Michael Koenig:

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan and the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km with a high ISO HD Camera developed by NHK Japan, nicknamed the SS-HDTV camera. All credit goes to them.

Micah Zenko:

Is this the world we want to live in? Because we're creating it.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Brian Greene:

When it comes to the universe, what you see is not what you get.

Neal Stephenson:

In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it's easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past. Today's belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age.

Freeman Dyson:

The truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS

NASA’s curiously worded press release earlier this week about an event later today prompted speculation that the space agency had discovered extraterrestrial life; going by a leak ahead of conference, it’s actually something about as alien as you can get from physiology as we know it, only on this very planet. According to NOS, NASA has found a new type of bacteria in Mono Lake, California, which lives with levels of arsenic in its biology that were hitherto believed impossible.

NASA find new lifeform: arsenic microbe widens likelihood of extraterrestrial life - SlashGear

A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. The team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus to assemble the components needed to crack apart a molecule of water, yielding a fourfold boost in efficiency over similar processes.

MIT Researchers Harness Viruses to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

Interstellar travel is impossible - very interesting!

Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he's ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.

There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The original crew of "Star Trek" featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.

"Well, they're all dead," Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.

Edelstein's personal interest in this thought experiment began 20 years ago, when his son Arthur asked him if there was friction in space. The father responded that yes, there would be hydrogen bumping off a spaceship. But he soon realized that the stray atoms of hydrogen gas would actually go right through the ship traveling close to light speed, and irradiate both crew and electronics in the process.

SPACE.com -- Warp Speed Will Kill You

Time lapse video of night sky as it passes over the 2009 Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas.

The galactic core of Milky Way is brightly displayed.

Images taken with 15mm fisheye lens.

From the archive:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas

Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.

The experts concluded Ida was not simply a lemur but a 'lemur monkey', displaying a mixture of both groups, and therefore putting her at the very branch of the human line.

Ida: Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Social Networks and Happiness

Messenger Photos of Mercury

I thought this was interesting -- it fits with Jared Diamond's argument about malaria.

The researchers compared that sample with modern strains to determine its mutation rate. Then they matched that rate with the 1959 sample, tracing their common ancestor to between 1884 and 1924.

The researchers surmised that the creation of colonial cities around the turn of the century was the catalyst that allowed the virus to take hold.

Jim Moore, an anthropologist at UC San Diego who was not associated with the study, said the fact that the virus could have spread unnoticed for decades is no surprise, given the mortality rates in Africa during the colonial period.

"The conditions then were horrendous in terms of how Africans were treated," he said. "People dying of AIDS would have been part of the background."

HIV dates back to around 1900, study shows - Los Angeles Times

Science Debate 2008 worked with the leading organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States.

There are probably many readers interested in this. Both candidates claim they will support increased funding for basic science research.

Sciencedebate 2008