A battered sign stands outside the wreckage of Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla. (Charlie Riedel/AP)President Barack Obama will travel to Oklahoma City on Sunday "to see first-hand the response to the devastating tornadoes and severe weather" that ravaged the area, meet with families affected by the devastation, and thank emergency responders, the White House announced Friday.

On Tuesday, Obama will head to the Jersey Shore to assess the rebuilding and recovery efforts in the months since deadly Superstorm Sandy battered the coast.

"The president, joined by Governor Chris Christie, will visit with families and business owners who have shown such resilience in the face of the destructive storm, highlight the extensive rebuilding efforts to date, and underscore his administration’s ongoing commitment to stand with the impacted communities as the important work of recovery continues," the White House said.

From William Ray Fullmer: "My nephew, Sgt. Derek Tillman Roberts, spilled his blood on the sands of Iraq to extend the right to live free to the people of the Middle East. On June 14, 2007, Derek was killed by a roadside bomb in Kirkuk, placed by those too cowardly to face him on the battle field. Derek, who was from Gold River, Calif., was 24. He served in the Army and was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division. Derek's bravery is and always will be a motivating force for us to rise to the call of those who desperately need our help to throw off the chains of oppression and cruelty." (Photo courtesy of William Ray Fullmer) Read more.

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The circumstances of their deaths are different. But the same words—"loyal," "honorable," "selfless," "smart" and "fearless"—surfaced again and again this week when family and friends remembered the American military service members close to them who sacrificed their lives for their country.

Yahoo News invited readers to mark Memorial Day by sharing

On the Radar

Memorial Day is a time when the country pauses to remember those in the military who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the country. It’s also a reminder of the soldiers who have come back from war alive but wounded in irreversible ways.

Lt. Jason Pak and Lt. Eric Zastoupil, both graduates of the West Point Military Academy, are among over 1,500 soldiers who have lost limbs fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this special Memorial Day edition of On the Radar follows their journeys of recovery.

Pak was on patrol in southern Afghanistan when the unexpected happened.

"I stepped on a mound and I just blew up,” Pak told On the Radar, “and then the next thing you know, my guys were rendering first aid."

The former West Point soccer player lost both of his legs and two fingers that day. Zastoupil similarly fell victim to an IED explosion Afghanistan, losing his left leg. While both soldiers faced challenging recoveries following their injuries, neither lost their

Students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) showed off an array of innovative media projects this week at their annual Spring show. But one project in particular caught my eye: an API that allows you to control another person’s arm over the internet.

Will Canine, Carl Jamilkoski, and Andy Sigler, all graduate students at ITP, created an open API platform that bypasses the nervous system and triggers muscle movement in a person hooked up with muscles sensors. They did so by hacking an “off-the-shelf” neuro stimulator unit and splitting its output so that it could be controlled with any interface, such as a keyboard, joystick or LEAP sensor.

In order to demonstrate their innovation for the show, the students fitted a fake skeleton’s arm with sensors that, when curled, also curled the arm of a person attached with electric muscle pads.

“We’ve been really interested in non-autonomous body control, so other people controlling your body,” explained Canine, who allowed

Are we less clever than our recent ancestors? (Live Science)A new study from researchers in Europe claims that the average IQ in Western nations dropped by a staggering 14.1 points over the past century.

"We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study," the researchers wrote in the study, which was published online in the journal Intelligence on Thursday. "Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence and are considered elementary measures of cognition."

The results might surprise some. Especially if the researchers were simply measuring visual response times. After all, in a digital world constantly competing for our attention, it would seem people generally respond more quickly to visual stimuli. However, the results appear to indicate something different.

The Victorian era ran roughly from 1837 to 1901, coinciding with the reign of England's Queen Victoria.

Storm chasers from an outfit called Fast Unit 70 uploaded raw footage of the first 10 minutes of the Moore, Okla., tornado that gives viewers a harrowing sense of what the EF5 twister looked like. Watch that footage here.

As cars and trucks zoom past, Chance Coldiron and Justin Cox's camera focuses on the dark gray funnel as it touches down. The tornado then tightens and begins to pick up debris. After a few minutes, someone can be heard saying, "It hit a house." Cars are then seen tossed into the air as the sky turns even more menacing. Urgent warnings can be heard on the storm chasers' car radio telling people to get underground.

justincox81 on YouTube posted the clip and wrote this in the description field:

Raw footage of Fast Unit 70's (Chance Coldiron & Justin Cox) coverage of the Moore tornado that was used by KOCO5 during the event on May 20th, 2013. We watched as the tornado formed in front of us and rapidly intensified then moved across highway 37 in Newcastle, OK. Then the

Cat bearding sweeps the Web (AP/WGNO)

It was only a matter of time. Love of cats and fascination with facial hair have joined together and become one exceedingly popular, furry Web meme: the cat beard.

Basically, it's where you position your cat in front of your chin and, well, voila!

The craze has even resulted in a handy how-to video. As you can see, no cats are harmed in the making of the cat beard, although some felines may get slightly annoyed by the process.

The Tumblr blog called, what else, Cat-beard.com, has collected a range of cat beard pics, from the vertical and expertly positioned (so that the cat's mouth becomes your mouth) to the horizontal.

Mashable points out that the "cuter and smaller the cat, the more rugged the beard."

3-D Printed Gun (ABC News)

The DIY 3-D gun may not be quite ready for prime time.

According to Techworld, the police commissioner in Australia’s New South Wales, Andrew Scipione, has issued a warning after his officers tested one of the firearms—dubbed the "Liberator"—and experienced a “catastrophic misfire” (no one was seriously injured).

According to the website, the NSW police used blueprints created by Defense Distributed to make two pistols that took 27 hours to create from start to finish. The cost for materials was $35 (the desktop 3-D printer costs some $1,700). Except for the firing pin and the pistol cartridge, all the pieces were plastic.

Despite the technical glitches, the NSW police force sees the printable gun as a potentially big problem, with Scipione calling the Liberator "truly undetectable, untraceable, cheap and easy to make."

Defense Distributed's plans, reports Techworld, were downloaded 100,000 times before the company took them down under pressure from the U.S. State Department. However,