Do you ever wonder how many pictures there are with you in the background? Like, the ones taken at crowded bars during other people's birthdays; or when you stroll through someone else's shot at a tourist attraction; or when you get good seats at a game? You're probably in the background of thousands upon thousands of photographs—and you're probably making a stupid face in every single one of them. On top of this, your picture also is being taken daily in ways you may not be aware of: from 400 miles above, by the satellites used to observe the earth. Lucky for your face, you're too small to appear, given the resolution capabilities. But you're still being 'remotely sensed,' your house a blip that appears as part of the imagery, in the same way you’re a part of someone else’s photo album. READ MORE

READ MORE

Wait, did you see this horrifying thing on the kilogram, a measure of weight (yes, yes it is) that is actually tied to a real object? (Which affects the "pound," as the pound is now basically defined as 0.45359237 kilograms!) READ MORE

There are only 16,777,216 colors that can be represented on the web (under our current system). The Tumblr that celebrates them, Pretty Colors, has posted 1077 of those colors since January. That means this Tumblr can only exist (if it continues posting at the same rate) for another 10,433 years before it runs out of colors. If my math is right. Which it may not be. But it'll have run out of "pretty" colors long before then, most likely. How many of the colors that can exist online can also be considered pretty, even with an open mind? I'd give that Tumblr about another 3000 years. I look forward to my avatar-archive enjoying its grand conclusion.

Today the brave and wasteful decades of the American space program as we have known it come crunching to a halt. From its beginnings as wildly adventurous jaunts to its ghastly end as porters and bellboys to the International Space Station, 30 years and 135 space shuttle missions later, we are officially Done With Space Shuttling. We'll always have our little laboratory on the Station, and corporations are happy to do our transit for us, but space is now for the Europeans, the Japanese and the Russian nerd heartthrobs—goodbye, pencil-necked cutie Sergei Volkov, you second-generation cosmonaut! Now our machines are going to go to some asteroid and to the atmosphere of Jupiter and, most interestingly, our newest machine, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, which will orbit the equator and listen for black holes, and then later to triage with the other space machines to rise up and destroy us. FROM SPACE.

Space Fence is for tracking space garbage (and then, I hope, BLOWING IT UP in an AWESOME WAY).

Hanny's back, this time with a plausible story. Back in 2007, Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, was on her computer happily classifying galaxies on Galaxy Zoo and was about to click Next, when she thought, "Wait. What was that?" At first, nobody knew: it was green, it glowed, it was shapeless, they called it Voorwerp. READ MORE

Uh huh. They're in "space." Saying "Happy Holidays." Maybe they'll bring some "moon rocks" "back" with them.

After several days of hoo-ha brought on by a vague NASA press release about mysterious life forms that will change how we see alien life, the story finally was published in Science and announced by NASA and so, okay, I'll bite. It turns out that a geomicrobiologist found a bacterium in a California lake full of arsenic, and the bacterium was full of arsenic too. The arsenic atoms were being used by the bug in place of phosphate atoms; and if you'd paid attention back when you were supposed to, you'd know that phosphate atoms are crucial to 1) DNA which is the molecule that makes up genes; and 2) ATP which is the molecule that provides cells' energy. So: genes and energy, about as basic as you'd want to get. READ MORE