The DIY movement is joining forces with the Pentagon. DARPA, the highly secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is partnering with TechShop to continue work on iFab, a turn-on-a-dime factory that would allow the government to quickly and seamlessly create parts and products as needed. Read full article >>
Posted 36 minutes 25 seconds ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

Here is a guest post by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University. As I prepare for my commencement speech this year, I remember vividly when I first realized that I could graduate college in three years rather than four. As a freshman, I was certainly in no hurry to leave. Indeed, I loved being in college: I was excited by the combination of freedom and opportunity to work hard on subjects I loved with faculty I admired. I didn’t want to leave – even for vacations! Read full article >>
Posted 53 minutes 25 seconds ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

During my daily news consumption, I bumped into a cute story that seemed a bit familiar. The story was a suggestion to switch to an 18 cent coin. I found it by way of Hacker News, for my money ($0), the best news aggregator for the tech set. The article was a fairly typical blog post, a summary of a longer paper, which simply ran the math and determined that the average number of coins you get from a cash register will be 4.7 coins. But the addition of an 18 cent coin would drop that to 3.89. Read full article >>
Posted 2 hours 4 minutes ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

I can’t believe my 10-year college reunion is coming up at the end of the month, given how closely I’ve stuck to student life. I visit about 15 campuses a year as an education journalist, and have developed an expertise on student-loan debt and the changing contours of higher ed. And yet being an “expert” doesn’t shield me from my share of mistakes. Read full article >>
Posted 3 hours 56 minutes ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

That’s Sir Jonathan Ive to you. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, was knighted Wednesday by the princess royal, according to the BBC. Ive is behind the sleek all-in-one packaging unique to Apple’s products, including the iPod, iPad, iPhone, iMac and just about every other iProduct. His designs are among the most influential in the history of technology to date. Read full article >>
Posted 5 hours 43 minutes ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

Four Secret Service employees have decided to fight their dismissals for engaging in inappropriate conduct in Colombia last month, a development that could unravel what has been a swift and tidy resolution to an embarrassing scandal over agents’ hiring of prostitutes. Read full article >>
Posted 8 hours 43 minutes ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

It is projected that there will be more than 10 billion mobile devices in use around the world by 2016, and a new report from Brookings Institution’s Darrell West outlines just how powerful mobile devices could be in the battle to bring down health care costs while simultaneously improving and expanding care. Read full article >>
Posted 11 hours 40 minutes ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat, has been in the news for blasting President Obama’s campaign ads attacking Mitt Romney’s career with a private-equity firm and calling the tone of the presidential campaign “nauseating to me on both sides.” Read full article >>
Posted 13 hours 42 minutes ago - 05/23/12 - Full Story

DC Water’s quest to build miles of new tunnels as part of a federally mandated plan to reduce sewage overflows might be at risk if the agency relies solely on ratepayers to pay for it, a new study says. Read full article >>
Posted 17 hours 15 minutes ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

Members of the Howard University chapter of Engineers Without Borders traveled to Choimim, Kenya, with two Howard professors to enhance water quality and quantity. Here, Kerry-Ann Hamilton, director of strategic communications and marketing at Howard, chronicles their travels. Read full article >>
Posted 22 hours 49 minutes ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

Facebook’s eagerly anticipated IPO, which turned Mark Zuckerberg into a billionaire and a select group of Silicon Valley insiders into millionaires, has had a decidedly rocky debut, to say the least. Shares, which priced at $38 and advanced as high as $42 on the first day of trading, have tumbled out of the gate amidst a long list of potential problems: “embarrassing” glitches on the Nasdaq, investment bankers who priced the deal too high, and concerns from advertisers about Facebook's core business. While Facebook may have been “the last great company of the desktop age,” at $38, it was overvalued for a new mobile age where consumers use the site via smart phones rather than desktops or laptops. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 6 hours ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

How’s this for some unfortunate prom planning? A high school prom was just held in the same Miami arena as a porn convention. And it wasn’t a surprise to organizers. Miami Beach High School students attended their prom Saturday night at the Miami Beach Convention Center at the same time that the “Exxxotica Expo” was being held in a different part of the complex, according to the Miami Herald. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 8 hours ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

A story in today’s Post talks about a generational decline in study time, the number of weekly hours college students devote to actual study. Since the 1960s, the weekly total has dipped from 24 to about 15. College has become, in effect, a part-time job. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 8 hours ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

After months of aggressive campaigning on jobs and the economy, President Obama and Mitt Romney, his likely Republican challenger, are locked in a dead heat over who could fix the problem foremost on voters’ minds, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 9 hours ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

This was written by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His next book, “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education,” will be published in July. This appeared on his Science and Education blog. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 11 hours ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

Updated 2:36 a.m.: We are about 1 hour away from launch time, with programming on NASA’s live video feed starting at 2:30 a.m. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 15 hours ago - 05/22/12 - Full Story

Men should no longer receive a routine blood test to check for prostate cancer because the test does more harm than good, a top-level government task force has concluded in a final recommendation that immediately became controversial. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 18 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

Over the past half-century, the amount of time college students actually study — read, write and otherwise prepare for class — has dwindled from 24 hours a week to about 15, survey data show. And that invites a question: Has college become too easy? Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 21 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

When she heard her younger son’s quavery cry of “M-o-o-o-m-m-m” drifting down the hall in the middle of the night, Jocelyn Mathiasen stiffened, braced for what lay ahead. Sometimes the little boy would awaken just before dawn shaky and weak, complaining of hunger or thirst; after consuming something he would quickly recover. But on the bad nights Peter Dawson would spend hours lying on the floor of the bathroom clutching his stomach, vomiting intermittently and refusing to drink anything. It took him hours to rebound — and it was never clear what had made him so sick. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 23 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

When George Washington University’s Class of 2012 marched across the Mall to accept its degrees Sunday morning, the nation’s back yard was transformed into an eco-fashion runway. Sure, the men wore dress shirts and slacks while the women donned colorful spring dresses and shoes that wouldn’t sink in soft soil. But on top of these outfits, each GWU student sported the newest trend: gowns made from plastic bottles. Read full article >>
Posted 1 day 23 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

Over an informal dinner in a Chevy Chase home, 25 doctors peppered one another with questions about prostate cancer treatments and clinical trials. By the end of the meal they had received a real-time, one-stop update. Several promised to refer their patients for trials. Read full article >>
Posted 2 days 3 minutes ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

People always ask, “What would Jesus do?,” but in America today, it’s impossible to know. And that’s because there are (at least) two prevailing views of God at work in our public and political conversation. It would not be an exaggeration to say that when you pull the lever this November, you will not just be voting for president. You will be saying what you believe about God. Read full article >>
Posted 2 days 2 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

Attention high school graduates with dreams of becoming a doctor: That’s a bad idea. Instead, become a plumber. You’ll make more money. If you think that sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But that’s precisely the message noted investor and Libertarian Peter Thiel intoned on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday. It was only the latest blast against college degrees from Thiel, who sees education as a liability rather than an asset. Read full article >>
Posted 2 days 4 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

I wrote an article for Saturday’s paper about controversial commencement speakers, as the weekend brought two examples in the District alone. On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke at a Georgetown University award ceremony and was heckled by an antiabortion activist. On Sunday, George Washington University presented an honorary degree to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, as about 100 Latinos protested. Read full article >>
Posted 2 days 5 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story

This piece originally appeared on the WaPo Labs Blog on May21.WaPo Labs is the digital team at the Washington Post Company focused on innovation and experimenting with emerging technologies. During the last several decades, scrawled on the walls of subway stations, roadside billboards, and city buildings, a particular form of culture jamming known as subvertising grew in popularity. Subvertising is the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements with the intent to expose assumptions behind commercial culture – think of the spoof ads in Adbusters or altered corporate billboards. Read full article >>
Posted 2 days 7 hours ago - 05/21/12 - Full Story