Since I know you are all too cheap to pay for Newsday and this article is behind their pay firewall, I will sum it up for you - Darth Vader apparently missed his flight to San Diego for the Comic Convention and decided to rob a bank in Setauket instead.Really, that doesn't need anything else to be funny.The camouflage pants are a nice extra humorous touch, though.   H/T and photo Gothamist

British nanny Nicola Paginton, age 30, suffered a sudden heart arrhythmia, likely caused by "her activity before death", says the coroners report.  A heart attack at such a young age?   What was that activity?  I am not writing it here but you can go read about it. I guess all British nannies look like this?  It explains why American men are not allowed to have them.

See if you can follow along as an Old Media giant goes after a new competitor.The Wylie Agency, that of literary agent Andrew Wylie, has said it will publish Kindle versions (that's Amazon) of backlist titles by authors like Ralph Ellison and John Updike.   Random House says they will kick Wylie's teeth in, legally.   Nope, says Wylie, the authors (or estates) control digital rights to works produced before e-books like Kindle existed.

Alex Antunes, space columnist and mastermind behind Project Calliope, got some love from Wired's online Gadget Lab.It doesn’t always have to be a scientific experiment. Antunes’ project, called Project Calliope, will use magnetic, thermal and light sensors to detect information in the ionosphere and transmit the data back to earth in the form of sound. That sound is almost like space music, he says.“Just like people have taken ambient sound and used it in music, artists can take this and create something out of it.” says Antunes.Extreme Hobbyists Put Satellites Into Orbit With $8,000 Kits By Priya Ganapati

Inspired by the new "Inception" movie, io9's Annalee Newitz compiles her favorite scifi dream cities - dark horse inclusion: "Monsters, Inc."

Dave Bacon, who used to be at Scienceblogs it seems (though not a departed because of Pepsigate, at least from what I gathered) outlines a pretty good vision of what the future of science networks might be.Obviously we are a science network but we are not the only model - however, we are very much Science 2.0 whereas Scienceblogs was Blogging 1.0 (and yet I would regard Adam Bly as a Science 2.0 pioneer, even though Scienceblogs is not a Science 2.0 site - makes no sense?   You'll have to buy the book) and there are tangential ways to go as well, something a quantum physicist would surely understand, living in a world of complex adaptive systems.

At Jonathan Rosenberg's excellent "Scenes From A Multiverse" ...Get ripped in defiance of conventional physics: Dark Energy brand energy drink replaces 74% of your muscles with Dark Muscles. Like it?  Buy a print here.

Casey Rentz takes that whole chicken-egg silliness (solved! say headlines) and gets to the meat of the issue in Which came first, the scientist or the sensationalist?It isn't just pageview-whoring journalists and media companies, Casey notes, but researchers and PIOs at institutions as well.Web publications want flashy news. Press officers want to glorify their own institution. Scientists want to attract new funding. It's a reinforced loop that can in some situations lead to the printing of truly questionable material, as the chicken and egg article so plainly illustrates.

Most of us are good at one thing; sports or science - Josh Witten is an exception but he may have found his match in Sweden's Elin Ekblom-Bak, who jacks up goals for a professional women's football team and still has time to work  in the Department of Medicine at the Karolinska Institute and the Astrand Laboratory of Work Physiology in the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences.

Strange creatures have been inhabiting London’s construction sites. Artist Zara Gaze knows more about their nocturnal origins.Artist Zara Gaze calls the installations “sandalism” - I call it awesome.   http://sandalism.co.uk/ for lots more cool stuff.