The University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomographic Facility (UTCT) has created an online biological visualization library called DigiMorph, which contains X-ray computer tomographic (X-ray CT) scans of living and extinct vertebrates and invertebrates contributed by the facility and more than 80 collaborating international researchers. The UTCT facility is used by researchers all over the country to scan the internal structure of rocks, meteorites, fossils, and modern organisms at macro- and microscopic scales. The DigiMorph homepage presents recent additions to the biological collection including, most recently, an X-ray CT-scan of the ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct but recently spotted in Arkansas. DigiMorph made the best of an old mounted specimen of an ivory-billed woodpecker by imaging it inside and out to produce the figure at right. The specimen shown here was scanned to create 339 "slices" of the bird, each slice being 0.2 mm thick. The site contains fast links to images of alligators, dinosaurs, and other cool images.

You've probably heard about it by now, or now, or now, or maybe now. Does it really matter? MIT student Amal Dorai is eternally famous as the mastermind behind the Time Traveler Convention, held on the MIT campus last Saturday evening, May 7. What is less well known is that the idea itself was inspired by the comic strip Cat and Girl, which just goes to show that scientific inspiration can come from anywhere. Who knows? Maybe the strip itself was a tip from... oh, nevermind. If you missed the convention, don't worry; you can always go back. The details on the convention are here: May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC), East Campus Courtyard, MIT, 42:21:36.025N, 71:05:16.332W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees).

Jack Sheldon, the vocalist of the popular Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, "Conjunction Junction" and "I'm Just A Bill", has a website dedicated to his oldies. "Conjunction Junction" first aired in 1973 and "I'm Just A Bill" aired in 1975. Schoolhouse Rock cartoons have been revived on ABC and play on Saturday mornings at approximately 10:56am and 11:26am. According to Sheldon's website, the Schoolhouse Rock series was created by the co-owner of the advertising agency Phil Kimmelman and Associates "to help his son overcome school difficulties in a new and fun way." The site has links to the songs and Quicktime videos.

Remember the "I'm Just a Bill" cartoons? (Do they still play those anymore?) Now Hitachi has come up with a Flash animation called "Get Perpendicular" complete with a dancing bit--that looks a lot like Mr. Bill--and a talking iPod. In the video, the talking iPod teaches the bit about the superparamagnetic effect and how more bits can fit on a hard drive by making them "get perpendicular." Hitachi released the cartoon with the announcement in March that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has achieved the highest areal density to date (230 Gb per square inch) using perpendicular recording technology. The cartoon explains how this is done, in a super-entertaining way that even a 5 year-old can understand. What does this mean for the iPod? In the next 5-7 years, according to the Hitachi website, a 60 Gb one-inch microdrive could be available for portable media devices, allowing you to store even more songs, or eventually movies, on your iPod. What do you think that little photo feature on the iPod is for, anyway? It ain't just for baby pictures....

Spiked magazine polled over 250 scientists with the question, "If you could teach the world just one thing about science, what would it be?" The survey was conducted to mark the 2005 World Year of Physics, which celebrates Einstein's "miraculous year" in 1905 in which he developed the theory of special relativity. The answers covered many areas of science, only a few actually related to Einstein's theories. "The scientific principle that I wish everyone understood," said Richard Dawkins (pictured right), from the University of Oxford, "is Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of 'design'." Gerald Jay Sussman of MIT, responded with a quote from Galileo, "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." The originator of the survey, Alom Shaha, has made four films containing interviews with the scientists as they explain their "most important lesson."

Launched in July 2004, NASA's Aura satellite program is providing the first-ever direct global measurements of ozone, air quality, and climate change on a daily basis. The project is helping scientists monitor pollution production and transport over thousands of miles across the globe, such as dust and pollution travelling from China to California, and a sulfur dioxide plume erupting from the Manam Volcano in New Guinea. Aura is third in a line of Earth Observing System satellites, following Terra and Aqua, that are designed to study the Earth's land, water, and atmosphere. Aura penetrates deeper into the Earth's atmosphere than previous satellites, reaching the Earth's troposphere that extends from the ground to about 10 km. NASA has designed a program to validate Aura's observations using ground-based, balloon, aircraft, and other satellite measurements. Click here to see a Flash movie about Aura's mission to study climate change.

At the 2005 National Education Summit on High Schools, Bill Gates addressed the nation's governors, chief executives, and education leaders with the pronouncement that "our high schools even when theyre working exactly as designed cannot teach our kids what they need to know today." "When I compare our high schools to what I see when Im traveling abroad," said Gates, "I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.In math and science, our 4th graders are among the top students in the world. By 8th grade, theyre in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations." Gates brought up more statistics: "In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelors degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering." The question is, what is anyone doing about it? For starters, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is investing millions of dollars into American schools with the goals of raising high school graduation rates and preparing all students for college and work though a range of programs. You can read Gates' speech here and find out more about the educational programs on the Gates Foundation website.

Nanoscience spans a range of disciplines including chemistry, mathematics, physics, biology, and medicine. Recognizing the need to bring researchers from these fields together, the Universities of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara have joined to create the California NanoSystems Institute. The goals of the institute are to create a multidisciplinary center for nanosystems research and development, and to develop commercial applications of nanosystems technology. The new CNSI building, designed by Rafael Vinoly Architects, is expected to be completed by December 2005 on the UCLA campus and will include an Integrated Molecular Systems Facility (INMOS) designed for "linking top-down semiconductor fabrication with biologically and chemically assembled molecular materials." The new center will eventually offer graduate degrees in nanosystems research and technology. This video provides an introduction to the center and its mission.

This four part special Strange Days on Planet Earth tracks how small changes in the environment have huge impacts. The series begins with Invaders, which traces the effects of insect migration into habitats that are free of natural predators. Asian termites take over New Orleans. Alian hyacinth plants in Uganda create a health threat by leading to the spread of the tropical disease schistosomiasis through a chain of ecological events. Actor/writer/director Edward Norton lends a little Hollywood charm as host of the series, which airs this week in most cities. The Strange Days website contains background information and links to related science sites and resources. Click here to find out when it's playing in your area.

For such a short video, Eric Schulman's History of the Universe in 60 Seconds or Less has a rather long history. Dr. Schulman, who sits on the Editorial Board of the Annals of Improbable Research (home of the Ig Nobel Prize), first performed a 200-word written article about the history of the universe at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony in 1997. The article was later expanded ever so slightly into the book A Briefer History of Time. Now the National Science Foundation has posted a video of Dr. Schulman performing the short talk on their website. Catch it if you have a minute ... or less.

Genetic studies suggest that humans originated from a common ancestor in Africa 60,000 years ago and then migrated along various routes to create the diverse global population that exists today. Tracing our roots and migratory paths back to their origins, however, is not a simple task. National Geographic has teamed with IBM, geneticist Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation to create the Genographic Project, a five-year research project that will map human migration over tens of thousands of years. Researchers will track specific "markers of descent" carried in DNA and use it to probe questions about deep human ancestry and historical human migration paths. The public is being invited to participate in this worldwide research program by purchasing Genographic Project participation kits with which to collect a DNA sample using a cheek swab that is then mailed to the project center, which will perform DNA analysis and make the results available to each participant through the project website. The results are kept private and anonymous by tracking the kit number, not individual names or other identifying information. Funds from sales of the participation kits will support the costs of testing and analysis as well as further research. Major technological support for the Genographic Project is being provided by IBM and IBM's Computational Biology Center.

How would you model human social interactions? What are the essential elements of human interactions? We think about a person across the room. We probe perhaps by studying the way they are dressed or by asking our friends about the person. We connect by talking to the person and making eye contact. Then we disconnect if and when we decide we no longer want contact with that person. With essential basic elements such as these, Ebon Fisher has created the Zoacodes, which collectively exist within The Nervepool, an attempt to model human social interactions in a language of networks, similar to telecommunication networks. In the early 1990s Fisher established "community-based media rituals" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in which to study human relations. Fisher's work seems to cross the bounaries between art, science, philosophy, and multimedia entertainment. But are these social scientific experiments or multimedia art parties? "Like much of the party culture, they tend to flirt with classic values of peace and love," says Fisher. "But not surprisingly, most traditional religions and cultures share these values as well."

Some enterprising graduate students at MIT with too much time on their hands have created SCIgen, an automatic computer science paper generator. Motivated by frequent e-mail requests (i.e., spam) for papers to dubious international science conferences with no real scientific affiliation, mission, or - it appears - standards, the students created SCIgen to produce equally dubious conference papers. The randomly generated papers include all of the essential elements of an academic research paper including graphs, figures, and citations. In fact, a SCIgen paper was recently accepted to the WMSCI 2005 conference, which "is a forum for focusing into specific disciplinary research, as well as for multi, inter and trans-disciplinary studies and projects. One of its aims is to relate disciplines fostering analogical thinking and, hence, producing input to the logical thinking," which is another way of saying that the conference isn't about anything in particular. Lacking travel funds to attend the conference, the students raised a little over $2000 in donations in 72 hours over the internet.

After grounding the Space Shuttle fleet for two years since the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia, NASA is preparing Space Shuttle Discovery for a launch window of May 15 to June 1. The Return to Flight Mission crew of seven astronauts will fly to the International Space Station to test new shuttle safety procedures and to bring sorely needed equipment and supplies to the space station. The Return to Flight website contains numerous multimedia features, including an introductory video and various videos that follow the preparation phases of the mission.

Next to Einstein, Richard Feynman is one of the best known and most photographed physicists of the 20th century. His memoirs are hugely popular with science aficionados and his "Feynman Lectures on Physics" are a must-have for budding physicists. Now a new book of personal letters written by him and edited by his daughter is being released by Basic Books entitled "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman." Feynman is best known for his work in quantum physics, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, working on the Manhattan Project, and for determining the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. The book is being promoted with a book tour by his daughter as well as panel discussions with prominent physicists who knew Feynman in major cities around the country. The Basic Feynman website contains various memorabilia including his Nobel Prize Speech and video clips of interviews.