We've never found an organic molecule (methane) in the atmosphere of a planet around a distant star before but NASA folks intend to announce next week it has been done. Should any of you desire to participate in this briefing, contact the Space Telescope Science Institute (Ray Villard at 410-338-4514 or Cheryl Gundy at 410-338-4707) by noon on March 19 for the call-in number and passcode. Plus, since we're discussing efforts to subvert science:

At least the folks at Galactic Mu think we are, because we print a summation, New Take On Invisibility - 'Shrinking' Nanoparticles Visible Size Without Reducing Physical Dimensions, rather than just violating the copyright of the Advanced Materials folks and reprinting their whole article. Well, we do what we can. The topic is interesting because current metamaterials can't be made (yet) in the optical range due to the limits of nanotechnology, so this is an interesting waypoint. I think it is a waypoint, in much the same way that disk compression was a waypoint on the road to ginormous hard drives.

There's a class war brewing and it involves DNA.

Only the wealthy can afford what is, now, around $350,000 for the kind of sequencing that can tell you if you have a disease-risk gene that can be passed on to kids. That's a Bentley.

Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland - "I’d rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane."

I like to keep tracking of interesting ways people find us and I saw a Google link for us with the keywords The world's greatest scientist. And what does it link to? Yep, yours truly. That Google is worth every penny of its gazillion dollar capitalization with results like that.

Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle fame is calling it a day - sort of - by ending her own column and starting a new one with another person. Good writer, good scientist, good community advocate. So go by and take a read at the new one once they're up and running.