What happens when you think you have seen a recent collision between two asteroids but find a bizarre X-shaped object at the head of a comet-like trail of material?    You keep looking until you can figure it out.

In January, astronomers thought the new collision they found would have a debris field expanding rapidly, like shrapnel flying from a hand grenade, but when they watched the aftermath using Hubble, they found the opposite; the object was expanding very, very slowly and that it started, not a few days, but nearly a year before the January observations.

Can't decide between the opera and a football game? (If needed, replace these bland stereotypes with specifics from your own relationship). Game Theory's got your back.

Imagine the possible outcomes: football together, football alone, opera together, and opera alone. We can show this with the following grid (imagine the guy choosing a column and the lady choosing a row—they accept the outcome that gets two marks):

Chiquita Brands has announced that following years of intensive research and investment,  FreshRinse(TM) technology is ready to go.  

Yes, for those of you who can't be bothered to wash even your pre-packaged salad, this can be a real time saver.    Their claim; it dramatically reduces microorganisms on leafy greens and better maintains freshness.

They claim that FreshRinse(TM) is a scientifically validated advancement for fresh produce safety that delivers a substantial reduction in microorganisms on leafy greens, including superior microbial efficacy against such pathogens as Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and E. coli O157:H7, as compared to the industry's conventional chlorine sanitizers. 

A man that fancies women with blond hair may announce such almost anywhere. Established scientists frequently work thinly veiled references to the proverbial sexiness of blondes into their talks, to loosen them up, to render the seminar or lecture personal and memorable. On the other hand, I have never seen anybody but Quentin Tarantino put their foot fetish into their work; certainly I do not know of any politician or scientist “putting their or others’ feet in their mouth” this way.

How do astronomers weigh stars?    In most cases stars that are trillions of miles away can't be measured, though astronomers can get a best estimate using numerical models.

But in some instances a star could be measured using inference.    If the star has a transit planet, and that planet has a moon, and both of them cross in front of their star, the size and orbit can be measured to learn about the star.  Has it been done yet?   Well, no, since we have not found a star with both a planet and moon that transit but NASA's Kepler spacecraft should discover several such systems.

Two women who took part in the world's first controlled study of a genetic screening test before IVF have given birth to healthy babies.

The babies are the first deliveries in a pilot study of comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) by microarray, a new method of screening oocytes, female gametocytes involved in reproduction, before in vitro fertilization (IVF) for a full range of chromosomal disorders. 

Amelia Carolina Sparavigna in the department of physics of  Politecnico di Torino says she has discovered geoglyphs, essentially earthwork graphic designs carved into the landscape, near Lake Titicaca is in the Andes Mountains on the border of Peru and Bolivia.

And she did it using Google.

You may not be able to see it so clearly but time and wear would certainly have made geoglyphs less obvious, though how and why anyone would have made them is also not obvious - unless they were insuring some deity or another could see something more interesting than farmers when they looked down.

Quite in advance with respect to the stated goals of its 2010 collider program, the Large Hadron Collider has produced yesterday night the instantaneous luminosity of 10^32 cm^-2 s^-1 in the core of the ATLAS and CMS detectors. This is great news for all of us: at such a collision rate, on average one top quark pair is produced every minute, and one 120 GeV Higgs boson (if the thing exists) every 10 minutes makes its apparition there! (Calculations are in this recent post).

Human presence in space enable us to do more than just observe Earth from a far. We develop space technology that come in handy here on Earth in numerous applications. Or, as is so touchingly demonstrated in the Chilean miners rescue 'miracle', we learn more about the human species (medical and psychological) so that we can literally help save human lives under extreme conditions here on Earth.


The San Jose mine in Chile as seen from space. Credit: NASA

Lunch Hour Lectures have been running at University College London since 1942.  It's terrific to know that even at the height of World War II, British citizens wanted to learn about the latest science in an informal setting.

Scheduled for today, the first one for the 2010-11 season has (well, had?) professor of genetics Steve Jones on ... incest.