One hour and twenty minutes until Curiosity (hopefully) lands! You can watch NASA's livestream here, and find a bunch of other info (including Curiosity's twitter stream, which I somehow have a hunch is ghostwritten) here. It's a cheeky little thing.

ETA: 25 minutes to go! I ate some ice cream, and now I'm sitting here practicing eyelets while ( Read more... )

Oh, Sinfest. How accurate you sometimes are.

So, hey, does anyone remember that ridiculous theory that rain follows the plow? The idea was that the Great Plains were a dry desert until settlers came along and farmed them in the middle-to-late 1800s, making the rain fall. Yeah. As Wikipedia notes, the theory's pretty discredited now, to put it ( Read more... )

I found this passage buried in Wikipedia's entry on Alfalfa, apparently written without a shred of irony. Oh, science, how you sometimes make me LOL.

Alfalfa pollination is somewhat problematic, however, because Western honey bees, the most commonly used pollinator, are not suitable for this purpose; the pollen-carrying keel of the Alfalfa flower ( Read more... )

Did you know about 2,400 million years ago there was an event colloquially called the Oxygen Catastrophe, and it was responsible for most of life (and even rocks!) as we know it? I did not, which is a shame because it is fascinating!

The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE, also called the oxygen catastrophe or oxygen crisis or Great Oxidation) was the ( Read more... )

I am reading this article about scurvy, and it is fascinating beyond all reasonable measure. You know how in the 1700s England figured out, hey, eating citrus cures scurvy, so maybe we should eat that on sea voyages? Turns out that, through a series of amazing coincidences that seems ridiculous and yet make perfect sense, by the early 1900s the ( Read more... )

Having now read volumes 1&2, I can confirm for anyone wondering that Gakuen Alice is weird. And disturbing. And incredibly cute, which makes the incredibly DEPRESSING, HORRIBLE things that happen that much worse. It's like if Koge Donbo decided to rewrite Kodocha as some sort of psychotic child abuse story with magical powers. I both love it and ( Read more... )