Of Bots and Bugs

Janine Benyus will be a guest lecturer in Evolved to Fit: Biomimicry in the Built World

for MIT's Goldstein Lecture Series, April 5th at 6:30pm at MIT Room 10-250.

Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry : Innovation Inspired by Nature, is President of the The Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit organization whose mission is to naturalize biomimicry in the culture by promoting the transfer of ideas, designs, and strategies from biology to sustainable human systems design. See Benyus's TED Talk here.

Interested in biomimicry? 

Come to the Science Carnival and check out MIT Lincoln Laboratory's booth featuring:  

Busy busy bees... we're 22 days away.

Hi, folks!  Sorry about the hiatus on the CSF countdown.  Things are really getting crazy with prep for the festival!

Check out our Event Index!  Want to get involved?  Volunteer with us by taking photos at events, spreading the word about the 2012 festival, continuing the CSF countdown here!

A few tidbits:

• Earth Hour is just around the corner
• One of our lovely Curiosity Challenge-tackling classes has a website of their entries.  Check it out!
• Everyone has a question about Climate Change.  What's Your #climatequestion? Submit it today.

If you haven't pre-registered for events yet - here is my current list of the CSF events you need to pre-register for:

Countdown Catch-up: Your Career

At the start of your career?  Looking for a change?  Not sure what’s out there for you?  The Festival’s got you covered. 

Check out these career search events!

Coolest Teacher, Solar Flares, Trebuchets, Oh My

So, one incredibly cool piece of local (teacher) news to share is about Boston Latin School's 8th grade teacher and adviser to BLS Youth CAN (Boston Latin School Youth Climate Action Network).  Not only is BLS Youth CAN participating in the Cambridge Science Festival's Ideas Challenge, they will also be producing a mural for David Breashear's Rivers of Ice symposium for the Festival on Saturday, April 21.  But this isn't about Youth CAN (in this post, anyway).  

Cate Arnold

  
         

This is about their teacher adviser, Cate Arnold, who is currently on a trip of a lifetime to Antarctica on Expedition 2041 as a “Coolest Teacher in The World".  What a crazy experience that must be!  Check out the daily blog posts by members of the expedition from all over the world.






Moving on to some space news that makes "local" take on a new meaning.  On Tuesday, the Sun's surface had some serious solar storms, throwing a wave of charged particles - a coronal mass ejection (CME) - just past Earth.  Quick geography lesson: the moon is about 400,000 km away from Earth.  The Apollo mission made it to the moon after 3 days in space.  The Sun is about 400 times further away from us than the moon.

Credit: NASA

So these charged particles are moving fast, far, and you have to wonder what the effects may be.  Now, it's been a few days and the response was mostly concern for satellites and potential for some great Northern Lights.  But the Sun is settling back into a very active period of it's 11-year-cycle, to peak in 2013.  Some exciting sights ahead for the whole Earth community!  Look out for the CSF Star Party on Saturday, April 28th to learn more about our neighborhood of the universe!

The festival won't be taking you into a solar storm or to the last wilderness continent on Earth, but we would like to engage you in some new experiences (or classic standbys)!  And, we are now 42 days away from the 2012 CSF! And our event of the day...