This week will include the peak evenings for the annual Perseid meteor shower. Although sky watchers have already seen a few exciting fireballs already, August 12 and 13 are expected to be the primary nights for viewing.

Back in the day, families in general seemed to do most of the work needed for themselves by themselves; since this was really required if a family was to simply survive the day. Over the past 100 years, the reliance on professionalism across the globe has steadily increased. The advantages to this “outsourcing of life’s primary needs” approach are endless… we have professional farmers that allow our refrigerators to be full with only a trip to the grocery store; we have professional protectors who work efficiently at keeping dangers as far away from our doorstep as possible without us even being aware of those dangers

This morning a more unique solar event occurred from the current sunspot 1092. A class C3 solar flare was unleashed from this spot along with a nearly simultaneous magnetic filament stretching mostly across the sun's northern hemisphere. The two events are likely connected by long-range magnetic fields.

The amazing and absolutely beautiful "solar tsunami" was captured in video by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory...

This weekend marks the launch of the inaugural Open Science Summit conference in Berkeley, CA.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology--a premier citizen science research and support organization--is launching an exciting new program in the Fall of 2010. The Lab focuses most of its energy on aggregating and analyzing the efforts of thousands of volunteer citizen scientists to better understand the population and behavior of birds. Now, they are interested to better understand the habitats of birds, and not just the wild birds perched on remote mountain tops, but those right in your very own back yard.