Join us on Wednesday, October 21, 2009, at noon CDT, for the start of  Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day, a groundbreaking marathon live interactive web event that brings together students, parents, and educators from across the United States to solve their toughest assignments and explore the power of using Wolfram|Alpha for school, college, and beyond.

The multi-hour event will be broadcast live on our new Homework Day website. You can interact with Wolfram|Alpha team members and other Homework Day participants via Homework Day chat, Facebook, and Twitter.
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If you caught Monday night’s Dallas Cowboys vs. Carolina Panthers American football game, then you certainly noticed the new Cowboys Stadium, which is one of the largest domed stadiums and has the largest single-span roof structures in the world. As a tribute to this monumental building, we want to take a moment to point out some of the cool comparisons that Wolfram|Alpha computes automatically whenever you type in a specific measurement or quantity.

The stadium’s roof, for example, measures 660,800 square feet. Type that figure into Wolfram|Alpha, and you’ll discover that it’s just slightly larger than another, possibly more familiar monument:

Each exterior arch of the stadium weighs 3,255 tons, which Wolfram|Alpha instantly computes as measuring a little bit more than the space shuttle’s launch mass, but just one-quarter of the mass of trash produced each day in New York City, or one-ninth the mass of the Titanic:

And those arches are an incredible 292 feet tall—greater than the length of a Boeing 747-400, and just shy of the length of the football field they cover:

For virtually any measurement or conversion query, Wolfram|Alpha will return a variety of dynamically computed comparisons like these. Try out a few of your own (like your age, height, and weight, for example) and let us know if you get any surprising results.

Yesterday an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 struck the South Pacific, near the Samoan islands. Wolfram|Alpha’s earthquake feed immediately brought information on that quake into the system, and continues to pick up data on aftershocks in the region. Here’s the latest 24-hour view of earthquake activity within 250 miles of Upolu, one of the Samoan islands devastated by the resulting tsunami.

(The image below reflects activity within the 24 hours before this post was written; click the image for current information.)

That earthquake in the South Pacific was the largest quake in the past 24 hours, but not the only one. Today there have been several other major quakes near Indonesia, including one of magnitude 7.6, and smaller quakes near China.

(The image below reflects worldwide earthquake activity within the 24 hours before this post was written; click the image for current information.)

Stephen Wolfram shared his thoughts and answered many of your questions about Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, and his scientific research in his live webcast on Thursday, September 17.

In case you missed it, you can check out a recording of the September 17, 2009 webcast and Stephen’s June 4, 2009 webcast on our new streaming server.

Thanks for participating and submitting great questions. We look forward to sharing more with you in future web events.

We like to demonstrate ways Wolfram|Alpha can be a helpful tool for everyone. Today we’d like to share a cool feature Wolfram|Alpha users are talking about on the web. The Retirement Savior blog posted an item on Wolfram|Alpha describing how it can be used to calculate your retirement investments.

Wolfram|Alpha’s investment-returns calculator prompts you to describe your current investment strategy. Once you submit your query, Wolfram|Alpha will provide you with a number of results such as a linear chart depicting investment value projection scenarios, pie charts of resource allocation, a bar graph that allows you to easily compare the distribution of ages at which the account balance would reach zero, and a table displaying projections of your portfolio’s value at various ages. More »

Thank you for participating. A recording of today’s webcast will be available soon on the Wolfram|Alpha Blog.

Whether it’s Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, or A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram is a man of big ideas. And this Thursday, September 17, at 2pm U.S. CDT, he will be sharing some of his thoughts, and taking your questions during a live webcast on justin.tv.

If you have a question you’d like to ask Stephen, please send it as a comment to this blog post or tweet to @Wolfram_Alpha. We’ll also be taking questions live on the justin.tv chat during the webcast.

Thanks again for all of your interest and support. We look forward to sharing this live webcast with you.

So you have more Facebook friends than anyone else on campus, the quad is a place where everyone knows your name, and you just happened to ace your business and marketing courses—it sounds like you are the perfect fit for a Wolfram|Alpha marketing internship. We’ve launched this challenging new internship program for talented and ambitious students just like you. It’s an opportunity for you to engage in immediate, real-world marketing experiences, testing out cutting-edge and traditional strategies and methods.

The semester-long internship program will be conducted on college campuses across the United States. The program integrates academic theory and scenario-based practice that puts you in the position of making mid-level business decisions, analyzing marketing campaign results, and reflecting on your campaigns. (Your professors will love this!) More »

We know college is hard. So we’re highlighting examples of how Wolfram|Alpha can make subjects and concepts a bit easier to learn. Wolfram|Alpha is a free computational knowledge engine that can help you tackle everything from calculus, to computing the number of pages for a double-spaced 1000-word essay, to comparing the flash points of methane, butane, and octane, to figuring just how much money it’s going to cost you to drive home to do your laundry. Check out a quick introduction to Wolfram|Alpha from its creator, Stephen Wolfram.

We want to help you take full advantage of this resource. Over the next term, we’ll be highlighting helpful computations and information here on the blog, and even providing ways you can get involved with our company. (Would you like to be a part of the Wolfram|Alpha Team on your campus? Stay tuned to find out how you can be involved.) For this post we selected several of our favorite examples to help you start thinking about how you can use Wolfram|Alpha in your courses, and in your always-changing college life. More »

We use this blog to provide helpful tips on using Wolfram|Alpha. So when a relevant screencast caught our eye on Twitter—“Wolfram|Alpha for Calculus Students,” produced by Robert Talbert, PhD, an associate professor of mathematics and computing science at Franklin College—we wanted share it with you. We think his straightforward video is a great demonstration of just how valuable Wolfram|Alpha is for students. In the screencast, Professor Talbert discusses the concept of Wolfram|Alpha, and illustrates how it solves problems such as factoring or expanding expressions, solving quadratic equations, and more.

The screencast covers just a few of the ways educators and students are using Wolfram|Alpha. Are you an instructor who has found innovative ways to incorporate Wolfram|Alpha into your lesson plans? Or are you a student using Wolfram|Alpha to assist in your studies? You can join others having these conversations on the Wolfram|Alpha Community site.