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Water ice and evidence of historic rainfall on Mars.
Smaller, rocky exoplanets near the habitable zone around their stars are being found. For a totally awesome exoplanet slideshow, click here.
(Because I need to think about something other than people right now. Ugh!)

Well guys, I’m out for the summer. Tomorrow I leave for Europe. In our group meeting last week, my coworker said he finally figured out the pattern: every summer, my boss goes on tour, like a rock star. He has probably half a dozen countries to visit in the next two months, […]

Seriously, I had all the ones in the Solar System memorized when I was six years old. Yeah, back when Pluto (a) was not only a planet but the smallest planet and (b) didn’t have a moon, and when Jupiter only had 9 moons and Saturn only had 12 moons…oh, those were the dayz…
Of […]

Cute little devils, aren’t they.
So I was talking to my ex-husband…well, one of my ex-husbands, the one I actually reproduced with…the other day, and I was asking him how his new baby was doing (he just got remarried about a year ago) and he said she was fine, and then he said, “You know, she’s […]

I promised you guys a polymer lecture, and I had a good boring one about polymer stabilized systems all mapped out in my brain. Lucky for you, I spent the day engaged in some very cutting-edge research on polymers, or at least that’s how we explained it to our boss when he came into […]

Pretend that you’re a journalist for the BBC. You’ve just seen the results of a scientific study on a group of women that shows a correlation between a large hip-to-waist ratio and high scores on cognitive tests. (Ignore, for a moment, the absurdity of doing such a study in the first place.) Now you’re going […]

So we’ve all heard about the Blackwater thing by now, right? After last Sunday, when Blackwater Christofascist mercenaries went on a killing spree, murdering at least 28 people in cold blood, Iraq’s puppet government finally said “enough is enough,” and revoked Blackwater’s license to operate in the country. This isn’t the first time that Blackwater […]

Some good news for people who like alternative energy: ethanol is back on the table.
Cellulosic ethanol is ethanol that comes from cellulose instead of sugar. This is good because most plants don’t have a lot of sugar, but all plants have lots of cellulose. So, instead of using food crops, (like corn and sugar cane […]

Awesome.
Scientists and Australian beer maker Foster’s are teaming up to generate clean energy from brewery waste water — by using sugar-consuming bacteria…
The fuel cell is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol.
The battery produces electricity plus clean water, said Prof. Jurg Keller, the university’s wastewater expert

Scientists have created chickens that lay eggs containing proteins that go in anti-cancer treatments.
The Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, says it has produced five generations of birds that can produce useful levels of life-saving proteins in egg whites.
The work could lead to a range of drugs that are cheaper and easier to make.

Raw Story has printed a letter sent to Congress from thousands of US scientists and experts.
In it, our scientific community expresses unconditional recognition of the real dangers of global warming, the impact it’s already had on our planet, and the urgent need for government action to reduce our fossil fuel consumption. Though […]