The scourge of 21st century socializing is that text messages have approximately the same emotional capacity as a brick wall, and emoticons make you look like an overzealous kid in year 7. When you say you're "fine," does that mean you're chipper or a little bit pissed off?

Monday mornings pretty much always make me feel like blowing things up. So watching videos about things blowing up - or people blowing things up - seems to be a perfect way to ease into the work week.

Yoichiro Kawaguchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, created this robot based on the theme of "space jellyfish." That title might be a little misleading, though: It's not headed to space, it's just an artistic interpretation of what a jellyfish in space might look like.

The singularity is nearer. Or, if you take the viewpoint of Technology Review, maybe the singularity is dead, now that Google has hired Ray Kurzweil to lead its engineering lab.

Observe the criticisms of nearly any major public education system in the world, and a few of the many complaints are more or less universal. Technology moves faster than the education system. Teachers must teach at the pace of the slowest student rather than the fastest. And - particularly in the United States - grade school children as a group don't care much for, or excel at, mathematics. So it's heartening to learn that a new kind of "classroom of the future" shows promise at mitigating some of these problems, starting with that fundamental piece of classroom furniture: the desk.

To test the safety of a bridge, engineers rely on some pretty low-tech methods. One common way of doing it is to drag a chain across the bridge and listen in for the hollow-sounding spots. But, weirdly, an even-lower-tech method might speed things along: Have the rain do the work for you.