Labs

If you build it... I've been working on my science-blog-network, online-magazine ( FoS ) for a little over a year now. As part of its development, I've been experimenting with repurposing a subreddit as a FoS specific forum. After numerous iterations, I think I've hit on the right balance. http://www.reddit.com/r/FoS/comments/aszmg/meta_field_of_reddit/ Over the years I've witnessed dozens upon dozens of great writers and contributors emerge from the ranks of the everyman only to be willfully ignored, and in some cases, openly resented by the "professional" journalists and editors who were too busy feeling threatened by the changes the internet was forcing on their profession to recognize all the untapped potential those same changes were putting within their reach. It was this perpetual (I realized) state-of-missed-opportunity that finally caused me to abandon the established media a few years back, and started me down the road that has led me here. Today ...

Artist's impression and animation of a celestial impact suggested by observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers say that two rocky bodies, one as least as big as our moon and the other at least as big as Mercury, slammed into each other within the last few thousand years or so — not long ago by cosmic standards. The impact destroyed the smaller body, vaporizing huge amounts of rock and flinging massive plumes of hot lava into space. Spitzer's infrared detectors were able to pick up the signatures of the vaporized rock, along with pieces of refrozen lava, called tektites. -- August '09 Press Release Image and Animation Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

ESA’s Herschel observatory is back to full operation following the reactivation of its HiFi instrument.

Experience the gripping story-full of hope, crushing dissapointment, dazzling ingenuity, bravery, and triumph - in Hubble 3D, the seventh awe-inspiring film from the award winning IMAX Space Team. Vividly captured in IMAX 3D, Hubble 3D recounts the amazing journey of the most important scientific instrument since Galileo's original telescope and the greatest sucess in space since the moon landing - the Hubble Space Telescope. Audiences will accompany the space walking astronauts as they attempt the most difficult task ever undertaken in NASA's history, and will experience up close the awesome power of the launches, the hearbreaking setbacks, and the dramatic rescues of this most powerful story. Hubble 3D will also reveal the cosmos as never before - allowing viewers of all ages to explore the grandeur of the nebulae and the galaxies, the birth and death of stars, and some of the greatest mysteries of our celestial surroundings, all in amazing IMAX 3D.

The list of people who have voiced their objections to Avatar for one reason or another . . . is long. Most, of course, are simply trying to hitch their particular agenda to Avatar's success-- even if that means they have to rub shoulders with their ideological foes . As for me, I only have praise for Avatar. It succeeded on every level. It was exactly what it needed to be. Nevertheless, I've detected something in Avatar's wake that is somewhat bothersome to me. It strikes me that audiences and critics are dismissing out of hand the environmental rape depicted in Avatar as if it were just another stretch of James Cameron's sci-fi imagination. This group denial of Avatar's nod to realism has served to remind me that humans are really and truly willfully ignorant of the severity and extent of the environmental atrocities being committed by us in the name of progress, greed and humanity each and every day, right here on planet earth. What's more, that ...