The Mars Rovers have had their missions extended by six months after making it through the Martian winter solstice. Quite an astonishing success story…

Well, I’ve been a bit lax in posting my writing and reading diaries. (Sound of one hand slapping the back of the other.) There. That’ll teach me. br / br /In any event, yesterday and today (and last week) I worked on emExcalibur Reforged/em. I’m now doing line by line rewriting and rethinking, a slow …

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Well, I’ve been a bit lax in posting my writing and reading diaries. (Sound of one hand slapping the back of the other.) There. That’ll teach me. In any event, yesterday and today (and last week) I worked on Excalibur Reforged. I’m now doing line by line rewriting and rethinking, a slow but enjoyable process; …

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It’s the strangest mental phenomena most of us ever experience: the feeling that we’ve already done or seen something that we’re really doing or seeing for the first time. It’s called “déjà vu,” French for “already seen,” and although nobody doubts it exists–surveys indicate that about two-thirds of adults have had at least one déjà …

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A new microscope at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has set a record for imaging the unimaginably small. Their new microscope (with some computer help) has a resolution of 0.6 angstrom. That’s small enough to see rows of dumbell-shaped atoms in a silicon crystal.

This looks more like a fantasy headline than an SF headline, but there it is in the New Scientist (well, technically, their headline says “Spacecrafts powered by thunder,” which is the first time I ever saw that particular plural, but I’m correcting it for them).

More Martian methane news: the incidence of methane in the Martian atomsphere correlates with water vapor: in other words, where there’s water, there’s methane. Since one possible source of methane is life, and life presumably needs water… Hmmm…

Perhaps credit for shooting down the Red Baron should rightly go to the anonymous machine gunner whose bullet creased the Baron’s skull nine months before his demise. And here I always thought the Baron was eventually shot down by a white beagle with long black ears…

The Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes are in the grip of an unknown force that seems to be holding them back as they head into interstellar space. Dark matter? A flaw in general relativity? Or simply a propellant leak? Nobody knows… (cue spooky music)

Nobody is sure what this is good for yet, but it sounds cool.

If shape-shifting robots aren’t science-fictional, I don’t know what is.

No, AMD, in this instance, is not the computer chip manufacturer, but rather age-related macular degeneration. My mother-in-law has lost most of her vision to it, and I, with my extremely myopic and astigmatic eyes, am apparently also at higher risk than others. Hence my interest in this new gene technique that is entering trials …

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