August

• ·   What if you got a whole bunch of those t-rex costumes and had a race?

  • ·   Related: watch this camel gobble down prickly pair cactus with six-inch-needles. Yes, eating those spikes is incredible, but notice how agile the camel's lips are! In fact, they are prehensile!!

• ·   How few strokes of a brush does it take to give the impression of a human portrait? Love these thick, impressionist paintings from Joseph Lee.

  • Wow. A robot draws swirly portraits, building up using the CMYK process — that’s cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

• ·   Watch Space X‘s Falcon 9 tumble back to earth set to Strauss' The Blue Danube (which people of a certain age will associate with 2001).

July

• I’m Dreaming of a Blue Sunset! The Mars Rover, Opportunity, captures a Martian sunset. So… why is the sunset blue?

• Here are four classic works of art recreated with very few Lego. How few “pixels” can we use while keeping the original work recognizable? And how many of the original works can your students recognize?

  • • Still Lego, but not simple at all, here's a machine that folds and launches paper airplanes. (How many of the speeches can your students recognize?)

• This music video was created using strings connected to pins filmed in stop motion. Check out the growing number of pinholes!

• The first known photo of a human is from 1838, although the man’s appearance is accidental! He happened to stand still (getting his shoes shined) for the ten minutes it took to expose the film!! What a coincidence. You can make the same type of camera Daguerre used with a Pringles can​ 

June

• ·   Conveyer belts that go every which way.

• ·   It's a pumpkin seed harvest machine.

• ·   Adam Hillman makes food pattern arrangements that boggle my brain.

• ·   A classic Jerry Lewis typewriter gag. I love opportunities to share classics with students.

• ·   NASA’s DART slams into an asteroid! DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test and uses one asteroid to knock another asteroid off course. More info here.

May

·   A time-lapse of the shortest day in Fairbanks, Alaska – filmed from 11:06 am to 2:59 pm.

·   A giant pumpkin, from seed to 600kg.

·   Ridiculous things you can do with a slinky! (This reminds me of the 2010 Yo Yo Craze at my school)

·   Let’s play Beethoven’s 9th… on a bunch of tools.

·   A starfish enjoying a walk on the beach!

April

·   When temperatures drop, train tracks shrink. And that will cause problems. So, in Chicago, officials set railroad tracks on fire for safety!

·   ​This machine takes a log, strips off the bark, and then peels off individual sheets of veneer from the clean log.

·   I dare you not to chuckle at these four robotic slide whistles performing together. You can play them live with the attached keyboard! There are several performances interspersed with the creator explaining how it was made.

·   There's a bridge in Durham, North Carolina with a clearance of just 11' 8". They call it The Can Opener. You can see why. They raised it 8 more inches. But that was not quite enough space for this recycling truck. There's a whole website devoted to this particular overpass!