It's one thing to be trapped inside a locked room, quite another to be trapped inside a relationship that's on the rocks. This week's No Escape puzzle challenge explores both themes. In Part1: The White Rabbit you explore a room from a bird's eye perspective, guiding the main character about by clicking on the floor and clicking on items to investigate them. The goal, as usual, is to use your wits, find the hidden items, and use them to solve the puzzles and discover a way out, both from the room itself and the situation you're in. Although the game window is quite small, and takes getting used to, once you get out of that initial little room and explore the other sections of the building, you'll find the experience gets better and more rewarding. Click here to see the other puzzle rooms in this section and as always, you can e-mail me at krisabel@gmail.com for clues and hints [More]

A piece of Irish Moss collected off the coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and then carefully pressed flat with sea stones and captured with a Canon digital camera is among the winners of this year's top photographs and images in the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The 5th annual competition is held and presented by Science magazine and the National Science Foundation. It is designed to showcase the creative talents of scientists and artists who, in the course of running their experiments or researching their projects come across images of beauty. Among the other winners are a modelled image of the flight of a bat, a strip of super-flexible metal, just 200 microns wide, tied into a ribbon, and a short film on Möbius transformations. [More]

Step right up and witness a website designed purely for fun, a gathering of interactive oddities, of the clickable and the strange, yes, it is The Howling Monkey. You'll find a collection of circus tents, each with its own set of activites. You can charm a snake, make the stars twinkle, and ask a question of the all-knowing oracle baby. There's games to play, secrets to uncover, and bizarre videos to watch. [More]

"I beleive that when I go, it will be sudden" so begins Josie’s Lalaland, a remarkable visualization of the state of being of a young girl faced with her end through Luekemia. As dramtic clouds are pushed across the sky, fields of fiery flowery and gatherings of fireflies swirl and move with poetic energy. It's an expression of a certain kind of happiness. the one that comes with acceptance and the decision to live life to the fullest. Created by EB Hu. [More]

On top of spaghetti, all covered in cheese. I lost my poor meatball, because somebody sneezed. Anyone remember that song? It's one of the children's tunes I used to listen to as a kid. Well it turns out that Tom Glazer, the 1940's folk musician who wrote it also produced, with a group of fellow musicians, a series of folk albums devoted to songs about science. Jef Poskanzer has transferred six albums from the series into MP3 format for download at his personal web page. There's tunes on Space, Energy & Motion, Experiments, Weather, and Nature. They are quirky, cheesy, infectious, and often times just way out there. [More]

PodDater is an online dating service built for use with your MP3 player. I've never investigated online dating services, so could never tell you what to look for, but the very idea that Apple's popular MP3 player would be the first thing you'd have in common is an interesting twist. To make finding a match easier, PodDater let's you download the videos, photos, or audio messages of prospective dates right into your iPod or other compatible MP3 player, so you can carry your selections around with you, show them to your friends, family, and perhaps co-workers. Like most new services on the web, this one's free. [More]

I love games that play with concepts in physics and Manifold does just that by giving you tools to bend and defy gravity in an action-platformer. The goal is fairly simple - move your little man from the beginning of the level to the exit. Along the way, you'll find large anomalies, big blobs of gravity force, that you can collect and then shoot at spots within the game to help guide you past trecherous obstacles. Once you place an anomaly, you can use your mouse to change the direction of its gravity force, so that when you enter it, your little man gets pulled or pushed into a helpful direction. [More]

Will Microsoft buy out RIM? What will the verdict be in the Phil Spector verdict? When will the Vancouver civic strike end? These are just a few of the questions being discussed and answers predicted for over at ZiiTrend, a new website built around the idea of using the dynamic of a community to make predictions on future trends. It's fairly simple in concept. You come up with an interesting question about the future, submit it to the list, and everyone then submits their predictions and the website keeps track of everyone's answers and then creates a community forecast. Currently ZiiTrends thinks there's a 71% chance that the Vancouver Civic Strike will end soon, for example. When the future event becomes the present, the question is closed and the success rate of everyone's predictions are noted and scores given out. How well can you predict the future? [More]

Inventors, tinkerers, braniacs.... Specialized Bicycles and Google want your best pedal-powered ideas and inventions. Innovate Or Die is a contest in search of new zero-emission inventions built around the idea of generating power through pedal strokes. Inventors are being asked to not only come up with a new idea for a machine built around the concept of pedal-power, but to actually build the machine itself and submit a video of it to a specialgroup created on YouTube. Winners won't be decided until January of next year, so there's plenty of time to come up with your own wacky invention. Top prize is $5,000. [More]

Once again Master Chief, Cortana, Sergeant Johnson, and the Arbiter race across the universe to try to stop the Halo rings from destroying all existence. Once again they find themselves hunting for a Cartographer’s room, for a map with the location of a remote library and an index key. Once again the covenant prophets unlock a new installation that becomes quickly infested with the Flood and once again they get drawn into debate with its cybernetic guardians who spout protocols and cryptic details about an ancient race called the Forerunners. The only difference is that this, we are told, will indeed be the last, the very final time. Not only will [More]