Planck, a European-US collaborative mission launched by ESA, has provided its first pictures. Planck is a followup to WMAP, and looks at the cosmic microwave background. But it has a host of other detectors and purposes, too. Stealing blatently from Wikipedia, Planck will do:

1. High resolution detections of both the total intensity and polarization of the primordial CMB anisotropies


2. Creation of a catalogue of galaxy clusters through the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect


3. Observations of the gravitational lensing of the CMB, as well as the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect

What do engineer Burt Rutan, hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, and game programmer John Carmack have in common? Answer: they've built the first private earth-to-space rocket, space station, and lunar lander in the current new space race.

Most people are familiar with Scaled Composite's X-Prize $10 million victory with SpaceShipOne, the first private reusable multi-flight manned spacecraft to succeed. But note 'first'-- they were not the only competitor. Just the first tick on the space race radar.

We have been in an anomalously long Solar Minimum.  The sun has an 11 year cycle from Minimum to Maximum.  But the cycles are (like most things in nature) not exact, and some are longer than the others.  We are coming out of Solar Minimum... or are we?

Even in the midst of our current cycle, solar physicists were predicting a long minimum, and, humorously, seemed evenly divided over whether this meant we would have a more active Maximum, or a far less active Maximum.  For example, David Hathaway in the NASA article "Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries" clearly predicts the latter.