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.”

More than three-quarter of Canadians, according to a new poll, don’t think the U.S. should try to promote the creation of democratic governments in other countries. The question is, do they think anyone should–or do they actually think dictatorships are OK for other people, as long as they don’t directly upset Canadians’ complacent, comfortable and …

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Don Bateman, 73, born in Saskatoon and trained at the University of Saskatchewan, has been inducted into the U.S. Inventor’s Hall of Fame for inventing the lifesaving Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System for airplanes.

Music, it is sometimes said, is a universal language. Well, yes and no. Every human culture has some form of music, but the language of music can vary wildly. You can learn to appreciate the music of another culture, but when you first hear it, it may sound like unstructured noise. New research is beginning …

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My wife and I have started a wine blog, The Willetts on Wine. It’s mostly just a place to record our own wine experiences for future reference, but you’re welcome to pay it a visit–if it points you to a great wine you wouldn’t otherwise have tried, our lives will be fulfilled. I kicked it …

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