Boston Dynamics have been working on incredible robotics technology.  This one runs through the forest.  To be fair, it runs like a toddler needing to use the restroom...for now.  But as the technology progresses, it will lose the tether & will run around like a teenager.  Yikes!
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"...presentation featured some video that we’d never seen before as well as tantalizing hints of what Boston Dynamics has been working on.

Here’s the clip that’s been going around, with Raibert showing some footage of Spot (an agile autonomous quadruped) opening a door with a manipulator mounted on it’s um, face (not nearly as scary as this), followed by ATLAS doing some dynamic walking outside, which is definitely new..."

Read more @ IEEE Spectrum

"The capacity of our digital storage devices has skyrocketed in recent years. But there’s one storage medium that still kicks the crap out of our state-of-the-art solid state, and humans didn’t invent it. It’s called DNA.

A team of scientists is trying to figure out whether the double-helix molecules that encode every plant, animal and microbe on planet Earth can be used to..."

Read more @ Gizmodo

Our advances in technology have allowed us to dream about a fusion plant.  Can this be another "power" industry that our students will help develop?
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"It’s an old joke that many fusion scientists have grown tired of hearing: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away — and always will be.

But now, finally, the joke may no longer be true: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming..."

Read more @ MIT News

"Gravity is a constant for all organisms on Earth. It acts on every aspect of our physiology, behavior and development – no matter what you are, you evolved in an environment where gravity roots us firmly to the ground.

But what happens if you’re removed from that familiar environment and placed into a situation outside your evolutionary experience? That’s exactly the question we ask every day of the plants we grow in our laboratory. They start out here in our earthbound lab, but they’re on their way to outer space. What could be a more novel environment for a plant than the zero-gravity conditions of spaceflight?..."


Read more @ The Conversation

At Milpitas Unified, we're at the beginning phases of incorporating 3D printing into our learning process.  One of 3D printing pain points is the removal of support material.  This solves that issue.

Explore more @ Cubify

We wonder which of our students will discover bodies around our solar system and beyond!
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"On the 23rd and 24th of January, 1930, a young astronomer working in Flagstaff, Arizona, scanned a small patch of the night sky. He was taking pictures of star positions, looking for anomalies that would signal movement somewhere at the edge of the solar system. He took the pictures then set them aside, not realizing that he’d found exactly what he was looking for..."

Read more @ io9

Although this is years away for public schools (due to cost), we can't wait to introduce and share this type of technology with our students.

Love the quote from this video:

"Anytime you change the way that you see things, it changes the way that you understand them.  As soon as you can change someone's understanding, then they can change the way that they see the world."

Of course, there is the "budget" way of doing this as well:

If you ever wanted an inside view on Hackathons, this is a good read.  Milpitas students have participated in several Hackathons around Silicon Valley.
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"On the third day, half the people on the Startup Bus got motion sick. We hadn’t slept for two or three nights, the roads through the Smoky Mountains were perilously curved, the tour bus was traveling at top speed, and we had all been staring at our laptop screens for far too long.

Someone on my team bumped the table where we sat and it collapsed on our laps for the third or maybe 10th time that day. Alicia Hurst, my team’s designer, grabbed her computer before it fell, but her giant water bottle hit the floor. Again. Emma Pinkerton, our business strategist, held up the table while I scrambled to..."

Read more @ The Atlantic

Imagine a world when we will no longer worry about blood supply - especially in emergency transfusions and/during catastrophic events.  
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"The first attempt at giving human volunteers “synthetic blood” made in a laboratory for the first time will take place within the next two years, the NHS has announced.

A long-awaited clinical trial of artificial red blood cells will occur before 2017, NHS scientists said. The blood is made from stem cells extracted from either the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies or the blood of adult donors.

The trial, thought to be a world first, will involve small transfusions of a few teaspoons of synthetic blood to test for..."

Read more @ The Independent