridis has veered from mobile devices and set his sights on quantum technology.

This technology is so fascinating to him that he and fellow BlackBerry co-founder Doug Fregin have launched a $100 million investment fund, called Quantum Valley Investments, to work on commercial applications for breakthroughs in quantum science, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But, what exactly are breakthroughs in quantum science?

According to Lazaridis, one need look no further than Star Trek.

"There's this buzz around the world that this quantum information science is starting to bear fruit," Lazaridis … Read more

Water can be a solid, liquid, or gas -- and one heck of a dazzling science experiment when you pump up the volume.

A mind-bending video by YouTube user Brusspup shows how falling water can take on a zigzag pattern after two influencing factors: a nearby device emitting a 24Hz sine wave noise and a camera recording at 24 frames per second.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Bonobos opens stores that don't sell anything.

- The Smithsonian gets Warner Bros. movie props no one else wants.

- Moving Image art fair sells first ever "Vine art" for $200.… Read more

Work to carry out what amounts to an electronic brain transplant aboard the Curiosity Mars rover -- a complex sequence of steps to switch operations to a backup flight computer -- is continuing this week amid ongoing analysis to figure out how to resolve memory corruption discovered last week in the rover's active computer.

The memory glitch interrupted science operations, forcing flight controllers to put the craft in a low-activity "safe mode" while the computer switch was implemented.

Richard Cook, the Mars Science Laboratory project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told CBS News … Read more

The magic of physics can turn the mundane into something marvelous. Mark French, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, designed a supersonic air-powered ping-pong ball cannon that shoots the lightweight object at speeds so fast I would consider the device a lethal weapon of science.

A ping-pong ball reportedly blasts out of the special cannon at speeds equivalent to Mach 1.23 -- nearly as fast as an F-16 fighter jet. As evidenced in the video below, the high-speed ball can put a clean hole through a plywood paddle, a VHS tape, and other objects. The amount of energy delivered by the Mach-speed ping-pong ball equals the force of a baseball thrown at 125 mph or a brick falling from several stories up.… Read more

Don't believe everything you hear -- a new science app reminds iPad users that our brains like to play tricks on us.

Created by the Exploratorium museum, Sound Uncovered replicates sound phenomena experiments, using examples that test what you thought you knew -- like why we can hear our car engines -- and introduces some sounds you may have never heard before.

"It's revealing the kink in the system, how your brain works," said Jean Cheng, project director of the online engagement group for the Exploratorium. The app's creators -- a mix of scientists and … Read more

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from California and safely boosted a new Earth-watching Landsat into a polar orbit today to kick off an $855 million mission. It's the latest chapter in a 40-year program to monitor the planet's resources, land use, and environmental changes.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission, or LDCM, got underway at 10:02 a.m. PT when the Atlas 5's Russian-designed RD-180 first-stage engine thundered to life and throttled up to full power with a rush of brilliant exhaust.

The towering 192-foot-tall rocket, generating some 860,000 pounds of thrust, … Read more