Well, as the world markets plunge, something else has started falling. It’s snowing on Mars:

iTwire reports:
Canada’s York University professor Jim Whiteway, who is the lead scientist for the Meteorological Station onboard the Phoenix spacecraft, stated, “Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars. We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.”

It must [...]

SciAm warms my heart with a great interview about metaphor. Cognitive psychiatrist Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto is an expert in why certain feelings are actually processed as feeling something:

I found that people not only use coldness-related terms to describe social rejection (for example, “cold shoulder”), but also experience rejection as physical coldness: feeling cold becomes an [...]

Click to embiggen

T. rex gets all the credit, but Allosaurus – all the various species and sizes – was really the large fierce predator to look out for in the Mesozoic era. Some paleontologists call them “wolves of the Jurassic”. Unlike today’s wolves, Allosaurus weighed between 2 and 5 tons and used its massive head like a [...]

Look at this:

while listening to this.

In the lifeless, frigid Martian arctic, the sun only sets at the end of summer, then rises, weakly, after 75 minutes.

Like so.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Scientists in New Zealand have distressing news for those of us who enjoy a drumstick now and again. As reported in New Scientist, they’ve found more evidence that birds are smarter than your average primate:

A choice morsel of food was placed in a horizontal Perspex tube, which also featured two round holes in the underside, with Perspex traps below.

For [...]

I suppose this has been all over the British press by now, but the Church of England recently apologized to Charles Darwin:

Scientific American:
“The Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still,” Rev. Malcolm Brown writes on a church Web site marking [...]

SONG: “(We Can Blame Peter Higgs) At the Collider” (To download:double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: CERN progress updates throughout 2008, as used in the posts “Calling Doctor Manhattan…”, “LHC fires beam” and a few others.

ABSTRACT: Well, it’d be hard, at this point, not to [...]

This summer, archaeologists discovered three bodies that had been ritually preserved 1,300 years ago in what is now the capital city of Peru. PhysOrg describes the central figure, who wears a mask identifying her as a woman:

“It is a woman because in the surrounding area we found offerings and textile items like those of a (female) weaver,” [...]

For the first time, astronomers have snapped a photo of a planet orbiting a star like our own Sun. That’s it. Not a recreation or illustration. That’s what an alien planet looks like.

It’s big and it’s far out, but on a universal scale, it’s not too different from home.

Here’s what the Gemini Observatory says about their discovery:

Three [...]