Legos to Jupiter

Because we know what's important.

Things and stuff

At least we'll have somewhere to move to when we wreck this one:  Rise of the Super-Earths Astronomers have discovered a giant new kind of planet that could hold life -- and they could change everything

Good.  Is anyone paying attention?  Ahmadinejad says Iran ready for nuclear talks

Monsanto, bringing chemicals to your stomach via genetically altered food. Millions against Monsanto. Leaked: US to Start ‘Trade Wars’ with Nations Opposed to Monsanto, GMO Crops And Monsanto's herbicide Roundup linked to infertility.  But what's not to like?

Superbugs spied off the Antarctic coast...  Didn't Godzilla start this way?

Gutting public schools because the Koch brothers want you dumb.

And uh... duh:
Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

*edited for crappy grammar.

Voyager 1

Sails closer to true interstellar space...

But now, after 33 years, that has changed: at 17 billion kilometers (10.6 billion miles) from the Sun, the spacecraft has reached the point where the solar wind has slowed to a stop. Literally, the wind is no longer at Voyager’s back.

There is gas between the stars, which astronomers call the interstellar medium. The solar wind blows out into it, slowing. There is a region, over a billion kilometers thick, where the solar wind plows to a halt, creating a roughly spherical shell around the solar system. That’s called the heliosheath, and it looks like Voyager 1 is now solidly inside it. In fact, it’s been there for four months or so; the scientists measuring the solar wind speed noticed it dropped to 0 back in June, but it took a while to make sure this wasn’t just some local eddy in the flow. It’s not. Voyager 1 now has calm seas ahead.

But the probe is still moving outward at 60,000 kph (38,000 mph). In a few more years it’ll leave the heliosheath behind, and when that happens it will truly be in interstellar space, the vast and nearly empty region between the stars. At that moment it will be the first human device ever to truly leave the solar system and enter the great stretches of the galaxy beyond.

To infinity and beyond!

Blog sprinkles

The Chinese just have to do everything better:

The jam on the main north-south motorway into Beijing has been blamed on a set of roadworks that is intended to alleviate congestion caused by thousands of trucks bring coal and perishable goods into the city.

At its farthest extent trucks joining the back of queue in Inner Mongolia were taking several days to reach their destination, crawling along at about 2mp/d – or miles per day, the measure of speed on the clogged section.

Fantastic ancient art work:

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Just looking for a scapegoat to beat to death and hang in the village square:

This is teabaggery crowd in America today.

Oh happy news!! New microbe discovered eating oil spill in Gulf!!.... Wait a minute.... If you read down to the last paragraph, who is funding these marvelous scientists who have discovered this microbe? (my bold):

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67 percent, while within the plume it was 59 percent.

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.

Ah. Prostituted scientists. So why on earth should I believe you guys, then? And ignore the crude dumped in the local landfills.... and ignore the guy who was telling the truth months ago:

What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing -- and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.

"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.

"Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there," he said. "And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."

Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.

Credo Action: We need to cut military spending, not Social Security:

Sign our petition to the members of the deficit commission telling them to make recommendations that significantly lower military spending, allow the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% to expire, and modify health care reform to include a robust public option to lower costs.

Putting Glenn Beck into perspective using MLK.

Omg.... Sean Connery is 80.

Marcellina of The Practice Room has a link showing how far it is from Ground Zero to the 'mosque'.

You do that. I'm sure you'll learn something: Conservatives Across The U.S. Plan Parties To Read The Constitution Out Loud

Obviously because it's fun! Sloth and Gluttony Hard to Shake Even For the Healthy

If we were listening to Ray Bradbury we'd be packing our bags right now!

New solar system looks much like home

The newly discovered solar system may contain the largest number of planets ever found orbiting another star.

Although... if you look at the space junk we've left in our wake just around Earth, I'm sure the other star systems hope we won't figure out how to space travel....

Anyway... we're all gonna diiiiiieeeeeee! Or lose all our invested money which comes down to the same thing....

And they're coming for dinner!

Aliens may exist but contact would hurt humans: Hawking

Too late, the invitations have already been mailed out. And there is no way of retrieving them...

Mars has proof of ancient lakes and rivers

And still has ice. And now apparently Venus had them....

Our solar system really went through a major drought and didn't recover, didn't it?



Update:
Mars Flight Simulation: 6 Men Endure 105 Days Of Isolation In Simulated Flight

MOSCOW -- Russian engineers broke a red wax seal and six men emerged from a metal hatch after 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars.

Sergei Ryazansky, the captain of the six-man crew, told reporters at a Moscow research institute near the Kremlin on Tuesday that the most difficult thing was knowing that instead of making the 172-million mile (276-million kilometer) journey they were locked in a windowless module of metal canisters the size of railway cars.

The men, chosen from 6,000 applicants, were paid euro15,000 ($20,987) each to be sealed up in the mock space capsule since March 31_ cut off almost entirely from the outside world.

They had no television or Internet and their only link to the outside world was communications with the experiment's controllers -- who also monitored them via TV cameras -- and an internal e-mail system. Communications with the outside world had 20-minute delays to imitate a real space flight.