If you see this tonight – as in New Year’s Eve – scamper outside at midnight and peer upwards. According to About Space, Saturn will be directly overhead and the closest it will be for the next 29 years, with the rings neatly tipped to reflect sunlight. Will this work in the Southern Hemisphere? My [...]

I love a good rant. In a piece of blatant puppet blogging, here is a really good one..
So nip over and give Blogosphere a funny blip in its statistics.

According to the BBC, Mars Global Surveyor, which has been mapping the planet for NASA since 1999, has taken a new look at Isidis Planitia where the plucky hi-tech hoop of Beagle 2 was supposed to land.
Smack in the middle is a large crater, one kilometre across and seven hundred metres deep. Now [...]

Today it was too hot to grip the steering wheel. I was in a hurry – rushing for beer, coffee and flyspray from the Clunes supermarket and very aware of my dog in the hot car with her snout pushed out the window.
The woman on the cash register was friendly, with the rhythms of [...]

The sun glitters on the galvo. The wind flicks dust. What am I reading in this shadowed interior?
“Karakutsa’s remedies, which relied heavily on the local flora and fauna, had been in use since the days when Perun was god of the steppe, and the fact that Karakutsa himself had lived to such an old age [...]

Alex Shoumatoff, who wrote the Russian story above, has been a journalist for thirty years. Dispatches from the Vanishing World is both his archive and a dynamic, cause-driven website.
“…a forum for documenting and raising consciousness about the world’s fast-disappearing biological and cultural diversity. It provides first-hand, in-depth reporting from the last relatively pristine places [...]

We are all cameras recording the history of commercial design. Think back to the icons of your childhood, from cereal to soft drinks, film posters to ice cream wrappers, mascots to soft toys. Now check them against their current equivalents, which we probably don’t bother to really look at. Oh yeah, weetbix. Grab the vegemite, [...]

Three quarters of the people who have ever lived on earth are alive today. Right?
No. Not only no, but double dyed nada to the tenth time. Population Today not only disproves the idea, it buries the crittur under a truckload of rubble and builds a temple to scientific reason made of platinum, kryptonite and adamantine [...]

By the way, David Aspall on Quark Soup is providing a gruesome but important coverage of the US mad cow disease outbreak. It includes the regulatory and media perspectives and transcends the cant and lies we will surely see about this over the next few weeks. Aspall’s story starts on the 27th.
“CSPI
From the [...]

It is looking much worse. There is sweat on the British upper lip. According to the BBC (natch), “”We haven’t yet played all our cards,” said Professor David Southwood, the head of Esa’s science directorate. “With Mars Express we will be using a system that we have fully tested and understand.
He added: “At the [...]