Wherever you are – anywhere in the world – on August 5th, contribute to science by taking a photo of a blank white piece of paper, outside in the sun, between 4:00 and 7:00 pm local time.

Your photo will used to measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back from the Earth -- our planet's "albedo." It's one way scientists can monitor how much energy – and heat – is being absorbed by our planet.

Read more at ScienceForCitizens.net

Here is what you need to do:

On August 5, 2011, take a photo between 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm local time.
Put a white piece of paper on a flat surface. The white paper should fill 1/4 to 1/2 of the total view.

What is the world coming to when a man can't even split atoms in his own kitchen any more?   

Richard Handl said he has always been attracted to physics and chemistry and so he decided to do a little citizen science.  It was no secret, he even kept a blog about it.  In it, he described how he managed a minor meltdown at home but there were no dangerous radiation levels.

When he figured he might be doing something illegal - Sweden is progressive and tolerant but they are not the ACLU - he wrote the Sweden's Radiation Authority and they replied to the lovable scamp by sending the police.   What did they find?  Radium, americium and uranium so they arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.

A drought has left the OC Fisher Reservoir in San Angelo State Park of West Texas almost empty, except for stagnant, dead fish that have made the water a deep red.


Credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife Inland Fisheries--San Angelo, and it's a lot more red now.

The controversy over human embryonic stem cell research was a policy one more than a science one; with so many diverse scientists there had to be an ethical standard created by society, just like with animal testing and the environment.

Since the introduction of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act in the UK, with standards much looser than the US and most of Europe, 155 ‘admixed’ embryos, containing both human and animal genetic material, have been created according to the Daily Mail.

Just as some flowers use bright colors to attract insect pollinators, other plants may use sound to lure in nectar-eating bats.  One rain-forest vine has a dish-shaped leaf located above a cluster of flowers that appears to help bats find them (and the plant's tasty nectar) by reflecting back the calls the flying mammals send out, new research indicates. 

While there is other evidence that plants use bats' sonar systems to attract them, this is the first time scientists have shown that a plant can produce an "echo beacon" that cuts through sonic clutter of reflected echoes, and that this signal can cut a bat's search time for food in half, according to the researchers, led by Ralph Simon, a research fellow at the University of Ulm in Germany.

A NASA satellite has caught a stunning, yet eerie, video of a huge plasma twister rising up from the surface of the sun.  The video, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows a plasma eruption that swirls up like a tornado to a dizzying height of up to 93,206 miles (150,000 kilometers) above the solar surface.

"Its height is roughly between 10 to 12 Earths," solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula fame asks why something obvious wasn't in the Ten Commandments - not molesting the vulnerable, like kids.   Pretty obvious, but that is not why I link to it.  I link to it because I learned there is actually not only a 'Hobo' set of rules but an actual hobo convention every year, which seems to defy the point of being a hobo but it's still interesting and I got a little smarter knowing that.

If you leave a job, you likely just leave a job because it does little good to carpet bomb an employer, especially since future employers frown on militant, slightly unbalanced people.

But it's a Whole Foods - even the shoppers are slightly unbalanced so a future employer won't expect much.  If Whole Foods customer statistics were extrapolated out to the population, vaccine herd immunity would evaporate for the entire country.   They are anti-science kooks, but the progressive kind, so most in science tolerate them in a way they don't do for conservatives because, you know, they aren't shopping next to conservatives in a Whole Foods.

When you think of underwater photography, you probably think of the clear ocean waters of the Bahamas or other exotic tropical locales - certainly that's where I would go.

Andrej Belic has other ideas.  The whole site is done in Flash so it's impossible to navigate but this is a guy who does things the hard way and, like the pictures he takes, the effort is worth it.