Imagine the utility of these non tin-man robots. Some of our students will be working with this technology in the future.

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"Microscale soft-robots hold great promise as safe handlers of delicate micro-objects but their wider adoption requires micro-actuators with greater efficiency and ease-of-fabrication. Here we present an elastomeric microtube-based pneumatic actuator that can be extended into a microrobotic tentacle. We establish..."

Read on at Nature

Wonderful infographic if you're planning a trip by air.
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FiveThirtyEight analyzed 6 million flights to figure out which airports, airlines and routes are most likely to get you there on time and which ones will leave you waiting.

Find your fastest route @ FiveThirtyEight

"Banks are a riddle wrapped up in an enigma. We all kind of know that they do stuff with money we don’t understand, while the last crisis left a feeling of deep mistrust and confusion. We try to shed a bit of light onto the banking system. Why were banks invented, why did they cause the last crisis and are there alternatives?" 
read more @ Kurz Gesagt

Libby Nelson of Vox released the video below that helps us understand the new way Common Core does math.  As our students venture into new ways of learning in Milpitas Unified, students are taught the "traditional" way of learning math in addition to approaches that will help them understand how and why math problems work called "number sense".

As a guest today in my daughter’s second-grade classroom, full of math-enthusiastic seven-and-eight-year-old girls, I led a mathematical investigation of graph coloring, chromatic numbers, map coloring and Eulerian paths and circuits. I brought in a pile of sample graphs I had prepared, and all the girls made up their own graphs and maps to challenge each other. By the end each child had compiled a mathematical “coloring book” containing the results of their explorations.  Let me tell you a little about what we did.

We began with vertex coloring, where one colors the vertices of a graph in such a way that adjacent vertices get different colors. We started with some easy examples, and then moved on to more complicated graphs, which they attacked.

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