New research is challenging the belief that the planet Neptune knocked a collection of planetoids known as the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt to its current location at the edge of the solar system.

The Kuiper Belt is of special interest to astrophysicists because it is a fossil remnant of the primordial debris that formed the planets.  University of Victoria Ph.D. student Alex Parker presented his results at today's meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California.

The Chinese Chang'e series is taking over the moon.  For lunch, NASA people in Florida are heading to bread lines, while meanwhile the Chinese are microwaving the entire moon for their own consumption.  Okay, I'll ditch the mixed jingoistic metaphors now and get to what really makes me hungry-- space exploration successes.

With 1 down, 1 flying, and several more coming, the Chang'e program is starting off with strong successes.  The Chang'E-1 mission mapped the entire moon in microwaves, with data presented at the European Planetary Sciences Congress conference last month (September 2010).

Arctic Ice October 2010

... the land being very high and full of mightie mountaines all covered with snowe, no viewe of wood, grasse or earth to be seene, and the shore two leages of into the sea so full of yce as that no shipping cold by any meanes come neere the same. The lothsome viewe of the shore, and irksome noyse of the yce was such as that it bred strange conceipts among us, so that we supposed the place to be wast and voyd of any sencible or vegitable creatures, whereupon I called the same Desolation.

John_Davis, 1587

I am on a diet, to the delight of my impossibly chic wife, who has no problem at all eating cake and pasta in front of me while I consume bland chicken.

I had assumed that my increasing weight was due to eating too much and no exercise but a new Université de Montréal study says it is my job doing it to me.  Whew.  I dodged a bullet there.

Regardless, in two weeks I will be back where I want and if it is true that workplace related obesity is real, my job took four years to make me a weight I did not want so four weeks is not so bad to suffer.

In the debate over human embryonic stem cell research, protesters have ethical issues with experimenting on human embryos, while proponents point to the research’s huge potential to save lives. How come no one questions why we create extra cells to use or throw away in the first place?

In April of 2009, six weeks after President Obama’s executive order lifting the Bush era policy that restricted federal funding to 21 already-extant lines, the NIH published a set of criteria for ethical (and therefore fundable) stem cell research:

Software uses many kinds of data. Sometimes it concerns worksheet data and sometimes it is data that is retrieved or generated in some way or it are results of actions. Often these data are interrelated. In that case the ensemble forms a complex object. When this is the fact then it becomes worthwhile to attach the actions that are regularly applied to the data to the object that contains the data. With comparable data structures the same will happen. The object oriented software generation uses this approach intensively.