A photography and space enthusiast has 'stunned' NASA by producing high quality images of earth from the edge of space using a few hundreds dollars of helium and off the shelf gear:
Robert Harrison used his ingenuity and a collection of cheap parts worth just £500 to take the spectacular shots using a Canon camera which he launched 35km above the planet's surface. [...] Mr Harrison, a married IT director, launched his first balloon, named Icarus I, in October 2008 and it was an amazing success, taking such stunning shots of more than 1,000 miles of the Earth's surface that NASA got in touch.
- Tyrannosaurus rex may have been terrorizing North America in the last days of the dinos, but a new fossil find puts his fearsome ancestors in a continent far, far away, long long ago:
T. rex's relatives might have once roamed in the land Down Under, according to a new study. A pelvic bone uncovered in Australia marks the first evidence that tyrannosaurs could have inhabited the Southern Hemisphere.
- A friend puts the Chevy Volt through its environmentally friendly paces and concludes it holds up in performance and design better than expected.
- The scale of the universe is immense, but this could be huge for medicine and manned space travel alike: Suspended animation may be just around the corner.
- Our family tree just got a little larger and a lot more mysterious thanks to the mitochondrial DNA recovered from a single hominid bone found in a cave overlooking the windy steppes of Russia.
- John Cole at Balloon Juice illustrates proper science geek priorities:
Got the internet turned on and rocking at the new place, and man is it speedy ... Now that I have internet and can connect with the outside world, it is safe to move furniture into the new place.
- Speaking of human DNA, in principle I probably lean more toward accepting the death penalty than a lot of my progressive peers. But stuff like this is one big thing that holds me back in practice. Fortunately, this particular Texas inmate got a stay just minutes away from execution and may yet have a chance for science to weigh in on his fate.