14-year-old’s home-made Physics game tops worldwide download charts

It’s a game that’s free to download onto your iPhone. It’s called Bubble Ball, and the objective of the game is to guide a ball through a series of obstacle courses to a goal. Last week it had topped the iTunes worldwide free app download charts, having being downloaded 2 million times. It had even outranked apps such as Facebook and Skype. If none of this really seems too remarkable, the game was designed and made by a 14-year-old boy.

The inventor, Robert Nay, from Utah, describes Bubble Ball as a “physics puzzle game” for Apple devices. He learned how to code the game using a book from a local library.

The success and the popularity of the game has taken him by surprise. “I think it’s pretty cool because I never thought my game would do that well…When I saw that it was number one for the free apps, I was astonished,” Robert told ABC News.

Full story: BBC Newsbeat http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/12224670

Scientists compile most detailed map ever of night sky

Scientists working on SDSS (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) have created the most detailed image ever of the night sky. It has taken over a decade of scanning the skies with a 138-megapixel camera to compile this image – consisting of over a trillion pixels in total.

It is an image so detailed and so massive that it would take half a million high-definition televisions to take it all in at full resolution… And this is just a map of one-third of the sky!

Full story: POPSCI Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-01/newest-digital-sky-survey-releases-most-detailed-sky-map-ever