"Let's start by first shrinking the Earth to the size of a Tennis Ball."

"That also lets me measure the number of spirals — roughly five — and calculate the size of this object: about a third of a light year across, or more than 3 trillion kilometers! Coooool."

"During its first six weeks of observations, it found five new planets. All are giants – four are heavier than Jupiter and one is about as massive as Neptune. They all orbit their host stars so closely that their surfaces are hotter than molten lava. "Looking at them might be like looking at a blast furnace," says lead scientist William Borucki, who presented the results on Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. ...

One, called Kepler 7b, is about as dense as polystyrene. It is about 1.5 times as wide as Jupiter, but only about a tenth as dense, making it one of the most diffuse planets yet found."

"But there's another way. Gravitational waves should also stretch and squeeze pulsars as they pass by, subtly changing the radio pulses they produce. So by monitoring an array of pulsars throughout the galaxy, astronomers should be able to see the effects of nanohertz to microhertz gravitational waves passing by. The array of pulsars should effectively shimmer as the waves wash over it, like a grid of buoys bobbing on the ocean. ... These guys say the next generation of radio telescope arrays such as the Allen Telescope Array in California and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia or South Africa, should be capable of making the required measurements. And the scientific potential of the data is huge."

“He is making pools out of dumpsters"

"It's 2045 and nerds in old-folks homes are wandering around, scratching their heads, and asking plaintively, "But ... but, where's the Singularity?" Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge--who originated the concept of the technological Singularity--doesn't think that will happen, but he explores three alternate scenarios, along with our "best hope for long-term survival"--self-sufficient, off-Earth settlements."

"We thought that this vertical structure was pretty neat when we first saw it in our simulations," said John Weiss, the paper's lead author at the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado. "But it's a million times cooler to have your theory supported by such gorgeous images. It makes you suspect you might be doing something right."

"Skylon is an unpiloted, reuseable spaceplane intended to provide inexpensive and reliable access to space. Currently in proof-of-concept phase, the vehicle will take approximately 10 years to develop and will be capable of transporting 12 tonnes of cargo into space."

"In 2012, Vega will carry ESA’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle into space. The vehicle will then return to Earth to test a range of enabling systems and technologies for atmospheric re-entry. The video shows computer-generated animations of the vehicle and its mission."

"The Chariot lunar rover would serve as a mobile home away from home for astronauts venturing from a lunar base to explore the lunar surface."

"For ham radio operators who like to contact stations over greater distances than would ordinarily be possible on the VHF frequencies, radio aurora is great! Besides the thrill of making contacts that most poeple would consider impossible, the phenomenon itself is fascinating - and like its visual counterpart, very unpredictable. It's the thrill of the chase."

"careful studies of the distribution and motion of galaxies confirm that it is homogeneous on the largest scales we can see, with no sign of a special point to call the centre."

"At the center of spiral galaxy M81 is a supermassive black hole about 70 million times more massive than our sun."

"Creative Review commissioned photographer Jason Tozer to shoot these pictures on behalf of Sony using its new Alpha digital camera."

"The UK's use of the name Skynet precedes the Terminator movies." "You mean they sent operatives back in time to create the company before the warning documentary was filmed?"

"I'm not sure how it's useful to classify trans-Neptunian dwarf planets again just so they can exclude Ceres, but I'm sure there's a reason that's definitely not arbitrary!""

"This image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters."

"illustrations ... by ... (one of the first Soviet science fiction writers) shows very clearly what kind of future the communist dreamers preferred. Think cool robots, intrepid explorers, brainy scientists, eerily Star Wars-like aliens and a huge doze of

"These forms should function much better as containers for holding fluids in microgravity, they say surface tension holds liquid inside the coil and the properties of the shape's surface allow fluid to be sucked out in one go."

They say the object left a deep crater after crashing down over the weekend near the town of Carancas in the Andes. People who have visited scene have been complaining of headaches, vomiting and nausea after inhaling gases."

"The Shuttle was never expected to be in orbit as one year gives way to another, so the computers aren't set up to switch to a new "Day One". To the Shuttle, January 1 is just day 366."

"Donald Davis was commissioned to do paintings for NASA in the 1970s and is now offering them to the public domain. The 'toroidal shaped space colony' above is an incredible piece of paleo-futuristic art from 1975."

Conrad: "We giggled and laughed so much that people accused us of being drunk or having 'space rapture.'"

Some interesting movies to check out.

Interesting timeline of future events for planet earth. Didn't know about the likelyhood of our galaxy colliding with another before the well known "sun expanding" event.

Up-to-date images of the earth from an ESA satellite.

"The 87,500 square feet logo was created by tiles placed in the Nevada desert, near the super secret Area 51. The stunt marks the revamp of the KFC logo, which now features a more streamlined image of Colonel Sanders."

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from

A rather addictive yet simple space/gravity style game.

"Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe."

Info about and images from a satellite receiving station based at Dundee University.