NASA is dead.  Jedi killed it.

Used to be, growing geeks wanted to go to Space Camp.  To fly rockets, to mimic operating a shuttle, to #$^ing be an astronaut.  It was engineering and space heaven.  Based on an idea tossed out by rocket god Wernher von Braun and given life in 1982 by a state agency, it was all about to know what it’s like to train like an astronaut.

"We have band camp, football, cheerleading; why don't we have a science camp?" [von Braun]

Conservatives have long lamented the politicization of science.  And why wouldn't they?  Scientists as a bloc haven't voted Republican in decades and when Republicans limit science, there is an outcry (and even whole books!) but when a Democrat limits science the outcry is pretty much limited to ... me.   Conservatives have not, for example, lamented the politicization of talk radio because they do much better there.

Researchers have unearthed a new species of horned dinosaur in Mexico with larger horns that any other species – up to 4 feet long.  The finding has given scientists fresh insights into the ancient history of western North America, according to a research team led by paleontologists from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.

"We know very little about the dinosaurs of Mexico, and this find increases immeasurably our knowledge of the dinosaurs living in Mexico during the Late Cretaceous," said Mark Loewen, a paleontologist with the Utah Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study.

A project under development at the University of Nevada, Reno, called VI Fit can help children who are blind become more physically active and healthy through video games. The human-computer interaction research team in the computer science and engineering department has developed a motion-sensing-based tennis and bowling exergame.

"Lack of vision forms a significant barrier to participation in physical activity and consequently children with visual impairments have much higher obesity rates and obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes," Eelke Folmer, research team leader and assistant professor in the computer science and engineering department, said.

I complain every time we have a family dinner at my sister’s house. Don’t get me wrong, I like my family and everything, but she moved with her daughter and son way out to the remotest parts of central Ohio and it takes forever to get there. But certain benefits are hard to measure.

This is her son, my nephew, with the smaller of their two Great Danes in the background. I’ll try to spare you the ‘cutest-nephew-in-the-world, proud uncle’ stuff.

In a mail message sent to the INFN president Roberto Petronzio and a few other distinguished particle physicists (not me, I got it third-hand), Carlo Rubbia announced today at 3.53 PM that the ICARUS experiment has begun operations. Below is the unamended text, which I excuse myself if I distribute freely, given the scientific value of the information and my conviction that I am not harming in any way the experiment nor the people involved (leave alone my own employer, INFN):

"We have the pleasure to announce that today at 12:14. immediately after turn on of the detector, tracks have been observed by one of the cryostats of T600 triggered by the internal phototube counters.

Finally, there is at least some controversy about Ardipithecus ramidus - 'Ardi'.  

Ardi was the missing link that was bigger than a meteor hitting the Earth or whatever, right?  Nope, that was Darwinius, also called Ida (see Science by PR Blitz).  This one got nowhere near the press because they didn't have a book and TV show about it before the science was even revealed.
 

Researchers writing in Science have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.

The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository – something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.

Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern Ocean floor between Antarctica and South Africa, the international team led by Dr Luke Skinner of the University of Cambridge radiocarbon dated shells left behind by tiny marine creatures called foraminifera (forams for short).

Scientists say ancient fossils unearthed in the Sahara desert belong to a new type of pterosaur (giant flying reptile or pterodactyl) that existed about 95 million years ago. According to the findings published PLoS ONE, the researchers consider the newly identified pterosaur to be the earliest example of its kind.

The scientists have named the new pterosaur Alanqa saharicafrom the Arabic word 'Al Anqa' meaning Phoenix, a mythological flying creature that dies in a fire and is reborn from the ashes of that fire.

Unearthed in three separate pieces, the jaw bone has a total length of 344mm (13.5 inches). Each piece is well preserved, uncrushed, and unlike most other pterosaur fossils, retains its original three dimension shape.

Florida State accounting professor Douglas Stevens says economic decision-makers frequently factor morality into their judgments and behavior, and it's time for economic models to incorporate morality as a result.

Stevens and a colleague have published a paper in Accounting, Organizations and Society that incorporates morality into the economic theory of the firm, known as principal-agent theory.