Kepler has First Light. It is On! Team is a Go! Photons are Arriving!

This provocativly-titled NASA release states "NASA's Kepler Captures First Views of Planet-Hunting Territory", and has a good explanation of Kepler's capabilities. What I wish to tackle is why Kepler matters.

Kepler is a new space telescope with an awesomely wide field of view, seeing a huge 100 square degrees in a single frame, then zooming in closer with two other 'scopes. It is primarily a planet-hunting mission, but there will be much good science coming from Kepler-- some of which we can't even imagine yet.

The ferroelectric materials found in today's "smart cards" used in subway, ATM and fuel cards soon may eliminate the time-consuming booting and rebooting of computer operating systems by providing an "instant-on" capability as well as preventing losses from power outages.

Researchers supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) nanoscale interdisciplinary research team award and three Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University recently added ferroelectric capability to material used in common computer transistors, a feat scientists tried to achieve for more than half a century.

If you're a man and have Lou Gehrig's Disease - Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - there is good news if you drink caffeine.   Antioxidants, such as in coffee, can help.   The bad news is you still have ALS and there is no caffeine benefit for women found so far.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a fatal disease that damages key neurons in the brain and spinal cord. The disease causes progressive paralysis of voluntary muscles and often death within five years of symptoms. Although ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) was discovered over a century ago, neither the cause nor a cure have been found, but several mechanisms seem to play a role in its development, including oxidative stress.

How many times have you had some pithy comment in prose be misinterpreted when you just know that if the other people could simply hear your voice or see your face they would know how brilliant you are?

It happens a lot and emoticons, along with their evil cousin ALL CAPITALIZATION AND !!! PUNCTUATION, were invented to try and close the communications gap.  

Now European researchers at the PASION project have developed a suite of tools to add non-verbal cues to email, phone calls, chats and other channels of electronic communication.   Digital communication hasn’t the richness of face-to-face conversation because it cannot communicate the non-verbal cues and contextual information that are so important to us all.