Fireworks ~ Icons of Celebrations Worldwide!

Here in Boston it's a very wet Fourth of July so most people are inside dreaming of fireworks. Here's a bit of the history of this great icon of celebrations... The science of fireworks... The Secret World of Fireworks by NatGeo... How they're made... MissC spots a quapter view from inside the 'works! And finally, thanks to Paul @ GeekPress for spotting the Big One...

Punchcard Chemistry ~ Prakash's Cheap Fluidikit

Media Lab alum, now Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash (of FoldScope fame) and team win the Science Play and Research Kit Competition (SPARK) for their ultra-affordable punchcard-programmable chemistry fluidic kits! Thanks to Medgadget for spotting!

Homebrew Sensing ~ DIY Enviro Health Tools!

Excellent to see MIT alum and Public Lab for open technology and science founder Jeffrey Warren win the Knight News Challenge grant for The Homebrew Sensing Project: Environmental health monitoring with open source tools...

"Just as the Homebrew Computer Club challenged assumptions that computers had no place in the home, the Homebrew Sensing Project explores the potential for spectrometry, a powerful analytic technique for identifying materials, in your home and neighborhood. We have leveraged the emerging Do-It-Yourself movement and the power of open source hardware and software development to bring spectrometric analysis to a new audience -- non-experts investigating and testing their immediate environment. The Homebrew Sensing Project gives everyone access to simple, affordable tools to collect data in their own backyards, providing the information they need to make environmental health decisions."

Bad Seeds ~ AlJaz on People & Power in Pampas

AlJaz spots People & Power politics in the Pampas revealing what filmmakers Glenn Ellis and Guido Bilbao call Bad Seeds...

"For much of the past decade Argentina has seen a commodities-driven export boom, built largely on genetically-modified soy bean crops and the aggressive use of pesticides. Argentina's leaders say it has turned the country's economy around, while others say the consequences are a dramatic surge in cancer rates, birth defects and land theft. People & Power investigates if Argentina's booming soy industry is a disaster in the making."

I'm not sure this is GMO fear-mongering and unscientific sensationalizing of the root-causes of real ailments or something more sinister and deeper. The bullying and fire-starting and land-grabbing I'm afraid is an age-old story in modern guise.

Chemistry Kits ~ BBC on State of DIY Science!

BBC's Alex Hudson asks Whatever happened to kids' chemistry sets?

"The early chemistry sets for children played on the idea of impressing school friends with a magic performance. By the 1920s and 30s children had access to substances which would raise eyebrows in today's more safety-conscious times. [...] In the 1950s, booklets offered lists of instructions like "how to make an explosive mixture". Now, even mildly explosive chemicals have been removed. [Today's] kits are not capable of the experiments of old. "What used to be in chemistry sets that are not in there anymore are actual chemicals," [...] "Given the right instruction booklet, the older set would allow the user to create all sorts of experiments -- blow things up, create smoke bombs, create stink bombs."

Olympicene ~ Synthesizing Novel Molecule!

BBC's Jason Palmer writes of new molecule Olympicene conceived by Professor Graham Richards and synthesized by Anish Mistry and David Fox!