This is a very cool flash video of how the sun, a low-mass star, works.

This is 1 million pennies, stacked against a guy about my height (5 feet, 10 inches):

Each cubic foot of pennies weighs about 300 pounds. Here’s 100 million:

One billion:

I wonder how many basketball courts you could fit onto this pile of 10 billion pennies:

Most important—100 billion:

I wanted to make an image with 100 billion pixels instead, but that would have been a 870 Gb file, blank. 100 billion is important because this is the reference I want you to keep in mind.  Astronomers say it is a good approximation of the average number of stars within a galaxy.

With that said, take a look at this image (click to zoom). Each cluster and every tiny dot represents an entire galaxy. Each spec in that image means 100 billion stars; most larger than our own. Now dare to tell me you do not think life exists elsewhere.

God, I love our socialized researchers and watchdogs. This is why we pay taxes!

• Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people. (New York Times)

• Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its ’serious privacy gaps.’ These include the retaining of personal information after an account has been deactivated, and the sending of personal information (other than contact info) to third parties. (www.canada.com)

• Gene therapy improves vision for the blind, by creating a new fovea, the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors. (www.technologyreview.com)

• The temperature of the sun’s outer atmosphere soars to several million degrees Kelvin (K); which is much hotter than at the sun’s surface. Scientists have been baffled by this until now. (www.spacefellowship.com)

• Seth Godin has written another unreal post, this time about the future of education. (www.sethgodin.typepad.com)

I know that I know nothing:

NewScientist reports that NASA’s Constellation program, which will replace the aging shuttle, will be designed in imperial units, as opposed to making the switch to the SI (metric) system. NASA says it would cost $370 million to make the conversion. And I say all the power to em’.

Speaking as a nearly graduated Canadian mechanical engineer, I am a staunch supporter of an American conversion to SI. At first, I was bewildered at the headline. “What?! Jeeze, I’ll do the conversion for only $100 million! How hard can it be to just keep the same parts and re-label them?” The answer is that, frankly, it really is rocket science.

First off, the Ares boosters that will be used for Constellation are derivatives of the Shuttle program. Every bit of design and testing has been conducted for these machines in Imperial units. Redesigning the connectors to the ship alone is a tough task: try training every machinist to properly measure 30.22 mm with their calipers, as they weld. Same goes for ordering parts from the hundreds, if not thousands of contracted US parts manufacturers.

Change to metric, now every bolt must be metric pitch thread, every nut must be changed to accommodate. Every calculation of mass and structural integrity has to be re-examined and re-calculated for new components. You don’t just magically say “Ok, our 3/8″ bolts are now to be called 9.525mm bolts” and call it a day.

As a Slashdot user so eloquently put it:

We’re just talking about units of measure. If it is easier to use imperial units because previous design and drawings were done in imperial, then that’s the smart choice. I would be upset if NASA was wasting taxpayer money just so that the design could be done in metric. I actually applaud NASA for making a smart, cost/benefit engineering decision.

If there’s one thing I do know, is that NASA is so underfunded that needs any bit of cash it can get.

University of Colorado at Boulder has released details of it’s research on Mars, and the results are fascinating.

Artist's rendering of how the lake would have looked about 3.4 billion years ago

Sediment data from the European Space Agency’s Infrared Imaging Surveyor, and high-res images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE, provide unambiguous evidence of this large lake.

What is of particular is not only the fact of this lake’s existence, it’s when it existed. From Astrobiology Magazine (emphasis added):

In addition, the evidence shows the lake existed during a time when Mars is generally believed to have been cold and dry, which is at odds with current theories proposed by many planetary scientists, he said. “Not only does this research prove there was a long-lived lake system on Mars, but we can see that the lake formed after the warm, wet period is thought to have dissipated.”

Planetary scientists think the oldest surfaces on Mars formed during the wet and warm Noachan epoch from about 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago that featured a bombardment of large meteors and extensive flooding. The newly discovered lake is believed to have formed during the Hesperian epoch and postdates the end of the warm and wet period on Mars by 300 million years, according to the study.

Now we know where to look for a search for life on Mars. Deep under this ancient lake, there are chances that microorganisms can be found. As mind-numbingly awesome as this is, there are still people out there who aren’t impressed by possible life on other planets, and still think this research is a waste of resources.

Doesn’t this remind you of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot?

I had to add this :

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