Update: Well, that went fast. Took the MIT team 9 hours to find all 10 balloons. Read more here, and congrats to the winners! [Thanks Andrew.]

What's cool is how most of the balloon hunting communities I've found are working towards selfless goals. Both DARPABalloon.com and this MIT group are proposing to gather a huge number of participants, and rather than give each contributor a measly cut, the forty grand will be donated to charity.

Good luck to everyone involved. If you happen to stumble across one this weekend, consider reporting it to a group that's playing for charity. Just make sure it's not one some kid let go of first. [DARPA via WSJ via AllThingsD]

The mission was dubbed BEAR-4 (Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio), and used an 1800g balloon for a total weight of about 3.84lbs.

The camera was kept in place by foam blocks, and hooked up to five AAA Lithium L91 battery cells. With the extra legs, it captured almost four and half hours of footage. Mercifully, they've edited that down for the results you see below. [BEAR]

Bonus: remember those kids who photographed space for $150? They've now put together a time lapse video of all the photos their rig took during its flight. Not quite as cool (or expensive) as the video above, though. [L337arts]

First up, their rig used a Canon A470 camera with 8GB SD card that they bought used on Amazon. And instead of the expensive GPS radios commonly used by weather balloons, they used a prepaid Motorola i290 GPS cell phone to receive location text messages.

The Earth's stratosphere can get as cold as -67 degrees fahrenheit (-55 Celsius), but they couldn't afford expensive temperature-resistant housing. The solution: a styrofoam beer cooler, and an instant hand warmer. Awesome.

Their low-cost balloon-launch platform reached 17.5 miles high, into near-space. Using the GPS phone to track its location, they found the rig 20 miles away from the launch site about 5 hours later.

Total weight was 800g (about 28 ounces). Apparently FAA regulations only apply to balloons with payloads over four pounds. If you want all the details—including a full parts list—check our their site below.

While groups like EOSS (Edge of Space Sciences) have done things like this in the past, I've never seen it done so cheaply. High school science teachers, please take note! [L337arts via Slashdot]

To the kid's credit, he was able to deduce that the tape had two sides (took him three days) and that you could switch between two kinds of tapes fairly easily. He was also given weird looks on the street and allowed to listen to music in class because of his teachers' nostalgia. Other choice quotes:

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day.

Another useful feature is the power socket on the side, so that you can plug the Walkman into the wall when you're not on the move. But given the dreadful battery life, I guess this was an outright necessity rather than an extra function.

But in the end, which did he like better: his Walkman or his iPod? The iPod, of course, except for the fact that the Walkman had two headphone ports for easy music sharing. [BBC via Engadget]

Tisch School of the Arts student Kacie Kinzer created the tweenbot as a kind of art experiment. In her words:

I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

In New York City, we might expect the smiley-faced tweenbot to be stabbed, stomped, mugged, or covered in graffiti, but every single one of the journeys was completed without a hitch. Pedestrians would stop and help the little guy when he was trapped against a curb or headed into traffic, and point him in the right direction.

I don't know about you guys, but I like to think this project says more about the state of our nation than that stupid negative-nancy stock market. It's just about the warmest, fuzziest thing I've seen since the last Muppet movie. [Tweenbots]

The Atomic Energy Lab set was only available from 1951 to 1952 and sold for a whopping $50 (that's without inflation).

The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom) and a government manual "Prospecting for Uranium."

Today, a set of one of these could go for over $5,000 due to the limited quantities that was produced. Maybe the set was produced in limited quantities because dying from radiation at the age of eight wasn't so fun either. [Oak Ridge Associated Universities via Boing Boing]

He concludes from the experiments that it should work really well as a fire retardant or insulation, as well as pulling moisture out of pretty much anything (including his finger!). Aerogel weighs only three times as much as air, but is even more effective than your everyday pink insulation. It may only be the world's coolest insulation material, but are you the world's coolest anything? Didn't think so. [Jason Wells via Crunchgear]

The purpose of the experiment—as the above picture so clearly explains—is to study the atmospheric flow of the ionosphere at an altitude between 100 to 300 km—a veritable atmospheric "blind spot" for both satellites and weather balloons. The balls of light are caused when sunlight strikes the lithium vapor clouds as they disperse, and will give the people of Japan a quick glimpse into the beauty that is Armageddon. [PinkTentacle via Asahi]

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

Shut Down a Day [Denis Bystrov and Michael Taylor]

Want to make your own tornado machine but you're too lazy to hunt down all the parts? $120 buys you this neat Tornado Simulator Kit, which comes with building instructions, experiment ideas, and all the parts you'll need to get going except an ultrasonic humidifier. If you don't have one already the site will sell you a humidifier for $49.95, but there are better deals online.

Tornado Simulator Kit [Science Kit & Boreal Laboratories, thanks David!]