Science and Technology

Teen Tech Week may be officially over, but our Teen Video Contest is only at its halfway point. While it's been widely advertised that winners’ videos will be featured on our library website, we just found out that Best Buy has also generously donated some incredible prizes. The first place winner will receive an Ultra Flip video camera, second place a $100 gift card to Best Buy, and third place an official library t-shirt.

This interview airs beginning February 24.
Clayton Ray has the impressive title of Curator Emeritus in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution. He also studies, collects, and writes about wagons. Debby Klein meets with this fascinating man to explore his many interests.
Find out more about CRRL Presents.

On Tuesday, April 13, 2010, Martin Sherwin, co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer will give a talk on the scientist.

On Tuesday, April 6, 2010, Paul Israel of Rugters University and author of Edison: A Life of Invention will give a talk on the inventor. This lecture, part of the university's Great Lives series, is free and open to the public. For more information on "The Wizard of Menlo Park," check out this list of materials recommended by the reference staff of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library.

If you're not on the Internet with your mobile phone, chance are you soon will be.  With the adoption rate for smartphones and other cellular Internet devices skyrocketing, these devices are stealing the spotlight from laptop computers and vying for the position as our dominant mobile computing solutions.  With this transition has come a plethora of mobile applications to meet our every need and then some (and some more).  We want to be able to do everything our regular computers can do on our smartphones.  For many of us, that includes using the library.  We're in luck. 

Most computer users these days use laptops as their portable computing solution and take them almost everywhere they go.  There are those situations, however, when you need access to your programs and your files, but of course, you forgot your laptop when you needed it most.  Fortunately there’s easy access to a computer nearby, but it doesn’t have anything you need on it.  What to do? 

William Kamkwamba first encountered the magic that ruled Malawi when he was six. Herd boys found a  sack in the road; it was filled with bubblegum!  What a treasure! "Should we give any to this little boy with leaves in his hair?", they asked. Of course they did, a double handful of gumballs: so many colors.  William ate them all.

Today's libraries are not just for books, computers and magazines – the Salem Church library now has its own geocache!  In geocaching, participants obtain the location of a geocache from a geocaching Web site www.geocaching.com, use a GPS to arrive in the area of the cache, and then follow clues or simply hunt for the cache.   There are over 1000 caches waiting to be found within a 25 mile radius of the Fredericksburg area!  

She’s only four feet tall and 110 pounds, but little “Ardi” is causing a sensation among paleoanthropologists. Earlier this month, after fifteen years of research, scientists reported that they had identified Ardi’s skeleton as the oldest hominid known to modern humans. Ardipithecus ramidus, as she is formally known, lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. She’s remarkable not just for her age, but for what she tells us about human evolution. Scientists are re-arranging the human family tree in light of this new research.

Let’s talk about eBook readers. I’m sure you’ve seen one by now. Rectangular pieces of plastic capable of storing thousands of books to be read anytime, anywhere. Now equipped with screens employing the latest “electronic ink” technology that mimics the lighting qualities of real paper, they are fast supplanting the "traditional" portable media player as the tech to talk about.