Thousands lined up in Japan Sunday to see a capsule from the Hayabusa space probe which was hoped to have brought asteroid dust from Itokawa back to Earth.Would Americans line up the same way?  You betcha.  If NASA would only do something meaningful.  Instead, we get more articles about how the bloated pig Webb telescope is years behind schedule and wildly over budget with no end in sight.

Largest thermometer that does no thermometing, largest shopping cart and even the largest ... particle collider.   Though at least we hope that last one will do something meaningful.It's all here in the 15 most useless huge things.

Cecilia van der Merwe, South African engineer and brains behind my World Cup Physics of the Vuvuzela article, was on "Let's Talk Geek" and gave us a mention - so in return you have to devote 2 hours of your time to watching the whole thing.Just kidding, though you will miss a band called Demon Hunter performing mega hits from their album title "Storm the Gates of Hell" if you don't watch it all.Want to bet those guys play D&D?

Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: Three citizen scientists--an American couple and a German--have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries. Link: Science Codex

What do you get when you mash up neuroscience-fiction smash-hit "Inception" with the charming, all ages "Up"?  "Upception", of course.  See the trailer below:

What happens on "Futurama" when Professor Farnsworth learns that evolution is under attack in schools?  The science-mobile, that's what.

Chad Orzel tackles a reader question on how to do cold atoms experiments so he engages in some 'lab porn' (hey, his words, not mine) with pics and all, at least of the vacuum apparatus.  You'll have to check back for more details.Doomsday machine?  He assures us it is not.

Publisher for the peopleMike Eisen, HHMI investigator (science cred!), Mad Men devotee(cultural cred!) and (oh yeah) co-founder of PLoS (Science 2.0 cred!) gets some love from this paper, so they get some love from us.Biologist Michael Eisen hopes to accomplish for science publishing what Linux set out to do for computing.Not bad.

“BY ALL accounts, I’m a medical miracle,” says Ozzy Osbourne, an ageing rock star who once bit the head off a live bat. For four decades Mr Osbourne (pictured above in his prime) drank too much and took prodigious quantities of drugs. Yet he survived. Now a reformed man, he is getting his entire genome sequenced by Knome, an American genetic-testing firm, for clues to how his body coped with such prolonged abuse. He is not alone in wondering what mysteries genetic testing might unlock. - Economist 

If you want serious coverage of the Pakistan floods, read Patrick Lockerby. If you want it to be obvious that during Ramadan people fast anyway, read Boston.comI guess it isn't that bad, but only a Northeast preudo-progressive big media paper would write a headline implying that religious rituals aren't saving anyone from real world peril.