MIT collaborates with Smithsonian on developing new science game for kids

Vanished: The MIT:Smithsonian Science Mystery"

The Smithsonian Institution and MIT announced the April 4 launch of VANISHED an 8-week online/offline environmental disaster mystery game for middle-school children, meant to inspire engagement and problem solving through science.

Developed and curated by MIT's Education Arcade (a research group in Comparative Media Studies) and the Smithsonian Institution, VANISHED is a first-of-its-kind experience where participants become investigators racing to solve puzzles and other online challenges, visit museums and collect samples from their neighborhoods to help unlock the secrets of the game. Players can only discover the truth about the environmental disaster by using real scientific methods and knowledge to unravel the game's secrets.

To navigate through the mystery game's challenges, participants will gain access to Smithsonian scientists from such diverse disciplines as paleobiology,
volcanology, forensic anthropology and entomology.

Potential participants can sign-up for VANISHED at
http://vanished.mit.edu
beginning March 21.
[Kes: Although you can currently sign up now ont he Web site to receive notification of when the game officially starts.]
( more info below cut )

New Du Maurier collection to include five lost stories

Kes: DDM's short story, "Don't look Now," which was made into a film starring Donald Sutherland, is definitley one of the creepiest little stories I've ever read, and it makes wonderful use of the setting of a very gothic Venice--I commend it to any horror fan who might not have read it yet.

bits and pieces from The Guardian article at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/21/daphne-du-maurier-stories-discovered

A bookseller's dedicated attempts to root out the early work of
Daphne du Maurier
have resulted in the recovery of five lost tales by the enduringly popular author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Most startling among them is "The Doll",
published in 1928 when Du Maurier was barely into her 20s – a macabre short story about a man who discovers that the girl he's smitten with is besotted
with a mechanical sex doll.

....Willmore said that she had been looking for "The Doll", which is mentioned in Du Maurier's autobiography, Myself When Young, for many years. "I'd searched
for it a million times before," she said, "but quite by chance it turned up in a 1937 collection of stories rejected by magazines and publishers called
The Editor Regrets. I was dumbfounded."

....The other stories that Willmore unearthed include two which vanished after appearing in short story collections in the US, "East Wind" and "The Limpit".
Another two - "And His Letters Grew Colder" and "The Happy Valley" – appeared in magazines published in 1932. The latter, which Willmore said is her favourite
of the rediscovered stories, contains elements of a plot which later grew into Rebecca. "These stories are often overlooked," said Willmore, "but they
show how she learned her craft, and tried out different mechanisms for telling the stories".

Du Maurier's novels are notable for their sour view of humanity and the often macabre suspense plots, which led Alfred Hitchcock to film three adaptations
of them. "The
short stories
are even darker," Willmore confirmed. "They're not nice, quite macabre and sinister."

Willmore took the stories to Kits Browning, Du Maurier's son, who himself had never seen the stories. They are now set to be published by Virago, alongside
another eight early stories originally published in the 50s. The collection, The Doll, is due to be published on 5 May this year.