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Ice Age Flower: 30,000-Year-Old Seeds Buried In Siberian Permafrost Are Resurrected Into Flower | Strange News

http://news.sky.com/story/927917/ice-to-see-you-30000-year-old-flower-revived Fruit and seeds hidden in an Ice Age squirrel's burrow in Siberian permafrost have been resurrected into a flower by Russian scientists. Using a pioneering experiment, the Sylene stenophylla has become the oldest plant ever to be regrown and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds.
http://www.avertedimagination.com/img_pages/solar_nirvana2.html This has been a glorious week for solar observers! Led by large sunspot region AR1339, the sun's disk is alive with activity... the most dynamic show in many years. I made two interpretations - which do you prefer? A close-up view of 1339 can be seen here . This image was featured on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day . November 6, 2011/ captured with Little Big Man , PGR Scorpion camera

Alan Friedman/ Solar Nirvana / 6 November 2011

Maybe this isn’t a newsflash to anyone but me, but, um, . Because some of the statues are set deep into the ground, and because the heads on the statues are disproportionately large, many people (myself included) tend to think of them as just big heads. But the bodies (generally not including legs, though there is at least one kneeling statue) are there — in many cases, underground. What’s even more interesting — there are petroglyphs (rock markings) that have been preserved below the soil level, where they have been protected from erosion.

World's Strangest | The Easter Island “Heads” Have Bodies - StumbleUpon

http://www.worldsstrangest.com/mental-floss/the-easter-island-%e2%80%9cheads%e2%80%9d-have-bodies/
The 1993 film "Jurassic Park" was based on the premise that scientists were able to extract dinosaur DNA from ancient mosquitoes that fed on the prehistoric reptiles and had been preserved in tree resin. http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/hundreds-of-prehistoric-insects-found-intact-within-huge

Hundreds of prehistoric insects found intact within huge amber deposit | MNN...

Artist concept of SLS launching. If things go without a hitch, NASA said its newly unveiled Space Launch System could take its first manned test flight in 2017. The new rocket design looks a lot like the Apollo era rockets that took American astronauts to the moon, but NASA said the new rocket is much more powerful than any other rocket they've made before and in conjunction with the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, already in development, it could set up astronauts for deep space exploration. The SLS will be NASA's first exploration-class vehicle since the Saturn V took astronauts to the moon. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/09/14/140468800/nasa-unveils-next-generation-monster-space-rocket

NASA Unveils Next Generation 'Monster' Space Rocket : The Two-Way

Hulton Archive / Getty Images Addiction has been moralized, medicalized, politicized, and criminalized. And, of course, many of us are addicts, have been addicts or have been close to addicts. Addiction runs very hot as a theme. Part of what makes addiction so compelling is that it forms a kind of conceptual/political crossroads for thinking about human nature. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/09/09/140307282/addiction-is-not-a-disease-of-the-brain

Addiction Is Not A Disease Of The Brain : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/10/19/141465224/why-the-u-s-needs-to-learn-more-science Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642): Think for yourself! Hulton Archive / Getty Images Quite often, people ask me why, as a research physicist, do I bother writing for the general public. "Doesn't that take time away from research?" they wonder.

Why The U.S. Needs To Learn More Science : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Pale Blue Dot « a simple prop

http://blog.jmlynch.org/2010/02/13/pale-blue-dot/ It’s the twentieth anniversary of the famous “ pale blue dot ” photo – Earth as seen from Voyager 1 while on the edge of our solar system (approximately 3,762,136,324 miles from home). Sagan’s words are always worth remembering: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A spacecraft circling the moon has snapped the sharpest photos ever of the tracks and trash left behind by Apollo astronauts in their visits from 1969 to 1972. Images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from 13 to 15 miles up show the astronauts' paths when they walked on the moon, as well as ruts left by a moon buggy. Experts could even identify the backpacks astronauts pitched out of their lunar landers before they returned to Earth. "What we're seeing is a trail," said Arizona State University geology professor Mark Robinson, the orbiter's chief scientist. "It's totally awesome." http://news.yahoo.com/astronauts-tracks-trash-seen-moon-photos-171551736.html

Astronauts' tracks, trash seen in new moon photos

Scientists squeeze light past quantum limit › News in Science (ABC Science)

News in Science Monday, 12 September 2011 Stuart Gary ABC Tiny ripples The race to discover gravity waves may be getting closer to the finish line with scientists successfully squeezing light using quantum mechanics. The detection of gravity waves is one of the Holy Grails of astronomy and astrophysics. It will allow researchers to study the inner workings of exploding stars and colliding black holes. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts these massive astronomical events generate tiny fluctuations, causing the fabric of space-time to expand and contract - like ripples on the surface of a pond. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/12/3314227.htm

Newly Discovered Planet: Hot, Muggy And (Maybe) Liveable : The Two-Way

Sort of like Washington, D.C., in the summer: "It would feel like a steam bath — hot, sticky and beyond uncomfortable." That's how The Associated Press describes the way scientists are describing "HD 85512 b ... a newly discovered planet about 35 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vela."