Because they like to be involved in literally everything there is, Google has partnered with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American to launch their second annual Google Science Fair. As Google says, it’s the “largest online science competition in the world, open globally to students ages 13-18.” Check out their accompanying video that introduces this year’s competition and, while you’re at it, note how much more compelling the competition’s mission is because of the British accented voiceover:

An update on Google’s official blog goes on to explain more about the competition:

This year’s fair will be even more global than the last: We’re now accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russia). We will also be recognizing 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa). From these 90, to be announced in May, our judges will select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live Google Science Fair final event on July 23, 2012. At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges (like Vint Cerf, Sylvia Earle and Nobel Laureates David Gross and Ada Yonath) will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18).

We’re also introducing a new category for this year’s competition—the Scientific American Science in Action award. We were so inspired by 2011 finalist Harine Ravichandran’s project, which attempted to solve energy surges in rural villages, that we decided to recognize an outstanding project that addresses a social, environmental or health need to make a difference in the lives of a group or community, as Harine’s project did for her grandparents’ village in India. The winner will also be flown to Mountain View for the finalist event in July.

Good lord. When I was a sixteen-year-old girl, I wasn’t doing anything nearly as meaningful as solving energy surges in rural village in India. It’s humbling what these kids are capable of these days. And here all anybody wants to worry about is the scourge of sexting among adolescent and how our culture is slowly eroding any sense of morality in today’s youth. Bullfeathers. These Google Science Fair kids are future human supreme.

Today is the ribbon-cutting moment of the 2012 edition of Google Science Fair and submissions will be accepted until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59 GMT (I’m presuming that’s the PM version of 11:59 but the Google post didn’t specify so maybe it’d be better for all involved parties to not wait till the last minute to get your submission in, eh kids?). To get your appetite for science growling, Google is offering prizes such as a $50,000 college scholarship and a 10-day trip to Galapagos (go get yer Darwin on, young brainiacs!).

Additional information was included in Google’s email announcement that highlight changes to this year’s competition in order to “make it even more global”:

Do any of you readers know of any teenagers that participated in last year’s Google Science Fair? If so, tell us a bit more about them in the comments.

To help calculate the lifetime of unpayable debt students can look forward to, the U.S. Department of Education implemented a new policy for all college and universities to include a “net price calculator” on their websites so prospective students can get an idea of how many lifetimes they’ll spend paying off their debt loans. Perhaps realizing that this wasn’t quite enough to really get that message to sink in, the Department of Ed has created a challenge for high school and college students to help spread the word about how terribly expensive college is.

Oddly named the “College Net Price Calculator Student Video Challenge” (seriously, guys, you couldn’t name it in such a way that it’d have a cute acronymic name?), the contest is an effort to use students’ first-hand misery to help spread the word about just how costly it is to go to college these days. From the contest’s website:

Net price provides very important consumer information to prospective students and their families, but few students and families know to ask colleges and universities about their net prices or to look for a net price calculator on an institution’s website. The Department of Education is announcing a prize challenge for the creation of a short (approximately 60-180 second) creative and informational video that tells viewers about what net price calculators are, why they are important, and where viewers will find them – both on college and university websites and also on the Department’s college search website, College Navigator (http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/).

Students have until January 31, 2012 submit their video that explains the deathly cost of enrolling in college. A panel of five independent judges will be selecting three winners, each of whom will be awarded a prize of $1,500. Wow, way to break the bank for kids, Department of Education. That sum wouldn’t even cover 6 hours of credit at my state-funded alma mater.

In all honesty, they should reconfigure the marketing of this video contest and just use it as a platform to discourage people from going to college. How is a bachelor’s degree even worth it anymore?

“What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone,” he said. “Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security. So we do increasing see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows phone platform.”

Great marketing tactic.

Microsoft has been running a contest under the Twitter hashtag #droidrage (via Graham Cluley at Sophos).

Microsoft’s Windows Phone (and Windows PC) evangelist Ben Rudolph tweeted the other day:

The other day, he tweeted:

Yesterday, he posted:

The winners have yet to be announced. People are still tweeting with the #droidrage hashtag. Are are some recent tweets:

The Google Nexus Twitter account (@googlenexus) is on day 7 of a series of challenges, run entirely through twitter, that give winners a free Galaxy Nexus (whenever they end up arriving).

The Galaxy Nexus Challenge (the “Contest”) is a skill contest where participants must submit via Twitter solutions to puzzles, photo challenges and essay questions (“Solutions”) to win prizes. The Solutions will be evaluated by judges, who will choose the daily winning entries in accordance with these Official Rules. The prize(s) will be awarded to participant(s) whose Solution is evaluated as having the highest score in the judging criteria.

There has so far been a contest every day since November 12th, each asking Twitter followers to submit answers to questions, or solve some sort of puzzle. Evey response is limited to the 140 characters that Twitter allows.

Today’s contest, the 7th, is particularly fun – it’s a poetry contest. If you want a free Galaxy Nexus, you must submit the most creative, original, and humorous reverse Cinquain poem of the lot. Here are the rules, via Twitter:

Here’s a sample entry, provided by the Google Nexus team –

With the way folks are feeling about the U.S. release of the phone, maybe a more accurate poem would be -

Hey guys
Don’t make me buy a damn iPhone
Or this new Droid RAZR
I’m impatient
No joke

All kidding aside, you should put on your thinking caps and try to win a free Galaxy Nexus. The official rules peg the value on that to be $500 (activation and service plan not included of course). Make sure to mention @googlenexus in your poem tweets and use the hashtag #nexuspoetsociety.

And hey, the daily contests end on November 21st. Maybe more evidence supporting a release somewhere around that time?

The contest involves tweeting your all-time best costume to Bing, and if Bing selects your idea and retweets it, you win the money.

With Halloween right around the corner, people are racking their brains to come up with creative costume ideas.

Well, we want to help those folks find some inspiration so we’re inviting you to share your best Halloween costumes with @Bing. Simply tell us your all-time best costume and we will give five lucky respondents a $100 Amazon gift card for sharing.

In order to enter, you must follow @Bing on Twitter. Then, you tweet your all-time best costume @Bing with the hashtag #BingHalloween. If yours is picked, you win.

The contest is running today, October 25th, from 10 am to 8 pm EST. The five winners will be selected throughout the day. Each Twitter handle only gets one entry.

What was the best Halloween costume you ever designed? Tell Bing and tell us in the comments.

Although season 2 is already a wrap, it looks like you might have a chance to play a small role in season 3 – as a zombie.

AMC has teamed up with Bing for the Walking Dead Sweepstakes, a contest to give one lucky person a chance to test out their limb-dragging, entrails-eating, vacant-expression skills with a walk-on role. The prize includes a trip for two to the set of The Walking Dead season 3, roundtrip airfare, hotel accommodations, and $500 cash.

Only the winner (not the guest) will win the part on the show. He/she will be “transformed into the flesh-eating dead by Greg Nicotero’s creature team,” and if you’ve seen the show, you know what awesome zombie-creators those guys are.

Did you guys watch the season 3 premiere? What did you think? Personally, I thought that it was great, and definitely sets up the possibility for an incredible season (and this is coming from a guy who was disappointed by season 1). Will it fill the Breaking Bad-sized void in my life? That remains to be seen, but I’m undoubtedly impressed.

If you want to relive the key highlights from the season 2 premiere, check out this video below –

Oh, and at the end of that you’ll get a front row seat at the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover. That rover will be investigating a certain area of Mars to check whether or not it ever offered “conditions favorable for microbial life” and if so, whether or not the area could have preserved evidence of that life.

NASA is selecting 150 lucky people to come to Florida for a “tweetup,” a meetup organized via Twitter. To register, you have to be a registered Twitter user and you also have to follow @NASA or @NASATweetup (or other NASA Twitter accounts).

NASA is no stranger to Tweetups, having organized many in the past. Previous tweetups have brought people to see shuttle launches, The World Science Festival as well as the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Registration for this experience will open at noon on Wednesday, October 5th and run until noon on Friday, October 7th. NASA will select the 150 people randomly from all the signups. Everyone else gets put on a waiting list. You can register even if you aren’t a U.S. citizen, but spots are for you and you alone. No plus 1′s and they are non-transferable.

You can follow the contest on the @NASA or @NASATweetup accounts and with the hashtag #NASATweeup. NASA says they hope to announce the winners by October 12th.

If selected, you’re going to have to find your own way there, however. But the VIP 3-day NASA experience should be enough motivation for that. If all goes according to plan, the Curiosity rover will launch at 10:21 am EST on November 25th.

The hackathon lasted for 48 hours straight, over 6 continents. Over 500 developers hacked with Foursquare’s API at 30 different global locations. Foursquare set up four official hackathon locations in New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris. And out of all of that, 90 different “hacks” were submitted to be voted on by both Foursquare and Foursquare users.

Today, Foursquare is announcing the winner – and it’s Plan Your Next Trip.

Plan Your Next Trip simply does what it says it does – plans your next trip. It uses the Foursquare Explore API to plan out a 2-day trip to whatever location you are planning on going. It was developed by Benjamin Netter in Paris.

The Explore API allows Plan Your Next Trip to make a suggested itinerary based on recommendations from your friends (tips) as well as their past check-ins. Plan Your Next Trip also looks at what is popular all across Foursquare as well and suggests places to eat, drink, shop, and just tour.

I’m heading to Chicago for a few days next week, so I decided to give the app a spin. The app suggested that I eat breakfast at a popular cafe, visit the Art Institute of Chicago, “get some fresh air” at Millennium Park as well as try Heaven on Seven for a good creole dinner.

I especially liked the suggestion for 10 pm – “Get Drunk at ROOF on TheWit.” All in all, the app planned my day from 9 am to 10 pm and beyond with around 9 different locations to visit.

For the complete list of grand prize finalists and the people’s choice winners, check out the official Foursquare blog post.

The mobile powerhouse has launched the Nokia Tune Remake contest. Contestants began submitting their compositions yesterday, and people will be able to submit as many compositions as they wish until October 5th.

On October 5th, ten finalists will be selected. Five of those finalists will be chosen by an official panel of judges, comprised of “some of the most respected names in the audio branding industry.” The other five finalists will be selected based on “likes” and “shares.” The winner from those 10 entries will be selected by the judges.

You can check out the current entries at the official competition site.

According to Nokia, they are “looking for a tune that is fresh, expressive, original, and creative yet distinctively a Nokia Tune.” Contestants are asked to use “elements of the popular original,” but warns that this is “not simply a remix contest.” This is a reworking of the famous melody, but it must show quite a bit of creative character. Entries are limited to 30 seconds each.

The winner of the contest will receive $10,000 and five runner-ups will get $1,000 each. The winning ringtone will come standard on Nokia devices and the runner-up tones will be available for download.

Right now, a sort of futuristic take on the tone called “Progressive Nokia” is in the lead with 1409 likes and 572 shares – but of course this is only day 2 of the competition.

Here’s the original tune, just for reference –

And here’s the original tune as played by an ensemble, just for fun –

The small town of Forney, Texas recently held a Facebook contest to elect one child, aged 8 to 13, “Mayor for a Day.” Adults were asked to nominate children by sending an email to the current Mayor of Forney, Darren Rozell, explaining why the kid would make a good chief executive.

On Monday, the town announced the winner via Facebook. 11-year-old Caroline Gonzalez received the honor – which came with responsibilities like leading City Council Meetings. Given all that power, free executive reign over an entire town, what did young Caroline do for her first Mayoral act?

She renamed a street in the town “Justin Bieber Way.” And not just any street, but Main Street.

The City of Forney’s Facebook page posted the entry the secured Caroline the win. It came from her father, and praised Caroline for being part of the Gifted and Talented Program, for playing softball, basketball and cheerleading, and for volunteering to help the poor through outreach programs. The nomination said nothing about her being a rabid Justin Bieber fan.

I say this is grounds for impeachment.

According to KDAF in Dallas, Rozell had this to say:

“I can’t really say that I know a lot of Justin Bieber’s music, but I know that he’s really popular these days, and if she wanted to name it Bieber Way, we were going to make that happen”

Luckily, Caroline’s regin of terror is over as she was only Mayor for one day. And Justin Bieber Way will be changed back to Main St. But the damage has been done. Anyone that drove through downtown Forney, Texas saw, for a split second, a street named Bieber.

Check out the video below, which is worth it simply for the female news anchor referring to “Justin Beaver” a couple of times.