Solar Impulse, a plane whose makers hope will one day be able to fly for up to a day using only the Sun’s energy, took off from Switzerland on a 24-hour test flight.

The plane, which has 12,000 solar cells, is designed to receive and store solar energy in its batteries. Andrea Borschberg is the sole pilot, and the co-leader of the project is Bertrand Piccard, who gave the world the first nonstop circumnavigation of the earth by balloon, in 1999.

Borschberg will be flying the plane at an altitude of 27,900 feet until midnight, when he will lower the plane to 4,920 feet and see how far the plane can go on the power stored in the batteries.

That the plane got off the ground at all was proof of the ground crew’s dedication. Delays having to do equipment had stymied progress in recent days and weeks.

Organizers say the ultimate goal is for the plane to some day fly around the world using only solar power.

Click here to read more about the company and the machine. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

Terrafugia, accompany based in Woburn, Mass., has been granted a special weight limit exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration for the Transition, “the flying car.”

The vehicle is a melding of automobile and airplane technology that features fold-up wings on the side of a largish car. The wings unfold quickly, the company says, but drivers will still need a runway to get off the ground.

What is this machine of the future?

It’s a car: It has front-wheel drive, seats two, and allows entry just like an automobile. It has a fuel tank of 20 gallons and gets 30 miles to the gallon. With a top speed of 65 mph, it can compete with many commuter vehicles.

It’s a plane: It can cruise at up to 115 mph. In the air, it burns 5 gallons an hour.

The Transition is on the tall side. With the wings folded up and the driver in car mode, the vehicle is 6 feet, 9 inches tall. That’s only six inches taller than the plane itself. The length is similar to longer trucks: 18 feet, 19 inches in auto mode and 19 feet, 2 inches in plane mode. The wingspan, unfolded, is 27 feet, 6 inches.

Unlike futuristic and movies that depict hundreds of cars zooming around the sky, the more likely scenario, given the price tag of the Transition — $194,000 — is that of a private pilot who wants the all-in-one convenience of combing a car and plane, thereby avoiding the hassles of driving to the airport, parking the car, flying the plan, then getting into another car, etc.

Terrafugia, a company founded in 2006 five students at MIT, has already taken 70 orders for the Transition, complete with big deposits. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

This according to a computer programmer who wrote a program specifically to tell his daughter how she could beat a computerized version of the Hangman game. The program simulated 15 million games, using 90,000 words from a dictionary and guessing in a semi-random method (just like a person would). No matter how many variations the programmer wrote into the program, the toughest word to guess was always the same.

Hangman is a simple game with a morbid premise: One player (or a computer program) chooses a word and reveals only how many letters it has. At the same time, that player draws a hangman’s noose. Another player guesses letters one at a time, and the first player reveals how many of each letter the secret words contains. When the guesser correctly guesses a letter, that letter is revealed all the times it is in the word. If a letter guessed is not at all in the secret word, then a part of a body is drawn on the hangman’s noose. If the guesser is incorrect enough times, the first player draws an entire body and the game is lost.

In the computer simulation, shorter words proved more difficult to guess than longer words. Not surprisingly, words with uncommonly used letters — like z and u — were near the top of the difficult list. And, the fewer pieces the computer got, the more difficult the words proved to correctly guess.

Among the other words that proved very difficult for the program to guess were these:

buzz
faff
hajj
fizz
jinx
fuzz
vex
fox
fax
puff
babes
jay
quiz
zap
huh

By: socialstudiesforkids.com

Rainstorms were expected to ease for a few days during monsoon season, and relief officials were hopeful that flooding would recede and relief efforts could go forward amid one of the worst disasters in Asia in quite some time.

The known death toll has exceeded 1,600. Some affected areas are remote, though, and government officials hesitate to speculate on the number of dead or missing there. Aid to those areas has been especially slow, slower than the pace that aid has been coming in to populated areas — and that is not very fast.

The United Nations has estimated that the aid needed is close to $500 million. That number is nothing compared to the estimated $1 billion lost in ruined farmland.

The first case of cholera has been reported, and U.N. officials fear much more damage from disease possibly than from the initial flooding.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been touring the country and says he has never seen a disaster so bad.

A staggering 2 million people have been left homeless by the worst rains and flooding in many, many years. Stories continue to circulate of whole cities and towns lacking necessities like adequate food, clean water, medical supplies, and sewer services.

Makeshift villages made up of homeless people living in temporary tents have sprung up around the country, alongside roads and pathways across the countryside dotted with floodwaters. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

It is the solving of the Rubik’s Cube, the multi-colored handheld puzzle-toy that has been entertaining and perplexing millions of people since its invention in 1974.

Now comes word that a team including researchers from more than one country has put Google’s computers to work on the problem and come up with every single way that the Cube can be solved. Not only that, the computers have determined that no matter how mixed up the colored squares are, the correct solution can be found in no more than 20 turns of the cube. By contrast, scientists say, the human brain can memorize only enough algorithmically possibilities to allow for a minimum number of 40 moves. (This is on average and doesn’t account for blind luck or a favorable starting point.)

This latest Rubik’s Cube news comes not long after the latest world record for speed, set by a Dutchman who solved a cube in 7.08 seconds.

The typical Rubik’s Cube has six sides covered with colored stickers. The colors are blue, green, orange, red, white, and yellow. When the Cube is “solved,” or first thing out of the packaging, the stickers are all the same color on each side. Turning the faces of the cube mixes up the colors and creates the puzzle.

Erno Rubik of Hungary invented the Cube in 1974 and named it after himself. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

Pakistan, not exactly a rich country, has large swaths of people living in poverty or very near it, their lives and livelihoods subject to the whims of the seasonal rains that always seem to find the people who need challenges the least.

The government of President Asif Ali Zardari has responded as best it can, but resources on the ground are thinly stretched. Government officials now say that the toll from this year’s floodings exceeds that of the 2005 earthquake, one of the deadliest in the country’s history. Already, up to 12 million people have been affected, more than four times that of the quake.

The military is now involved as well, with navy boats carrying many people to safety and promising rescue for many more. That sight will be extremely welcome to people gathering for shelter atop mosques and other tall buildings, questioning their future as the monsoon nears just its halfway point.

The news of intense flooding in regions such as the Punjab is especially unwelcome, since agriculture is one of the prime movers of that region’s economy and the usually prime agriculture land is now underwater.

In response, many countries around the world — most prominently so far China, France, Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. — have promised or already given a total of tens of millions of dollars.

Pakistan was in dire straits before this latest monsoon, though, with inflation approaching 12 percent and the war in nearby Afghanistan occupying much of the country’s attention and expenditures. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

The pair of orange van-like vehicles will technically have no drivers, although technicians will be sitting the driver’s seats and be able to seize control if anything goes terribly wrong. As a last resort, the team has installed a giant red shutdown button on the dashboard.

What the team of Italian engineers goes terribly right is the system of laser scanners and cameras that feeds information about weather, traffic, and terrain to the computer system driving the vehicles.

A van will lead the vehicles, and the journey will take the team through the busy city of Moscow, across the arid plains of Siberia (summer now, of course), through the extreme chills of the Gobi desert (very cold at night), and right across China to Shanghai, for an expected arrival in late October. The vehicles have a maximum speed of 60 kilometers (37 miles) an hour. After three hours of driving, the vehicles’ batteries must be recharged for eight hours.

Although the team expects such vehicles to be commonplace not for another couple of decades, the engineers can definitely see the potential for such driverless machines, namely for farming and mining and for military use. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

One of the few “safe” spots has been a main relocation camp near Corail-Cesselesse, about 15 miles north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, where the bulk of the earthquake damage occurred. In April, U.N. peacekeepers, U.S. military personnel, famous people (like actor Sean Penn), and a host of other volunteers helped move 7,000 people to this supposed “safe haven,” away from the ripping forces of the rains and winds promised by the coming hurricane season. The area had security, paved gravel roadways, and a few other amenities that put it a cut above the makeshift “tent cities” that sprang up in the days and weeks after the January 12 7.0-magnitude quake.

That strategy seemed to have been a bit in error, as a summer storm tore through the relocation camp, leveling temporary buildings and knocking out the solar-powered streetlights that have been (in more ways than one) a bright spot in this otherwise dismal story.

Nearly 2,000 people fled in the wake of ultra-high winds that picked up tent poles and sent them flying through the air. Only six people were reported injured by nearby hospitals, but the true number of injured was undoubtedly higher than that.

Also coming to light was the area’s feasibility as a long-term living area, given the relative sparsity of trees and other vegetation, not to mention food supplies and employment opportunities. The idea had been that the residents would stay a few months and then be able to return home; but delays in nearly every phase of the recovery have plagued exhausted workers. Then, the Haitian government targeted the area for more permanent living and working space – an idea that might well be questioned after this latest incursion by the weather.

Haitian President Rene Preval marked the six-month anniversary of the devastating quake by celebrating the efforts of rescue workers, who collectively have saved hundreds of lives. The ceremony took place in the shadow of the National Palace, itself a grim reminder of the damage wrought by the earthquake. In attendance were Penn and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, both of whom have worked extensively in the area for many weeks.

Six months later, the number of temporary camps remains very, very high. Some estimates put that number higher than one thousand. The number of homeless is thought to be well above 1 million. Aid continues to stream in, now that the port has been repaired and the airway expanded to accept more flights. Whether the country continues to recover and enter what Preval hopes will be a reconstruction phase remains to be seen. By: socialstudiesforkids.com

Frank wrote in her diary in her teen years, beginning when she was 13, not long before she and her family went into hiding because they were Jewish in an era when people of that religion were being hunted by Germany’s Nazis.

Frank and most of her family died during the war. Her father, Otto, published Anne’s diary after the war.

The book is expected to be published in the U.S. and in the U.K. in September. English is not the only language for publication, however. The graphic novel will eventually be published in German, French, and Italian.

Other graphic novels about Anne Frank have been published. This is the first one authorized by the Anne Frank House Museum. The author of this authorized version have experience in the genre, having worked together to create The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Both have wide experience in animated books. By: socialstudiesforkids.com