Author: creative

Do you remember writing letters to Santa Claus, athletes or the president when you were in elementary school? Well, today we learned that some of those letters do make it to their intended destination Leanne, a second-grade student at Baker Elementary School in San Jose, Calif., composed an adorable letter (pictured below) to slopestyle snowboarder Jamie Anderson. She even used the spaces between each word to draw small stars. See also: Shaun White’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day In the note, Leanne expresses her shared interest in biking, and offers the Olympian some luck via a penny attached to the letter. The token seemed to do the trick, as Anderson took home a gold medal, becoming the first-ever women’s slopestyle Olympic champion Read more… More about Watercooler , Pics , and Conversations

Read More

It’s official: The U.S. military is getting into the business of building Transformer -style robots. Of course, they won’t exactly be like the ones you’ve seen in Michael Bay ‘s films, but in terms of purpose and functionality, the early versions won’t be far off DARPA , or the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, revealed on Tuesday concept images of its plan to outfit the U.S. military with modular flying drones , which can “transform” to meet various mission needs See also: Apple’s Jony Ive Designs Special Edition Red Mac Pro Called ARES (Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System), the drone will serve as an unmanned flying vehicle capable of setting troops down in hazardous environments, and as a resupply vehicle for military deployments. ARES will also be able to facilitate the evacuation of injured soldiers, a key feature for missions unassisted by combat-ready helicopters Read more… More about Military , Robots , Robotics , Darpa , and Tech

Read More

As the Sochi Winter Olympics begins, people are making comparisons between the Russian venue and the host cities that have come before it. This year’s games in Sochi disprove any notion that the Winter Olympics lacks the pomp of the Summer Olympics. Medal counts aside, each successive host city works to make its games bigger, its torch relays longer and its total cost greater than the games before. Well, maybe not the latter so much, but Sochi’s estimated $51 billion price tag sure makes it seem that way. See also: 12 Sochi Photos That Russia Probably Doesn’t Want You to See When compared, the facts and figures of the Winter Olympics certainly show signs of trending more and larger . Back in 1998, 72 events comprised the Nagano Games. That number has increased to 98 in just 16 years. Another drastic increase is in the hours of coverage CBS covered 123.8 hours of the Nagano Games, while NBC plans to cover 539 hours of Sochi competition.

Read More

Scandal has surrounded every aspect of the Winter Games in Sochi. From anti-gay remarks to stray dog slaughtering to environmental concerns to shoddy construction to yogurt wars to — well, you get the point. But the Sochi Games is far from the first time Olympic festivities have been marred by scandal involving both the competitions and the social conditions surrounding the event at a whole. See also: The Athletes Arrive: 15 Behind-the-Scenes Photos From Sochi During the 1904 Summer Games in St. Louis, a marathon runner who finished in first place was later disqualified for driving a car throughout most of the race. In 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime oversaw the games in Berlin.

Read More