Wish that, like fantasy baseball players or civilization builders, you could have your own planet to kill with greenhouse gases?  Good news!  "Fate of the World" lets you run a UN environmental group tasked with saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or - and you know most people will do this - seeing what soaring temperatures do.The people really excited about this "issue-led gaming" concept are the same people who think a game about cleaning up pollution would lead to less pollution and comic books about religion make kids want to go to church.   Basically they think people are pretty dumb and will only understand climate change if it's a game.    But let's face it, BP executives are not buying this game and getting rehabilitated, the already convinced are.

Bill Nye "the Science Guy" and Emmy award winner,  is opening a 'climate lab' at the Chabot Space&Science Center in Oakland.  It is designed for 10-year-olds but, really, isn't all science aimed at 10-year-olds?    It has lots of hands-on experiments and information about climate research.The Chabot Space & Science Center expects 190,000 children to visit the Bill Nye's Climate Lab in its first year.

Burt Rutan, who designed the first private manned rocket to reach space, has announced he will retire next year.    Though everyone in aviation knew him well (including this blogger's aerospace engineering wife) he became famous worldwide in 2004 when his SpaceShipOne prototype won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for being the first privately financed manned vehicle to reach space.In 1986, his Voyager aircraft made the first nonstop flight around the world without refueling.   I shall grow mutton chops and dig out my leather jacket in his honor.

You've all heard of global warming but global dimming has gotten less attention - because it can be confusing that cooling would be bad when warming is bad.Global dimming is when fossil fuel burning doesn't just release the gases that traps the sun's heat within our atmosphere but also emits particulate pollution, composed primarily of sulphur dioxide, soot and ash. In the atmosphere, those particulates absorb solar energy and reflect sunlight back into space.

Concerned about rising political attacks regarding climate change research, 700 members of the American Geophysical Union are going to wade further into the political muck and campaign against skepticism.    Namely, they are creating a 'rapid response team', which reads like SWAT, except they are gunning for conservative radio hosts and all Republicans.

It seems not everyone is in love with The Steve.Inon Beracha is the CEO of PrimeSense, the company that created the hardware fueling Microsoft's Kinect device and Apple was the first he wanted to pitch the motion tracking technology to.But Apple wanted too much paperwork and other companies were interested, yet mostly "Apple is a pain in the ass," said Beracha to Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney.    So love for The Steve can sell merchandise but it can't do everything.

Scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin. The discovery could mean that people needing blood for surgery, cancer treatment or treatment of blood conditions like anemia will be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin to provide transfusions. Clinical trials could begin as soon as 2012.

Alom Shaha at the Guardian thinks that even though there are now more women Ph.D.s than men, women won't go into science unless they see a woman hosting a science show in the UK.

Disputing that no screening method had proved effective at reducing mortality from lung cancer,  annual CT scans of current and former heavy smokers reduced their risk of death from lung cancer by 20%, a huge government-financed study has found.Previous studies stated scans can catch cancers at an earlier stage but did little to affect death rates.   So why isn't that a big jump for you?   Even the longest-term smokers only have a 10% chance of getting lung cancer and the cost for the scans is very high.

Cook's Source is an old school sort of magazine - in that they think they are doing the online world a favor by copyright infringement.  For the benefit of their readers and advertisers and to the detriment of Monica Gaudio, whose work was stolen by someone at Cook's Source, they lifted her 2005 online article and published it.Naturally, Gaudio complained.    The response:an editor fired back that she should feel grateful because they edited it and cleaned it up, and "now it will work well for your portfolio."