Loris Z.com

Agh:

“For the first time ever, NASA beamed a song — The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” — directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4.

The transmission over NASA’s Deep Space Network commemorated the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of NASA’s founding and the group’s beginnings. Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe.”

See? This is why we don’t have colonies on Mars by now. They’re more interested in spending awful amounts of money and time sending fucking songs to Polaris.

I buy:

(Via JWZ)

Sometimes, all that money shot into space does pay for the effort:

This stunning close-up view shows mountainous terrain that reaches about 10 kilometers (6 miles) high along the unique equatorial ridge of Iapetus. The view was acquired during Cassini’s only close flyby of the two-toned Saturn moon.
Above the middle of the image can be seen a place where an impact has exposed the bright ice beneath the dark overlying material.

The image was taken on Sept. 10, 2007, with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 3,870 kilometers (2,400 miles) from Iapetus.

(found on Ben’s LJ)

Wonderfully insane:

These next experiments went one step further. They involved scientists hooking up subjects with virtual-reality goggles that displayed a 3D copy of their own body, as seen from behind, in front of them. (Basically, if was as if they were standing behind themselves.) The scientists rubbed the back of the avatar with a stick while performing the same action on the real subject’s body. Voila: The subjects began to identify with the avatar so strongly that they felt they avatar was their real body — i.e. that they were floating incorporeally behind themselves.

(Dust and the Helix Nebula)

Here:

Expedition 14 flight engineer Suni Williams uses a digital still camera to expose a photo of her helmet visor during a February 2007 spacewalk. Also visible in the reflections in the visor is a solar array wing. During the spacewalk, Williams and mission commander Michael Lopez-Alegria reconfigured the second of two cooling loops for the Destiny laboratory module, secured the aft radiator of the P6 truss after retraction and prepared the obsolete Early Ammonia Servicer for removal this summer.

During her stay aboard the space station, Williams set a new record for the longest duration spaceflight by a woman, surpassing Shannon Lucid’s mark of 188 days, 4 hours set in 1996.

Just a theory, but it sounds pretty interesting (no pun intended, of course)

“Anesthetics, they suggest, lower the temperature at which lipids become solid, making it difficult for the waves to form, thereby preventing nerves from sending pain signals. They also suggest that as the waves travel, they change the shape of the cell membrane, producing the electrical pulse that scientists currently mistake for the primary function of nerve cells.”

Link.

“This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows infant stars “hatching” in the head of the hunter constellation, Orion. Astronomers suspect that shockwaves from a supernova explosion in Orion’s head nearly three million years ago may have initiated this newfound birth.”

(Crescent Rhea occults crescent Saturn)

(Dark Matter)