The good news-- I am writing a four eBook series with O'Reilly (publishers of MAKE) on four Do-It-Yourself Space topics!  Woo hoo!

Now the advice portion.  I occasionally have a habit of taking a more difficult path.  Here is that difficult path.  For the easy path, I recommend just doing steps 9-11, skip to 14-15, then close with 20-22 (marked in bold).

1) Get an agent by responding to a call for authors on an IT encyclopedia.
2) Offer to write the encyclopedia.
3) Write 30 page proposal.
4) Agent submits proposal to publisher.
5) Publisher loves proposal.
6) Publisher decides to stop printing encyclopedias.
7) Publisher changes mind, gets back into encyclopedia business, then changes mind again.

Given the news recently about yet another E. coli outbreak, you may be concerned E. coli is not just a plague in 'organically' processed and prepared vegetables but perhaps in regular steak  - and you would be correct.

Jackson Pollock (d.1956) is famous to mainstream people more for the movie about his troubled life than his art, but his drip paintings have intrigued more than art historians.

A quantitative analysis of Pollock's streams, drips, and coils reveals some deep knowledge of applied physics and an ability to exploit fluid dynamics.  Crossovers between art and science are nothing new, of course, Leonardo da Vinci's is the archetype of the "Renaissance man" because of his botanical sketches, proportional studies, flying machines, war engines and a painting or two.

An innovative gene therapy technique, known as genome editing, ‘searches’ a specific mutated gene and fixes it. Now, for the first time, it has been shown to work in living animals. In the study, the researchers used two versions of a genetically engineered virus (AAV, or adeno-associated virus). One of these versions carried the enzyme that cut the DNA in the right spot, and the other one transported the gene meant to replace the mutated one.

All this was done in liver cells of living mice that suffered from the blood-clotting disorder hemophilia, which is caused by a single-gene mutation and comes in two forms: hemophilia A and hemophilia B, caused by, respectively a lack of clotting factor VIII and IX. In this study, the mice suffered from the B variant.

I think of myself as non-violent, a purple guy in the blue state of Massachusetts.
When it comes to proposals in science though, I go for head shots. Nature doesn’t care if we keep repackaging bullshit. A well-fed bull does not run out of bullshit.

To stop a science zombie, a bullet to the brain is all that might stop it. I know from experience that the easiest person to fool is myself. I am on the lookout for bullets for subjects I speculate on.

I feel quite grateful to the DZERO collaboration for publishing today in the Cornell arxiv the preprint of their search for neutral MSSM Higgs bosons in the tau-pair decay mode. Not more than 12 hours ago in fact I had been looking for a suitable figure which could summarize the status of searches for those particles, to help a student who is about to graduate; but had not found anything satisfactory.

Endocarditis is a dangerous and sometimes lethal infection of the heart sometimes caused after a dental procedure.    

A pair of studies presented Saturday and today at the American Diabetes Association's Scientific Sessions in San Diego suggest diet sodas may be a dietary head fake for the body. 

Epidemiologists from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio reported data showing that diet soft drink consumption is associated with increased waist circumference in humans.  Whatever, associated is not caused - people drink diet sodas more after they put on weight, not when they are still thin - but a second study that found aspartame raised fasting glucose (blood sugar) in diabetes-prone mice is more of a concern.