Ever wanted your very own cesium clock? According to this article on Wired, they’re available as surplus on ebay and crazy hackers like the Time Nuts are hooking them up and syncronizing themselves! Prove Einstein’s theory of general relativity for yourself! Run your own time server! Be a time lord!
(note: HP-5065A model shown is rubidium)
According to a story today in the New York Times (free reg. req., blah blah), scientists have begun to examine how humans construct their sense of self by combining the inputs of their various senses, and apparently have been able to trigger an ‘out of body’ experience using virtual reality techniques to trick the mind into attributing sensation to a virtual body. It seems to me that this is a bit like what happens to amputees that feel pain in their missing limbs. It does suggest that reports by people who have suffered traumatic accidents of a sensation of floating and looking down on their body don’t necessarily require a supernatural explanation.
A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that followed 12,000 individuals over 30+ years suggests that obesity spreads like a virus. If your friends are obese, you become much more likely to become obese yourself. From 57% more likely when only one friend is obese to 171% more likely when mutual friends are obese! The same effect applied for weight loss, but was far less dramatic. It’s going to be hard to replicate this study since it uses data that is hard to come by and was done over such a long span of time, so it will be debated, but it is compelling. “You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” says Christakis, an investigator in the study.
Story in International Herald Tribune
The Mars rover Opportunity will descend into Victoria crater despite the very real risk that it might not be able to get back out of it again. Rolling down into the crater should allow scientists to investigate progressively older rock strata, an opportunity 
whose benefits far outweigh the risks. Nothing in the rovers’ original mission plan allowed for more than a few months of scratching about on the surface, so for Geologists everywhere, this is really a dream come true. Opportunity should begin the trek into the crater sometime in early July.
Recent genetic studies suggest that Humans and Sharks shared a common ancestor 450 million years ago. At first this might seem unlikely, but humans and sharks do share some traits that aren’t found in fishes - they copulate (internal fertilization), and they bear live young. According to the ABC article, we also share some DNA having to do with our sperm and immune system
Be aware of the most popular Creationist arguments for a Young Earth which many of them see as their best hope in their holy crusade against evolution (and reason). Many of their claims sound like they are based in science, but they don’t stand up to even the most casual scrutiny.
If you have some time, poke through Dave Matson’s posting:
How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments? (1995) A comprehensive, point-by-point refutation young-Earth arguments and other creationist claims made by Dr. Kent Hovind (”young Earth creationist and dinosaur hunter”) in the Hovind-Patterson debate.
According to GW (in 2004), NASA’s new strategy is to make it back to the moon by 2020. We’re supposed to build a moon base, and then… on to Mars. For those of us who grew up on Star Trek, we were really excited at the prospect of a return to space, but frankly we were expecting warp drive by now. But what to do when we get there? NASA has worked up a nice to-do list numbering 181 possibilties. At the top of their list (and mine) is a potential radio telescope built into a crater on the far side shielded from Earth’s radio noise. I’ve taken a look through half of their huge PDF file and picked out some other favorites:
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