The earthquake that shook Sumatra on on April 11, 2012 is distinct, not just because it was  magnitude-8.6 but also because it was both larger than scientists thought an earthquake of its type could ever be and it was rupturing along multiple faults that lie at nearly right angles to one another.

Like an underwater earthquake in a maze. 

A little nuclear robot on Mars is getting all of the attention this week but Earth has plenty of undiscovered life - a third of Earth's organisms live in our planet's rocks and sediments and they are almost a complete mystery.

As a newly minted, 1 year old professor, this is the deep end of the astronomy edu cation pool. I am swimming in the insights and experiences of people with more experience than me. I recommend attending an Astronomical Society of the Pacific meeting for this very reason. This is where you can find the answers to questions you hadn't yet realized were questions.

It will take a while for me to assimilate (and type; I am using a nook), but here are three tidbits.

If you give a planetarium show about supernovas providing the elements of life, and your visuals show supernovae, your audience will walk out raving about your cool show that taught them about.... how supernovas occur. The visuals were the story, not the voice-over narrative.

Climate change advocacy groups are not happy with U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern's recent statement at Dartmouth College renouncing a limit of 2 degree celsius (2C) temperature rise as a global goal for UN climate negotiations. Stern said that agreeing to a framework to achieve the 2C goal would "only lead to deadlock" and that a new agreement should give countries "flexibility." 

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Gibson Guitar Corp. entered into a criminal enforcement agreement resolving a criminal investigation into allegations that the company violated the Lacey Act by illegally purchasing and importing ebony wood from Madagascar and rosewood and ebony from India. 

Pyros small tactical munition completed a successful warhead and guidance system test, according to Raytheon.

There are three choices for guiding the weapon to the target: GPS coordinates, inertial navigation or laser designation.   There are also three options for engaging the target: height-of-burst, point-of-impact or fuze-delay detonation. The end-to-end test validated the weapon's guidance modes (semi-active laser and global positioning system), its height-of-burst sensor, electronic safe and arm device, and multi-effects warhead.

Medieval clerics did not like the prospect of giving up sex - heck, every man getting getting married dreads the part about giving up sex  - so even when they had to do so by Papal decree there was resistance to it. You think changing from a Latin to local language Mass was controversial? Genitalia are a lot more personal. 

Priests, of course, used to be married but that changed hundreds of years later after the foundation of Christianity. The justifications were that a priest should imitate Christ, who was celibate (unmarried), and still later there was an argument and decree that priests who were handling the sacraments had to also be unpolluted by sexual activity - chaste.

The Carnival of Cosmology: Bloggers on Dark Energy is now up and running on Matthew R. Francis' Galileo's Pendulum:

In the spirit of blog carnivals, several of us—cosmologists, physicists, astronomers, and writers who just love all these subjects—decided to write about one of the abiding mysteries of modern cosmology. That mystery is dark energy, the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.