Recommended Podcasts

Check out this list of podcasts for gifted kids

Sandcastle holds up a car - mechanically stabilized sand!

Reinforce loose dirt with some stiff material and it can hold a car, form a freeway on-ramp, or be the wall of a building! Great engineering video.

Mercury’s Transit

Mercury passes directly across the sun for the first time in ten years. Look how tiny it is!

Triple Scorpions!

Three short videos on how scorpions evolved, scorpion moms, and glowing scorpions. I love the scorpion expert lady!

Marble Mountain X-Treme!

An 2.4-metre-tall marble mountain! ‘nuf said.

A huge marble machine bolts together 32 possible paths for the 250-300 steel marbles that it’s made for. Measuring 3.7 by 2.4 meters, and standing 2.4 metres tall, the kinetic sculpture takes about an hour to set up or take down.

Have you got a marbles at home just waiting for your take on this???

I cannot believe they pulled this off: 

Space X lands a rocket back on earth after it completes a mission in space! 

Check out the previous (failed) attempt along with this week's success

If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again!

Free online animation course!

This is BIG 

- a free online course from Khan Academy and Pixar Studios...

Check out the video below!

There’s no need to register for the course, nor a requirement to watch the lessons in order — just head to their site and start exploring!

Love to Build? Check this out!

 The Ultimate Marble Run

Makes Music with 2,000 Marbles

Wintergatan Marble Machine (video link here), a hand-cranked music box loaded with instruments including a circuit of 2,000 cascading steel marbles.The marbles are moved internally through the machine using funnels, pulleys, and tubes.

Unique Words From Other Languages

Looking to extend your vocab?

Try Words without an English equivalent

e.g.Yūgen (Japanese): gives a name to a mood in which one feels that the universe as a whole possesses a mysterious, elusive, but real, beauty. Moonlight, snow on distant mountains, birds flying very high in the evening sky and watching the sun rise over the ocean all feed this sensibility. 

Science: Master Classes

Immerse yourself in the World of Science

• Science Unplugged a series of short videos that offer answers to questions about science

•  “Master Classes” which are short classes about various subjects (mostly in physics) that take a few hours to complete.  Classes are free but you will need to register for this site to access them.  Check with your parents first.

The current roster of lectures is impressive: MIT’s Alan Guth teaches Inflationary Cosmology; U. Chicago’s Michael Turner (who coined the term “dark energy”) presents the Dark Side of the Universe; Stanford’s Andrei Linde takes you into the Multiverse; and Caltech’s Maria Spiropulu probes Nature’s Constituents, to name a few Master Classes. Meanwhile Brian Greene currently teaches two of the university courses: “Special Relativity: A Math-Based Introduction” and (highlighted above) “Space, Time and Einstein: A Conceptual Tour of Special Relativity.”

Virtual Technology in Sport

Click here to find out how the NFL uses technology to improve the viewer's experience.

World's Largest Rubik's Cube

British puzzle maker and collector Tony Fisher might have made the largest functional 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube in the world. 

It measures 1.56 meters (5.11 foot) on each side, weighs 100 kilos (220 lbs), and can be solved by one person alone.Watch as he rolls it out and proceeds to meticulously turn each section to prove that it works like a standard, hand-held twisty puzzle. He explains:

“I am fascinated by the extremes in life and things that make me go wow!" Tony Fisher