We should send Mr. Brooks a fan letter.

hivemind - what would it take to hit 100GB of bandwidth/month. not just aheming a few movies or series, right?

DIY Nuclear Fusion Reactor

Mr Suppes, 32, is part of a growing community of "fusioneers" – amateur science junkies who are building homemade fusion reactors, for fun and with an eye to being part of the solution to that problem.

He is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net. Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.

Of course, no one has yet accomplished a fusion reaction that produces more useful energy than it consumes.

We should send Mr. Brooks a fan letter.

Heh, I did just send him an e-mail.

Allow me to be the umpteenth person to commend you on your heroic effort today. Creative, hilarious, and yet still informative. We're preemptively sad you won't be covering the zombie match tomorrow. Rest well. Sleep tight. Don't let the zombies bite.

Brew in style with these beautiful retro-futuristic coffee makers

So it turns out there's this huge storm raging... on another planet... in another solar system. Isn't it cool that we know that?

“HD 209458b is definitely not a place for the faint-hearted. By studying the poisonous carbon monoxide gas with great accuracy we found evidence for a super wind, blowing at a speed of 5,000 to 10,000 km per hour.”

The storm itself is not surprising, but the fact that we are able to detect it is something of a coup. The planet in question is about 60 percent as massive as Jupiter, orbiting a Sun-like star 150 light years from Earth in the direction of Pegasus. Orbiting at 0.047 AU, the world is tidally locked, with surface temperatures thought to reach about 1000 degrees Celsius on the star-side, while the other remains much cooler. The temperature differential is what kicks up the enormous winds, now measured using the ESO Very Large Telescope and the CRIRES spectrograph, which produced spectra sharp enough “…to determine the position of the carbon monoxide lines at a precision of 1 part in 100,000,” according to team member Remco de Kok.

[link]

Happy birthday, Teppy, non-abdicating Queen of Flexibility and Typesetting!

Well it's about bloody time! Or was he going to have Caroline's kids inherit--if that's even allowed in Monaco?

Prince Albert of Monaco is engaged to marry Charlene Wittstock, a former Olympic swimmer for South Africa, a union that will give this wealthy Mediterranean principality its first crown princess since American Grace Kelly died in 1982.

Crap. One less opportunity for me to become a princess....

Isn't a given that Prince Albert is gay?

He's gay? Huh - my chances were better than I thought....