SKIRMISHER

Some guy recalls Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with this grainy shot of what looks like a frigging monolith on Mars. No Martian chimps, yet, but that’ll come.

link: “Monolith on Mars“

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) released the final still images taken by the onboard High Definition Television (HDTV) of the lunar explorer “KAGUYA” as it crashed on the moon. The KAGUYA was launched on September 14, 2007, and was controlled to be dropped to the Moon on June [...]

When the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover lands on Mars in 2012, it will face a unique obstacle: With an Earth weight of nearly a ton (compared to about 400 pounds for previous Mars rovers) and a Mars weight of about 750 pounds, it is too massive for any existing space parachute. So to cushion [...]

There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away [...]

If sometimes you feel really big and douchebaggy, would help if you’d take a look at this.

Expedia just made visiting the red planet as easy as going to your favorite hooker.

Hey kids, did you know that:
One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.
This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the [...]

About one hundred billion trillion — that excluding the balls to understand it.
Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, said there could be as many Earths as there are stars in the universe – one hundred billion trillion.
Because of this, he believes it is “inevitable” that life must have flourished elsewhere over the [...]

New research reveals there is hope for Mars yet. The first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars indicates the planet is still alive, in either a biologic or geologic sense, according to a team of NASA and university scientists.
“Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so [...]

You may have to wait a coupla years till the world ends properly in 2010 as the Large Hadron Collider’s repairs, initially thought to last only two months, will actually take that said time to be complete.
Coming online in September, the LHC blew a transformer that controlled its cooling in preliminary test firings.  Without the [...]

Remember that meteor that streaked across Canada a coupla weeks ago? They’ve found it:
On Nov. 27, planetary scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand from the University of Calgary and graduate student Ellen Milley brought reporters to a site where they have found numerous meteorite fragments from the bolide that streaked across the sky in Western Canada on [...]

Venus (upper left), Jupiter (upper right), and the moon align tonight, Dec. 1, to form some sort of a “smiley.”
An event similar to this one will take place about four decades from now. So this is about all that we can get in our lifetime. Cheers.
{Image: Pant0mime}

A team of 20 physicists from four institutions has literally made something from nothing, creating particles of matter from ordinary light for the first time. The experiment was carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) by scientists and students from the University of Rochester, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee, and Stanford. The [...]

The Sun’s protective bubble, aka the heliosphere, is shrinking.

New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years [...]

The £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider will be out of action for around two months after magnets over-heated, a spokesman for the project said today.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) said damage to the huge project below Switzerland, discovered yesterday, was worse than it first thought.
The collider, which was designed to send particles around a [...]

Hubble finds an object so mysterious it got astronomers’ panties in a twist, if they wear panties at all.
In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of.
The project used the Hubble Space Telescope to [...]

Now that almost everybody’s excited [some even kill themselves] about the planet-ending possibilities with the Large Hadron Collider, the current shitstravaganza begs an answer to the question, “So what happens if that proton beam hits me in a very personal way?”
Thirty years ago, in Russia, Anatoli Bugorski sort of stumbled on the answer:
As a researcher [...]