Here's a pleasant Christmas thought-- why are rocket launches like holidays-- infrequent, big productions that tend to always be the same?  A New York Times op-ed, Faster, NASA, Faster, puts forth an idea that, really, resurfaces at least once every few years.  It's a good idea.  It says, hey, let's do more launches with higher risk.

Sure, Christmas is a religious holiday and science and religion share common people but not often common ground.   That doesn't mean we can't all join together and share some Christmas science ... and an awesome electric car (5 MPH!) I assembled for my youngest kids last night (picture to come later).    Like Rock'em Sock'em Robots, even adults think miniature cars are cool.   If you're the environmental type, I am basically teaching my kids to like a Prius - and it goes about as fast.  So thank me by reading some of the terrific science below:

The climate is changing and the natural world has to adapt to it. But how much time do the multitudes of species and their habitats have before it's too late? A team of environmental researchers has set out to answer that very question, and they say that as the world warms through the 21st century, ecosystems will need to shift about 0.42 kilometers per year (about a quarter mile per year) to keep pace with changing temperatures across the globe.

Many illusions are like spherically curved space. Below on the left (fig. 1 ) is a geometrical illusion, and on the right is a ball with some great arcs drawn on it.

Notice the similarities: the distortions in the illusion are qualitatively similar to the non-Euclidean nature of the contours on the ball.

Why? Is there something in perception that’s like curved space?

figure 1

According to a 2007 press release by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, every year 33.1 million people are injured by consumer products in the home. No one is safe and constant vigilance is required to avoid maiming and/or death (paraphrased). Here are the prime offenders:

1. Magnets: If a child eats your wedding ring, it will pass. If the same child eats both your wedding ring and a magnet, the two might attract through intestinal walls, creating a massive kink and making it very difficult to retrieve your ring.

2. Recalled Products: At cspc.gov, you can sign up for e-mail notification of recalled goods. With about 400 recalls a year, you can rest assured that your in-box will be a constant source of terror.

Female ducks can thank evolution for avoiding becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males.  That's right, males are literally screwed.

The research on this evolutionary 'battle of the sexes'  at the genitalia level were described in the December 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Stars in globular clusters tend to be 12-13 billion years old but a small fraction appear to be significantly younger than the average population.   Left behind by the stars that followed the normal path of stellar evolution and became red giants, those younger ones have been dubbed blue stragglers.

Oddly, blue stragglers appear to regress from 'old age' back to a hotter and brighter 'youth', gaining a new lease on life in the process - a cosmic facelift.

As 2009 closes, we can look at the state of sci-fi gaming.  You might wonder why a science site cares, and the answer is that science fiction is one of the best gateways to science careers.  For one generation of astronomers, pretty much, either you'd watched Star [Trek/Wars] or you got to peek through a telescope at the real thing.  Or both.

Global warming may be a reality, but the debate over what causes the warming and what to do about it is nowhere near over, according to a story in the latest issue of Chemical&Engineering News (C&EN) that surveyed climate scientists on both sides of the argument.

While both global warming "believers" and "skeptics" agree on some basics of climate change, for example, that average global temperatures have risen since 1850, with most of the warming occurring since the 1970s, the cordial agreement stops there, writes author Stephen K. Ritter. "At the heart of the global warming debate is whether warming is directly the result of increasing anthropogenic CO2 levels, or if it is simply part of Earth's natural climatic variation."

Scientists have identified a strain of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis that thrives in the presence of rifampin, a front-line drug in the treatment of tuberculosis. The bacterium was identified in a Chinese patient, and the researchers say his condition grew worse with treatment regimens containing rifampin, before being cured with rifampin-free regimens.

Their study, which will appear in the January 2010 issue of the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, is among the first to document the treatment of a patient with rifampin-dependent infection.