The Phoenix Mars Lander is dead, says NASA.  Last week, the Mars Odyssey orbiter flew over the Phoenix landing site in final attempts to communicate with the lander but no transmission was detected and since Phoenix also did not communicate during 150 flights earlier this year, NASA declared its mission over.

The latest image transmitted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed what appears to be ice damage to the lander's solar panels.

Birds wouldn't be happy in a Trader Joe's, it seems.   Stuffed with aisles full of organically grown, gluten-free, range fed deliciousness, birds would see through expensive marketing and know that, nutritionally, organic food is no better, it is just a different process.

And scientist birds would be confused why no one in the food industry knows what the word 'organic' means.

What Is The Meaning Of "organic" (and Inorganic) Food? by professor Lee Silver

Lance Armstrong will be in my neighborhood tomorrow but he won't be coming by for coffee.  It's the first stage of the Amgen Tour of California, starting in Nevada City and ending in Sacramento 104 miles later.

I recently saw an article that surprised me, and it isn't often I am surprised by anything that shows up on the Internet.   It was written by Adrienne J. Burke at the New York Academy of Sciences and titled "Conversations with seven Science 2.0 pioneers" but that isn't what surprised me either; Science 2.0 gets used all of the time and it is a registered trademark (of yours truly) but I only bothered to trademark it when people started trying to use it to make money.    The NYAS article is free so they aren't going to get a cease-and-desist or anything like that.

If you hadn't noticed before today, the impact of the Gulf Oil spill may have been understated.  Sure, sure, I know what you are thinking; in the Internet-plus-24-hour-news-Age everything is overstated but just this once the mass hysteria apparently did not come close to the actual damage.

The issue still remains how to clean it up and it will involve a little bit of cutting edge technology but also a whole lot of ancient physics - and I'll even show you how to duplicate it in your house.