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Next week, the first female space tourist will spend a couple of days at the international space station.
Anousheh Ansari is of course filthy fucking rich, and paid about $20 million for the ride. But you need to be rolling in disposable income to make this kind of history - only three guys got up [...]

Good Math, Bad Math has an excellent post up (with an animation and everything) on the existence of dark matter, plus a reminder on the importance of good math to good science. Even the non-sciency types should check it out, since dark matter is cool and MarkCC writes pretty accessibly here.

Pluto’s been stirring up controversy since it was discovered, and this week things finally come to a head.

A new “scientific and simple” proposal to define the word “planet” will be released Wednesday and astronomers will vote on it next week. It is not clear whether the definition will settle a long-running debate on the status [...]

Raw Story posted a recent study showing sexually degrading lyrical content can impact a teenager’s sexual habits:
Among heavy listeners of sexually degrading music - where men are “studs” and women are sex objects - 51 per cent started having sex within two years, versus 29 per cent of those who listened to little or none [...]

A little cosmology to help you sound smarter at cocktail parties:
A joint UK-US team has put forward an alternative theory of cosmic evolution.
It proposes that the Universe undergoes cycles of “Big Bangs” and “Big Crunches”, meaning our Universe is merely a “child of the previous one”.
The article also lets you in on just how [...]

The European Union is about to have a new battery recycling law:

It says a quarter of all used batteries must be collected by 2012 - rising to 45% by 2016 - and that at least half of them must be recycled.
This is just peachy, because batteries are just full of all kinds of unpleasant crap, [...]