It's the Wei of the future: BBC launches cartoon Mandarin lessons to prepare children for a Chinese-dominated global economy

Children as young as four will learn to speak Mandarin thanks to a BBC series that starts today.

An animated bug called Wei, who wears rollerskates and a crash helmet, will teach young viewers basic vocabulary such as the words for 'hello', 'thank you', the names of colours and numbers up to 10.

It has been suggested that the decision to include Mandarin alongside the two other 'priority' languages - French and Spanish - was driven by calls for children to be prepared for a global economy dominated by China.

Makers of the show, which will be broadcast on CBeebies, promise to expand youngsters' horizons, 'extending their cultural knowledge and understanding of the world around them'.

Other languages featured in the 11-minute episodes include Polish, Urdu, Punjabi and Somali, as well as Welsh. Read More

Lego Space Shuttle Launched Into Space

On December 31, 2011, Raul Oiada, a Romanian physicist and self-taught rocket scientist (who taught himself English so he could read the books to teach himself rocketry) and Steve Sammartino, an Australian entrepreneur, launched a Lego Space Shuttle into space from Germany.

The project came out of some bigger plans that Raul has, but Steve convinced him to start smaller. The whole project cost about $1,000, which Steve pointed out to me was so much cheaper than the cost of a similar exercise only 10 years ago. He said:

The rig was really cheap – less than $1,000. Which 10 years ago might have been$ 100,000 (Including GPS trackers, HD camera capable of surviving space conditions et al. Add to this that without the web (Skype, Paypal, Youtube, GoPro, cheap GPS) none of this could have happened, and it is a great story about the world coming together and technology being a bridge to democracy and collaboration. Like minds living worlds apart finding complementary skills – this is the kind of world I want to live in. Read More

Rhyming Gaijin rapping for 12+ hours straight from Tokyo to raise money for Japan 3/11 Disaster Survivors: Check it out! (He's breaking world record)

Check out the live Ustream feed here!
He's on hour 6 so far. Awesome!