The Curiosity Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) captured the rover's descent to the surface of the Red Planet, as it survived a potentially perilous landing dubbed the 'seven minutes of terror,' capping a decade of work by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (more commonly known as JPL) in California.

The world was watching as Curiosity, NASA's latest contribution to the Martian landscape, landed at 10:32 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 near the foot of a three-mile tall mountain inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in diameter.

First-person updates on NASA's official @MarsCuriosity Twitter account include the historic touchdown tweet — "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL” — which has been retweeted to date more than 71,000 times.Continue reading...

Just because rapper Ludacris has let loose on such NSFW songs as “Move Bitch” and “Get the F--- Back” doesn’t mean the guy is not safe for your family. In fact, the 34-year-old native of Champagne, Illinois, would like to be part of your family’s life if you’ve got young kids.

The man who is known as Chris Bridges in the rest of his life is relaunching his interactive website for kids, karmasworld.com, that he designed with his 10-year-old daughter, Karma. The site will feature 11 new tunes and artwork from Bridges. 

The focus of the website is teaching elementary-school kids “about math, science and geography as well as ethical and social issues like manners, honesty and kindness, through original songs, games and stories,” a press release states.Continue reading...

The new IBM THINK app for Apple iPad and Android tablets is inspired by scientific advances over the centuries, combining history and technology in an "innovation time machine." It’s a virtual timeline of images and historical anecdotes ranging from the history of ancient measurement to modern metrics of atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope, to the Wright Brothers' prototype airplane in 1903 through modern airline mechanical parts simulations and the history of metal detectors.

“Through thousands of images and historical anecdotes, IBM THINK brings to life stories of the history of progress, from space exploration to weather prediction and medical advances,” blogs IBM's head of design, Lee Green. “It documents the roots of Big Data, from early charts and scales to microscopes and telescopes, from RFID chips and biomedical sensors in clothing to breath-sensor diabetes detectors. Given its strong educational bent, the app will even be used to create lesson plans for middle school students later this year.”Continue reading...

Teaching Kids to CARE, a philanthropic initiative from DoubleTree by Hilton hotels, has reached 5 million grade school students to engender values and behaviors of sustainable change for more than a decade. This week it launched a new website in a bid to create a global online community.

The program pairs team members from DoubleTree properties with local schools in more than 200 communities and now, a refreshed Teaching Kids to CARE program is available online for teachers, parents and students. DoubleTree’s partners include The Arbor Day Foundation and The Woodland Trust. 

At its core are five thematic lesson plans developed in line with U.S. National Education Standards about small actions that make a difference for the planet, the positive impact of trees on the environment, and the importance of the “three Rs” – reducing, reusing and recycling. Lesson plans are available in two versions, targeted for students in grades K – 2, and grades 3 – 5.Continue reading...

New York's Parsons The New School for Design, PPR Group’s Luxury and Sport & Lifestyle premium brands, and The Fancy website have partnered so that Parsons students can vie for an internship with one of PPR's stable of 16 luxury brands. Lucky (meaning talented) Parsons students will be able to intern at PPR-repped brands including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Brioni, Stella McCartney, Sergio Rossi, Boucheron, Girard-Perregaux, JeanRichard, PUMA, Volcom, Cobra Electric and Tretorn.

Open to 2012 seniors of Parsons BFA Fashion Design program, the theme of the competitions is “Empowering Imagination” and students’ designs will be featured on TheFancy.com with winners showcased at Barney’s New York Madison Avenue store. The internship will run for 1 or 2 months in Paris, London, New York, Boston, Rome or Milan and an expense-paid internship of up to $10,000 with the PPR brand of their choice.

“Partnering with PPR and The Fancy will provide our students with an international perspective, thus positioning them as design thinkers poised to lead fashion globally,” said Simon Collins, Dean of the School of Fashion at Parsons, above.Continue reading...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University are joining the ranks of elite universities jumping into the burgeoning MOOCs — massively open online courses — business. The schools' new partnership, dubbed edX, is also spurring the boom in online video education.

Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan recently partnered in Coursera, a commercial company with $16 million in venture capital. 

Beyond academia, the just announced TED-ED website offers customizable tools for educators, while Khan Academy has helped countless students, teachers and parents with its free treasure trove of online videos, offering more than 3,000 tuturials on everything from math to physics.Continue reading...

Pearson Education, the educational publishing brand, is under fire following a botched series of standardized exam questions now roiling public schools across New York State — and it's only year one of a five-year, $32 million contract between the publisher and the state.

As Gail Collins opined in Sunday's New York Times, it wasn't just the weirdness of the questions — more on that in a moment — but the debate over the commercialization of education and the control of a single brand, in this case Pearson, over kids' futures. Collins wrote, "We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, for whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a five-year testing contract with Texas that’s costing the state taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars."Continue reading...

The newly-launched TED-ED website is TED’s latest delivery on its brand promise of “Ideas Worth Spreading;” a dynamic site with customizable tools for educators.

Enhancing the TED-Ed YouTube channel launched in March whose short videos have garnered over 2.5 million views, this latest platform lets teachers tailor TED-Ed videos with follow-up questions and assignments.

Each short video (three to eight minutes) includes multiple choice quizzes, open-ended questions and a ‘Dig Deeper’ section. When a student answers incorrectly, a ‘Video Hint’ directs them to the point in the video with the correct answer. Teachers can browse content by subject with videos mapped via tagging to curricula taught in schools and access correlative materials that augment with the learning level.Continue reading...