The demonstration started at 250 million years ago, when the most of the dry land on Earth was glued together to form Pangea. The tectonic tape was run forward, continents spreading and shifting about until to 250 million years in the future, when geologists believe a new supercontinent will reassemble itself. In the middle the group paused at the present day and the people making up Antarctica opened and closed black jackets they were wearing to display white shirts underneath, simulating ice ages (bottom of the picture).

Oddly enough, it wasn't just a random idea. The leader of this strange interpretation of Earth's history, Stanford student Kat Hoffman got her inspiration from a similar (though way more psychedelic) video on protein synthesis put together by the Nobel-Prize winning chemist Paul Berg in 1971. Berg was also at Stanford, and the fact that almost forty years later members of Stanford University are willing to repeat the process tells us two things: 1) people there are dedicated to coming up with fun ways of visualizing science and 2) there is almost certainly something in the water in Northern California.

Hoffman says her video will be out later this summer.

Source: Stanford University

The conference, called Technology in Wartime (caveat: I'm helping to organize it), will feature a panel of expert roboticists and ethicists dealing with what happens when mobile, autonomous robots become soldiers — and have the potential to malfunction catastrophically. Ronald Arkin from Georgia Tech's mobile robots lab will be speaking, as well as Rutgers techno-ethicist Peter Asaro.

Other panels at the conference will deal with recent government research into cyberterrorism, as well as ways that human rights and civil liberties workers are using sneaky software to aid dissidents in war-torn countries. Featured speakers include computer security hero Bruce Schneier, EFF's legal director Cindy Cohn, e-voting expert and former ACM president Barbara Simons, human rights software crusader Patrick Ball, National Academy of Science's Herb Lin, Danger Room's Noah Shachtman, and sly computer security expert (and Sarah Connor Chronicles hater) Kevin Poulsen.

The conference is open to the public (entrance fee gets you free lunch, a t-shirt, and serves as a donation to nonprofit Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility). Students get in cheap! There's still time to register if you want to come. Technology in Wartime [conference site]