geekosystem

Cross country road trips and voyages to outer space have at least one thing in common -- bringing along baggage is a hassle. Researchers working to minimize the cargo that space travelers will need to carry in the future are, quite naturally, looking to 3D printing as a solution. After all, why bring a tool box along when you can just print the contents of one as needed? A team of materials scientists at Washington State University is taking that tactic a step further, though, using material found in moon rocks in a 3D printer -- an advance that could one day mean that if you need a screwdriver on the moon, you can scoop up a handful of dust and print one at a moment's notice.

You might not think that Google's PageRank algorithm, or the Internet at large for that matter, would have much to do with chemistry besides maybe helping you to find some chemistry content. In actuality, the two are far more similar than you might imagine. Google's PageRank indexes webpages by the way they cohere to each other through hyperlinks and chemistry is concerned with the way molecules cohere through chemical bonds. Not that different, right? That's what Aurora Clark, associate professor of Chemistry at Washington State University thinks, which is why she's using PageRank as a jumping off point for moleculaRnetworks, a sort of chemistry emulator.

Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies co-wrote an article entitled "To Boldly Go" suggesting that a one-way trip to Mars would be more efficient than a roundtrip, and they believe the one-way explorations could take place in around twenty years.

An unknown Washington State University student took control of two-dozen in-class projector units this November 5th, causing them to play a pre-recorded spoof of the televised speech given by the protagonist/antagonist/terrorist/anarchist character V of the movie V for Vendetta, exhorting his fellow students to rise up a year hence against a terrible threat encroaching on their school: Squirrels. (England, I'd like to apologize on behalf of America for the comical extent to which we have misinterpreted your holiday about anti-Catholicism and the defeat of violent fringe elements.)