A young and foolish pilot wanted to sound cool on the aviation frequencies. So, this was his first time approaching a field during the nighttime. Instead of making any official requests to the tower, he said: “Guess who?”

The controller switched the field lights off and replied: “Guess where?”

John RoachNBC News

May 18, 2013 at 1:22 PM ET

Intel

Eesha Khare, 18, of Saratoga, Calif., received the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award of $50,000 for the invention of a tiny energy-storage device.

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student’s invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.

The fast-charging device is a so-called supercapacitor, a gizmo that can pack a lot of energy into a tiny space, charges quickly and holds its charge for a long time.

What’s more, it can last for 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with 1,000 cycles for conventional rechargeable batteries, according to Eesha Khare of Saratoga, Calif.

“My cellphone battery always dies,” she told NBC News when asked what inspired her to work on the energy-storage technology. Supercapacitors also allowed her to focus on her interest in nanochemistry — “really working at the nanoscale to make significant advances in many different fields.”

To date, she has used the supercapacitor to power a light-emitting diode, or LED. The invention’s future is even brighter. She sees it fitting inside cellphones and the other portable electronic devices that are proliferating in today’s world, freeing people and their gadgets for a longer time from reliance on electrical outlets.

“It is also flexible, so it can be used in rollup displays and clothing and fabric,” Khare added. “It has a lot of different applications and advantages over batteries in that sense.”

Khare’s invention won her the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, conducted this week in Phoenix, Ariz. For more information about the event and other prize winners, check out our earlier coverage.

 Teen’s invention could charge your phone in 20 seconds – NBC News.com.

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Travis Andrews

Sunday, May 19, 2013 – 2:34pm

Credit: U.S. Naval War College Museum

Long-time readers might have kept up on the various military usages for dolphins. They can wield pistols, and they can help hunt for underwater mines. Generally, they haven’t been used in any sort of Indiana Jones-like archeological digs, which makes the discovery made by two dolphins off the cost of Coronado, Calif. all that much more impressive.

The discovery: a Howell torpedo, a United States torpedo from the late 19th century, which was high military technology at the time.

When first created, the Howell torpedo had major implications for helping the United States be the dominant naval force in the world. The design was quickly outdated, though. Only about 50 were ever made, between 1870 and 1889, when the technology was surpassed.

The 11-foot long torpedo is made of brass and had a range of 400 yards while traveling at 25 knots. Not bad for the 1800s.

The dolphins themselves follow simple system for alerting the Navy of any found objects. They take a dive and, if they find nothing, touch the back of the boat with their snouts. If they find something, they touch the front of the boat.

Before these dolphins came along and found the relic, only one Howell was known to exist. It’s displayed at the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Wash. The newly discovered Howell will likely be displayed in a museum as well.

 Mine-seeking dolphins make historic discover | DVICE.

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by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on 15 May 2013

Kaput? NASA engineers are trying to fix the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft.

Credit: NASA

One of the most successful missions in NASA history may be coming to an end. NASA officials announced this afternoon that the Kepler spacecraft, which has found more than 2700 planetary candidates outside the solar system, has lost the ability to point in a specified direction due to the malfunctioning of one of its reaction wheels. The spacecraft has been put into safe mode while engineers attempt to figure out how to resolve the malfunction.

Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission completed its 3.5-year planned run last year, winning plaudits from planetary scientists. The spacecraft monitors some 150,000 sunlike stars in search of transiting planets. In November 2012, the mission began an extension of an additional 3.5 years, and officials were hopeful that it would continue beaming back data until 2016.

That now looks uncertain following the failure of the second of its four reaction wheels, officials announced at a telecom this afternoon. One of the wheels failed last year, and the spacecraft needs three reaction wheels to be pointed precisely. Mission managers learned of the latest failure earlier this week.

Engineers must either regain functionality of one of the two broken wheels or find another way of pointing the spacecraft as desired. “We are not down and out,” says Charles Sobeck, deputy project manager for Kepler at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The spacecraft is safe and stable. We’ll proceed with our investigation.”

Sobeck says that “the mission itself has been spectacularly successful. We have lots of data on the ground still to pore through. The next question is going to be what the future of the mission looks like.”

 Malfunction Could Mark the End of NASA’s Kepler Mission – ScienceInsider.

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What Professors Can Learn From ‘Hard Core’ MOOC Students

M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle

Jonathan Haber took a year off from work with the goal of completing four years’ worth of undergraduate study via massive open online courses.

By Jeffrey R. Young

If people who sit at their computers for tens of hours each week zapping virtual monsters are hard-core gamers, then massive open online courses have led to a similarly obsessed breed of online student: the hard-core learner.

Nearly 100 students using Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, have completed 20 or more courses. And more than 900 students have finished 10 or more courses, according to the company. That means taking several courses at a time, and racing through as many lecture videos and robot-graded assignments as possible to collect certificates that carry no official credit.

The term “MOOCs” is meant to parallel the video-game acronym “MMOGs,” or massively multiplayer online games—collaborative worlds, like World of Warcraft, that have attracted millions of devoted players around the world. So perhaps it is no surprise that some MOOC students are driven to win as many certificates as possible and treat online lectures as a consuming pastime that keeps them from going outside to hang out with friends.

I talked at length with a handful of hard-core MOOC students, with questions big and small about why, and how much, they felt they were learning.

Most are driven mainly by curiosity rather than the desire to show off their certificates to any potential employer, and none has paid for a verified certificate.

Consider Anna Nachesa, a 42-year-old single mother in a village near Amsterdam who logs on to MOOCs for several hours each night after dinner with her teenage kids. She has always found TV boring, she says, and for her, MOOCs replace reading books. She is a physicist by training, with a degree from Moscow State University, and she works as a software developer.

“This stuff is actually addictive,” she says. In some ways the lure is like Everest: Some want to climb it to see if they can. “The Dutch have the proverb ‘If you never shoot, you already missed,’” she says.

It’s unlikely that MOOC addiction will grow into a pressing social problem—after all, Coursera already claims more than 3.5 million students, so these junkies are a small minority. But most of the people I interviewed say that they are somewhat embarrassed about how much time they spend glued to their laptops watching professors lecture, and that they plan to cut down from, say, seven courses at time to more like four.

“I don’t think it’s very healthy” is the confession of Pavel Lepin, a 35-year-old in the Latvian city of Jelgava who has earned certificates in “about 30″ MOOCs, some from Coursera, some from Udacity, and some from edX. “My friends and co-workers are already making fun of me for being a Coursera addict.”

One reason Mr. Lepin takes so many MOOCs at once is that he’s afraid they might not last—or might not remain free—a concern shared by other students as well. “It boils down to what feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says. “I’m just afraid this thing might end sometime soon.”

4 Tips From MOOC Veterans

Colleges and professors teaching MOOCs or thinking about jumping in can learn a few things from these students, who have spent more time in these new virtual classrooms than just about anyone else on the planet.

Among their observations:

Clarity and organization are key. All six of the students said the quality of the MOOCs they’ve taken has varied widely. But a sure way to botch a MOOC comes down to one word: “ambiguity.” When assignments, expectations, or the mechanics of the course are unclear, forum discussions erupt with frustration and misinformation.

“Every little glitch is multiplied a thousandfold or 10,000-fold,” says Rich Seiter, a 47-year-old software engineer in Santa Cruz, Calif., who has completed 35 MOOCs. In the classroom setting that professors and students are used to—Mr. Seiter attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—such logistical issues can be quickly resolved, and many professors are accustomed to making up or adjusting the syllabus as they go along rather than having the whole semester planned before they start.

But Mr. Lepin argues that in MOOCs, the amount of planning, or lack of it, by the professor really shows. “There needs to be quite a bit of preparation,” he says. “Some were not ready in time for release.”

Professors are the stars. When the students talked about the MOOCs they’ve taken, they usually mentioned the professor first. They sometimes couldn’t remember the name of the university offering the course.

“It makes professors a kind of celebrity, and I think they deserve it,” says Ms. Nachesa. “It’s much better than having actors or other kinds be celebrities.”

Helen Weidner, a retired management analyst in Bastrop, Tex., who has completed 18 MOOCs, says she has been surprised by the level of adoration that MOOC students express in course-discussion forums. “Some of them wanted to make a T-shirt with the professor’s face and one of his quotes,” she says. Others said they were willing to donate money on crowdfunding sites to get a professor to offer additional courses.

Text still matters. When the only materials are lecture videos, it can be hard to go back and study for quizzes or exams, several of the students say. Since the videos aren’t searchable in most MOOCs, students aren’t sure where in the video to look for a given concept they are reviewing.

“I would really love that every course have some comparative set of reading materials,” says Ms. Nachesa, who notes that it is faster to skim through text than video.

Mr. Seiter likes it when professors make copies of their slides available for download, so he can print them out and take notes on them while he watches the lecture videos.

Many professors who teach MOOCs have been reluctant to require a textbook that would cost students money, and most of the students I talked with have skipped buying optional textbooks. But even transcripts of lectures could help, they say.

Passion matters most. Not all the professors are great on camera, according to the students. But even those whose performances are occasionally cringeworthy end up winning students’ hearts if the professors are clearly excited about the subject matter.

“There’s one thing that makes a great course—it’s passion,” says Mr. Lepin. It is a sentiment that most everyone I spoke with seems to share.

MOOC vs. Mainstream

Opinions are mixed on the biggest question: Are MOOC students learning as much as they would in traditional courses?

At least one hard-core learner is focused on that question. The student is Jonathan Haber, a 51-year-old who has taken a year off from his job in publishing to try to get an entire four years’ worth of college from MOOCs and other free online materials. He is blogging about his experience along the way.

Mr. Haber will have finished 16 MOOCs by June, out of his goal of 32, and he says he believes that in courses for which he does all the assignments and watches all the videos, he is learning as much as he remembers learning while he was earning his bachelor’s degree, at Wesleyan University.

Mr. Seiter agrees that it as possible to learn as much online as in a traditional course, but that to do so usually requires doing optional readings, which most MOOCers skip.

And he notes that the workload of MOOCs varies greatly, just as it does in in-person classes. He admits that he often does minimal work on the essays he submits in courses that require them, and that based on the essays he has seen in peer grading, other students seem to be doing the same.

“The commitment level is lower” in free classes, he says. “Work that’s submitted is not always the student’s best work.”

Markus Lauer, a 32-year-old Ph.D. student at Saarland University, in Germany, who has completed more than 28 MOOCs through Coursera, says the online courses have been a great way for him to get a quick introduction to new fields in a way books usually can’t provide.

But to really learn any of those subjects in depth, he says, he’d have to hit the books in a more traditional way.

“If you want to become an expert in the field,” he says, “I think you need the book.”

 What Professors Can Learn From ‘Hard Core’ MOOC Students – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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By Bryce Covert on May 20, 2013 at 12:00 pm

Credit: Associated Press

The highest Powerball jackpot in history, $590.5 million, is waiting to be claimed by the winner in the small town of Zephyrhills, Florida. While the lucky winner may feel a sense of exhilaration, there can be huge down sides of the lottery for those who play, those who win, and the state governments that rely on the revenues.

With odds stacked sky high against actually winning a jackpot, lottery players lose an average of 47 cents on the dollar for each ticket. With such low payouts, tickets act as an implicit tax of 38 percent.

Yet poor people are far more likely to buy tickets than their wealthier counterparts. They spend a larger percentage of their income on the lottery, and many studies of state lotteries have found that low-income Americans account for most of the sales and that sales are highest in the poorest areas. One study found that a reason for this is that “lotteries set off a vicious cycle that not only exploits low-income individuals’ desires to escape poverty but also directly prevents them from improving upon their financial situations.” The loss in income of buying tickets that provide no reward is harder to bear on a slim budget.

Those who win may not be much better off, however. The National Endowment for Financial Education estimates that as much as 70 percent of those who land sudden windfalls lose the money within several years. Lottery winnings have led some to drugs, bankruptcy, and family fractures.

The revenues from lottery tickets act as a regressive tax because states use them to fund many public services, such as education. Lotteries netted 11 states more revenue than their corporate income tax in in 2009. But states don’t fare well either in the long run. While states that have lotteries increased per-capita spending on education at first, after some time they ended up decreasing overall spending, while states without them increased investment. One study found that “nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states.” In fact, lottery revenues may not end up increasing funds and could actually increase budget imbalances. There are only so many tickets that a state’s population can buy, making it a short or medium term fix but not a long term source of revenue.

The chances of winning the Powerball jackpot were very low at just 1 in 175.2 million. One person has likely won it and will now face the challenges of managing a huge influx of new money. The rest of the residents and the state’s revenues are not likely to fare as well.

 How Lotteries Are Bad For Players, Winners, And States.

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