Category: Blog

Here’s a fascinating article from NASA about surface conditions on Titan. Infrared rainbows, liquid methane showers, rushing rivers, towering waves…sounds downright homey, as long as you’re dressed for the -290 F weather.

The iPod is old hat. Here’s the latest thing in music playback: a toothbrush that transmits music through the jawbone.

You’ve heard of nanotech, but here’s a story about vinotech: the science and technology that is transforming winemaking and giving the new-world producers who use it a leg up over their tradition-bound old-world counterparts.

It’s “The Greatest Saturn Portrait…Yet” from the Cassini space probe folks.

This looks like a really interesting story, but I’m way too sleepy to read it all the way through…

A 25,000-acre sheep farm in the Australian outback has been purchased as the site of a proposed 3,280-foot solar power tower. That’s twice as tall as the CN tower, and the structure would pump out as much electricity as a small nuclear reactor.

Here’s a bit of a shocker from New Scientist: “Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels.” The culprit: rotting vegetation in the reservoirs, which often flood forested land.

Let’s see, am I ready to devote myself full-time to blogging and give up all that nasty book- and column-writing and acting stuff I also do to make a buck? Let’s say I wanted to earn $50,000 a year (hey, why not?). Hassenpfeffer is currently getting 15 or 20 visitors a day–let’s be generous, and …

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Bacteria frozen 30,000 years ago started swimming around as soon as they were thawed out–a startling finding that has implications for the possibility of finding ancient life on Mars.

Space colonization has never made me giggle, and now a lot more people are taking it seriously, too.

I’ve already reprinted the review of Lost in Translation from Romance Reviews Today, but here’s the link to the review in its natural habitat–just so you can see I didn’t make it all up.

Hard as it is to imagine, the first full-blown theatrical production of The Sound of Music is about to open in Vienna. Seems it has always suffered from a local “authenticity deficit.”