doodle

CBS News' Rebecca Jarvis reports on the group of 13 artists and engineers who create more than 300 Google doodles a year that live for 24 hours on Google home pages across the world.

This story originally appeared on CBSNews.com.

Google is invoking the name Copernicus again, but this time it's not a joke.

The Web giant is celebrating with a doodle the 540th birthday of the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who challenged the way people look at the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus, who was born in 1473, is perhaps best known for his heliocentric theory, which asserted that the sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of the universe.

The doodle is a representation of Copernicus' model for the solar system -- a golden sun encircled by six planets on stylized plane.

In an effort to improve … Read more

It's not easy to celebrate a near miss on the day of an actual hit.

Google discovered this yesterday. The company was very keen to offer another of its highly involving doodles for your weekend enjoyment.

Its nerd-leaning artists thought it might be fun to create a little something that cheered the fact that Asteroid 2012 DA14 wasn't going to strike Earth and create havoc.

Sadly, an ill-timed meteorite did strike Earth and create havoc.… Read more

Google is helping the National Hockey League begin its abbreviated season.

The NHL's 48-game season will begin Saturday after a 113-day lockout, but the Web giant apparently recognizes that the ice will need some TLC before players can skate to their opening face off. So Google is rolling out a Zamboni doodle to clean things up.

The interactive doodle begins by launching a skater that scratches up the ice. A Zamboni ice resurfacer then appears that Web users can, using their mouse, manipulate through a series of tests to clean the ice.

The Zamboni pilot gets points for cleaning … Read more

Here's a chance for your child's drawing to find a platform bigger than the kitchen refrigerator. Google today announced the sixth annual Doodle 4 Google contest, which invites kids to submit a drawing that could appear on the Google homepage -- and to win thousands of dollars for themselves and their schools.

This year's theme is "My Best Day Ever..." Students in kindergarten through 12th grade are invited to submit a doodle. The winner gets a $30,000 college scholarship and wins a $50,000 technology grant for his or her school. … Read more

Are you experiencing a slightly dry feeling in your mouth? Are your limbs offering involuntary jitters and twitches?

The fiscal cliff negotiations can do that to you.

However, Google would like to tell you that it understands the pain of entering 2013 without a sheet to the wind.

Having presented a charming doodle for New Year's Eve (below), featuring so many of the characters from the doodles of 2012 (you can see all Google's doodles here), today it presents the cleanup.

Reality has chimed. The cleaners have arrived. Robert Moog, Moby Dick, and Niels Bohr have all gone … Read more

Today's Google Doodle honors the birth of a computer visionary who believed such machines could be more than just number crunchers.

Born December 10, 1815, Ada Lovelace is perhaps best known for her contributions toward Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Designed but never actually built until 1991, the Analytical Engine is in many ways one of the ancestors of today's computer systems.

A mathematician and writer, Lovelace took on the task of first translating and then expanding upon an article describing the Analytical Engine. Her notes contains what some people think of as early computer progams or algorithms, … Read more

I'm not feeling lucky. I'm feeling scared.

For Google has chosen November 8 to celebrate Dracula's daddy, Bram Stoker.

Yes, the latest doodle is an especially creepy tribute to Stoker's legacy -- which, some might say, has brought us to the apogee represented by Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

Stoker was actually Irish and was a theater critic before he sank his teeth into novels.

He began to write while he was the director of the Lyceum Theatre in London. His conception of Dracula was written as a series of made-up diary entries, newspaper clippings, and … Read more

Google's latest doodle may not be as interactive as some in the past, but it's pretty appropriate for the day.

The doodle follows an Election Day theme, directing people where to vote when they click on the Google search page image.

The first link listed is a box for users to enter their addresses for where they're registered to vote. Clicking "get my info" sends voters to Google's politics & elections page, with details about the user's polling place and ballot summary, as well as links to "insights," YouTube Live, and other election-related information. … Read more