Someone turns five years old…but apparently isn’t very happy about it. (Hint: it’s not Petrarch.)

Amy Nelson-Mile notes at Books, Words, And Writing that Petrarch was born on this day. By amazing coincidence, just 655 years later, so was I.

More photos here.

I didn’t mention this in my column about Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis-1, but it’s worth noting that one of the things aboard it is a shoebox-sized laboratory designed by NASA called Genebox, which on this and future Bigelow missions will test “how the near weightlessness of space affects genes in microscopic cells and other small life …

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More photos here.

Robert J. Sawyer quotes the news I posted at the head of the version of my science column emailed free to whomever wants it (you can subscribe here!) about my recent novel sale to DAW Books. Which I really appreciate, but reading his introduction, in which he wrote “Ed has twice been my writing student …

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…via virtual reality.

Robert Bigelow has a lot of money. In fact, he’s a billionaire (among other things, he owns the Budget Suites of America hotel chain). Not surprisingly, he’s a big proponent of capitalism. And he also firmly believes that since capitalism works so well on Earth, it should work just as well in outer space How …

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More photos here.

Not quite, but this plasma bubble would be the next best thing.

We’ve been working on moving (we still aren’t there, but we’re getting closer) into my mother-in-law’s house (she’ll move into our condo) and so my schedule has been disjointed. Hence the lack of photos of the day for the past week. I’ll try to resume normal photoblogging this week. For the two of you who …

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Well, it won’t get shiploads of sleeping colonists to the stars, but it may save lives–if it works in humans like it works in pigs.