Whew! Seems we can quit worrying about the “grey goo” fear of nanotechnology. Instead, we should focus on the possibility of devastating weapons and an unstable arms race. That’s a relief!

NOAA scientists have captured the eruption of a deep-sea volcano on tape. Cool! Um, I mean, “Hot!”

This is both a test of my new photoblogging capability and a chance to show off my lovely family; my wife Margaret Anne and my darlin’ daughter Alice, who turns three on Sunday. 

a href=’http://photos1.blogger.com/img/240/1109/1024/us.jpg’img border=’0′ style=’border:1px solid #000000; margin:2px’ src=’http://photos1.blogger.com/img/240/1109/400/us.jpg’/abr /This is both a test of my new photoblogging capability and a chance to show off my lovely family; my wife Margaret Anne and my darlin’ daughter Alice, who turns three on Sunday.nbsp;a href=’http://www.hello.com/’ target=’ext’img src=’http://photos1.blogger.com/pbh.gif’ alt=’Posted by Hello’ border=’0′ style=’border:0px;padding:0px;background:transparent;’ align=’absmiddle’/a

This is both a test of my new photoblogging capability and a chance to show off my lovely family; my wife Margaret Anne and my darlin’ daughter Alice, who turns three on Sunday. 

The “greatest unsolved problem in mathematics” may not be unsolved any longer; Purdue University mathematician Louis De Branges says he’s solved it. You can read his 23-page paper here, assuming you have the mathematical knowledge to understand it. I, alas, don’t!

A moment of silence, please, for Albert Fia, father of Canadian rocketry, who developed the still-used Black Brant research rockets in the early 1960s.

Having just read Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, this story about erupting Indonesian volcanoes caught my eye. Personally, I like living in an extremely geologically stable part of the world!

…on Mars. At least, there was once!

Here’s an excellent image of today’s transit of Venus, as photographed by the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite. It was cloudy here, so I’m just as glad I didn’t get up early enough to try to see it with my ancient Tasco refractor.

If you’re a kid interested in astronomy, as I was, there are few thrills to compare with your first view of the rings of Saturn. So you can imagine how excited astronomers (and ex-kids like myself) are with the imminent arrival of the International Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn. The $3 billion space probe, launched October …

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