Science News: Galaxy Zoo's Blue Mystery.
"[W]hat is this new object? ... Among Keel's guesses: a dwarf galaxy that got in the way of some bigger, brutish cousin and was pulled apart; or perhaps a dwarf galaxy that got zapped by some quasar that temporarily formed when passing stars fell into a neighbor's black hole."
Deputydog: A skyscraper's amazing 728-ton stabilising ball in action.
The National Review: Movie Review -- 'The Happening'.
"M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening, is not merely bad. It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined." ...
"Perhaps oddest of all, The Happening imagines itself to be a powerfully pro-environment movie.... Allow me to suggest, contrarily, that if millions of Americans were killed by some tree-originated pathogen that could be released again at any time, the immediate result would not be a renewed enthusiasm for peaceful coexistence, but rather a program of deforestation so aggressive it'd make the Brazilian lumber industry look like tree huggers."
Science News: Theory suggests a pre-Big Bang universe.
"Inflation's stretch ‘usually provides a veil between us and the pre-inflationary and/or superhorizon universe,’ says coauthor Kamionkowski. But if the asymmetry in the microwave background is confirmed ‘and if our interpretation is correct, then it provides a window toward regimes of the early universe that we hitherto thought observationally inaccessible.’"
Science News: Makeover for the Milky Way.
"Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two major arms. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms."
Here's a link to a NASA illustration --
NASA: Two-Armed Spiral Milky Way.
NYT: After Years of Effort, Dark Energy Still Puzzles Scientists.
"Einstein's constant is the most economical explanation for dark energy, Dr. Witten said.... But if dark energy is the cosmological constant, it is smaller than predicted by a shocking factor of 10^60. No fundamental principles can explain why Einstein's constant, or any physical parameter, could be so small without being zero...."
Sunday school lesson --
Jordan Says: Numb WHAT?.
"Spelling Bee kid doesn't understand his word."
