You may have thought Angry Birds is a waste of time. Information Week are reporting that the new Angry Birds Space game was “developed in collaboration with NASA through a Space Act Agreement”, a kind of commercial partnership NASA has used for “more than 50 years”. The article explains:
NASA seized on Angry Birds Space as an opportunity to educate the public on the law of physics that’s fundamental to everything it does: gravity. On NASA.gov, it used the occasion to explain the difference between normal gravity ($1g$), zero gravity ($0g$), and microgravity ($1 \times 10^{-6} g$), and to point out that experiments on the International Space Station happen in a microgravity environment. In a video demo of what that looks like in practice, astronaut Don Pettitt used a slingshot to catapult an Angry Bird across the interior of the Space Station.
The article outlines a series of experiments NASA will be undertaking in microgravity, though really the game is an outreach activity:
NASA hopes that Angry Birds Space will spark kids to take a keener interest in math, physics, and engineering careers… Of course, there’s a gigantic leap from the animated world of flying feathers into the real world of astronomy, aerospace science, and propulsion systems.