Back in time and ahead to the future...

This isn't the dog park!

Periods of geologic time.

We need our sleep.

Goosebumps on a comet.

The Punisher (Ukrainian grandmother)

7 lies about the American Sniper.  And more.

New police radars can 'see' inside your home.  But of course they would never misuse them....

Ribbons on kittens...

Cave dwellers counting on bones, medieval manuscripts hiding ancient Greek mathematics, comets that crash into alien worlds, a Viking burial mound in Scotland, these are a few of my favorite things...

An ever increasing ball of gas?

Scientists are stumped trying to explain how the comet 17P/Holmes is getting bigger:

Comets, of course, are no rarity. And it seems like every couple of years or so, one becomes big and bright enough that it can easily be seen from Earth. But the behavior of 17P/Holmes has mystified both hobby astronomers and professionals around the globe.

Rather than shrinking as it gets further from the sun as most comets do, this one just keeps getting bigger and brighter. At the beginning of the week, the cloud of dust and gas surrounding the comet's core -- called the coma -- had already grown larger than the sun. Now, just a few days later, the coma's diameter is twice that of the sun -- the dust cloud measures some 2.7 million kilometers across whereas the sun is just 1.39 million kilometers across. And there is no sign that it is finished.

"The comet is now a long ways away, but the dust cloud is still growing," Dr. Maciej Mikolajewski from the Torun Center for Astronomy at Nicolaus Copernicus University told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It's the first time I've ever seen such a thing. I've never seen such a bright comet in my life."

Even more interesting than the celestial body's sheer size, however, is that scientists aren't totally sure why it suddenly exploded in brightness throughout October and November. The comet is no longer close enough to the Earth to be readily visible without a telescope, but the head scratching in the scientific community continues.

Sounds like a few tv egos we know about....

Comet dust

Our past and our future:

This week, scientists in charge of the program released the first tantalizing glimpse of the dust Stardust managed to collect. The particles have quickly become a must for anyone studying the origins of comets and those wondering what goes on at the frozen edges of our solar system where comets are thought to develop.

The findings are not quite what scientists expected. "The interesting thing is," says Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, the lead scientist on the Stardust mission, "we are finding these high-temperature minerals in materials from the coldest place in the solar system.... Remarkably enough we have found fire and ice."

Stardust returned to Earth on January 15 this year following a seven-year mission which saw the spacecraft orbit the sun three times to collect the interstellar and comet dust. The particles -- the first extraterrestrial material brought to Earth since the manned moon mission -- were collected by a special silicone-based material called aerogel. It's a clear substance that is 99.9 percent air but looks and feels like glass reborn as Styrofoam. The particles left dozens of tracks in the aerogel as they were captured and the streaks can now be seen with the naked eye. Scientists spent hours removing the particles with a computer-controlled needle.