In Honor Of Christiaan Huygens

On this day in 1655, Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn's moon Titan. Below is NASA's breathtaking footage as the Huygens probe drifts over landscape suggestive of snowy mountaintops, river channels and shorelines before coming to rest in a dry riverbed scattered with polished stones.

One of my favorite moments in the film starts at 3:42 into the 4:41 footage, when the shadow of the probe's parachute passes across the eerily familiar terrain.

Now We Can Race Them!

In order to study "postcopulatory sexual selection," scientists have engineered glow-in-the-dark sperm.

From Science Daily:

"...many advances in reproductive and evolutionary biology have been constrained by the inability to discriminate competing sperm of different males and by the challenges of observing live sperm inside the female reproductive tract. "

Whew!

(Photo by Jen @ Your Kid Matters)

Afternoon News 3/16/10

A "Blood Protest" Today in Thailand seems "unlikely to solve Thailand's immediate problems." No offense, but it also looks pretty gross.

Corey Haim laid to rest today in Toronto. We'll miss you Lucas.

If you keep eating that junk, it'll kill you dead. First Lady Michelle Obama speaks to American Grocery Manufacturers today and asks them to ease up on making foods "that are sweeter, richer, and saltier than ever before."

Queers still invisible to the US Census, but we're making a teensy bit of progress.

Scientists find amphipod, squid deep below the Antarctic ice where they didn't expect to find anything.

Planet, Schmanet, Janet!

Last Saturday, March 13th the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company held their second annual "Pluto is a Planet" protest march in Seattle.

Pluto was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet at the IAU (International Astronomical Union) summit in Prague in 2006. This is an insult to one of my favorite planets and to a great hero of science, Clyde Tombaugh (pictured). Tombaugh discovered planet Pluto on Tuesday, Feb. 18th, 1930.

The IAU ruled in response to Michael Brown's discovery of Xena in 2003, that a planet is "a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be redounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighboring region of planetesimals."

Hmph.

I'm not a scientist, but doesn't that mean that Uranus Neptune is not planet, since it hasn't cleared Pluto out of its neighboring region? (Pluto and Uranus's Neptune's orbits cross each other, as a matter of fact.)

Take that, IAU jerkwads!

Visit the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company site for all sorts of angry, Pluto- related schwag. Wear your "Pluto is a Planet," T - shirt with pride.

This injustice cannot stand, man.

(Hat tip to Snickerdoodle, AKA Dr. Brent Zenobia - super genius.)

Update/Correction: Of course, Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit, not Uranus's. But it is so much more fun to type and say: "Uranus, Uranus, Uranus!" (Snickerdoodle saves the day again.)