Alejandro Jodorowsky, a cult Franco-Chilean film-maker (an "acid western" - so think back to 1970 and picture that) and science-fiction comics writer who later became a spiritual guru (psycho-shamanism - just jumble together tarot cards, alchemy and Zen Buddhism together), has been honored by The Minor Planets Centre, a branch of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).They have listed asteroid 261690 Jodorowsky at the request of the French astronomer who spotted the five-kilometer-wide object almost eight years ago. 261690 Jodorowsky orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, at an average distance of 470 million kilometres from the sun.

Want to create an online video course that will be successful and make a ton of money? The Synchronous Massive Online Class (SMOC) by two psychologists at the University of Texas - Austin may be it. It's an introductory class in psychology so anyone can participate and they are charging $550 per viewer.  Unlike the better-known MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), you have to watch the class live. "We're not business people, we're not entrepreneurs, but we know we have a first-rate class that works, and now the question is how do we go out and sell this mousetrap," said Prof. James Pennebaker, the chairman of the UT psychology department.

William Stein, an associate professor of mathematics at University of Washington, has taken his advocacy of free open-source mathematics software to the next level. Stein is the director of the SAGE Project and this new web-based LaTeX editor is client-side CoffeeScript, HTML, and CSS. It's free, it's unlimited! Check it out at the SageMath Cloud.

3-D printing is cool, just a little gimmicky. But NASA took 3-D printing to a whole new level; they created
an injector fabricated from layers of a nickel-chromium alloy powder
 and then hot-fired it in a rocket engine.The injector component is part of the rocket engine that allows the hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen to pass through to the combustion chamber, where the thrust is produced, notes Jason Paur at Wired. The engine tested with the 3-D printed injector developed 20,000 pounds of thrust, about 10 times more than any previous engine that’s used a printed part.

In April of last year, two Jordanians died of a mysterious respiratory illness, followed by another man with similar symptoms in Saudi Arabia. Scientists and public health experts were surprised to identify the cause as a novel coronavirus, like the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002, that had been caused by a coronavirus that originated in China. 

A peaceful protest of 30,000 turned violent when young people wearing masks opted to show their support for farmers by throwing bombs and bricks in city streets. At least four people were arrested and 12 police officers injured in the melee in downtown Bogota. Red Cross officials said 10 civilians were hurt.The 45,000 farmers, coffee growers and truck drivers who have blocked highways and battled with riot police since last week say their business is simultaneously hurt by protectionist tariffs on fertilizer, which make their product expensive compared to other countries, and free trade promoted by their government. 

A writer at Breitbart has referenced a study done by Harvard in 2007 debunking the claim that banning firearms would reduce murder or even suicide.Suicide is the far and away leader in handgun deaths while rifles, including the confusingly-termed 'assault' kind, are barely a blip in murders or suicides, a few hundred per year.This sort of analysis has been done multiple times and get done each time a shooting tragedy happens. When 'shooting sprees' were blamed on American gun culture last year, it was quickly noted that the rate of shooting sprees in countries where guns are outlawed are not lower.

Yesterday, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program moved Verlasso farmed salmon from Chile to its "yellow list" as a good alternative. It marks the first time an ocean-farmed salmon has gotten a nod from an influential "eco-friendly" fish list.The Seafood Watch list is one of several that assign seafood a red, yellow or green rating, based on their sustainability and environmental impact. Red is "avoid," yellow is "good alternative" and green is "best choice."

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are called new innovation so disruptive for academia today that they will do to higher education what the Internet has done to newspapers or what Napster did to music. There's only one problem with this bold hypothesis: It's simply not true.MOOCs are not a transformative innovation that will forever remake academia. That honor belongs to a more disruptive and far-reaching innovation – "big data," a catchall phrase that refers to the vast numbers of data sets that are collected daily, big data promises to revolutionize online learning. Big data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students.

6,100 hundred people applied to become astronauts - with its rather fuzzy, non-specific meaning compared to when I was a kid - for the candidate class of 2013. 8 have been chosen."These new space explorers asked to join NASA because they know we’re doing big, bold things here -- developing missions to go farther into space than ever before," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.