This week in science

A group of more than 50 leading scientists, engineers, and space enthusiasts including Alan Stern, Elon Musk and Richard Garriott have sent an open letter to Congress urging uninterrupted funding for NASA:

Funding NASA’s Commercial Crew program would lower the cost of access to low Earth orbit, thus enabling more of NASA’s budget to be applied to its focus on exploration beyond low Earth orbit, and better enabling the kind of program laid out in NASA’s authorization bill.

• And what better place for a future moon base than a newly discovered subterranean lunar lava tube a mile long and a football field wide, complete with stable temperatures and natural protection from the micrometeorites and harsh radiation above.
• A creationist shill spouted his spiel in Minnesota last week, and aspiring evolutionary biologist Kele blogs about the serial delusions and lies he witnessed firsthand.
• As long as we're on the topic of creationism, imagine my shock when Palin sounded as reasonable on evo and science in general as any believer in God[s] I've chatted with about it. My world is collapsing, I now spend my days watching a top spin waiting to find out if I've been hijacked into someone's dream.  
• Dunno what to make of this, yet, but he's got images and I bet we hear more about it soon:

  Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover has become convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites -- and by extension, suggest we are not alone in the universe. .. He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot -- here on earth, that is.