Is the flag left behind from Apollo 11 still standing? In a three-day period NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) camera was able to image five of the six Apollo sites. Not Apollo 11, though. Coupled with the fact that NASA confirmed that it doesn't have tapes from the original moon landing (something known in 2006, if you read Moon Landing Footage “Missing”, Replaced With Episode Of Futurama) it only adds fuel to the fire for conspiracy theorists who believe the whole thing was faked.
Not faked - a 15th century Vinland map showing America. At least if you want to believe the latest finding at a cartography conference in ... surprise ... Denmark. So did the Vikings discover America first? They have been saying that forever. It's up in the air, the document could be from the 1440s, 50 years before Columbus. Ink doubts leave it up in the year but Rene Larsen says anatase titanium dioxide has been found in other ancient documents. Your call.
My favorite hypothesis? A priest made it to piss off Hitler.
Hello, we're still here, say global warming activists. They have news that makes them happy; June was the second hottest June on record. Downer; the first was 2005, when Al Gore was making his movie. Bigger downer; they always claim 'since records were kept in 1880' but those were mostly logs and the kind of inaccurate measurement tools you can bet we would hear about if global warming deniers were using them. But accurate records have been kept since 1980 so at least it's the second warmest since then. The solar cycle is linked to global variations in temperature, just like El Nino and El Nina, so that means we have a little time before warming ramps back up - let's not waste money on tired old porkbarrel alternative energy like solar panel and windmill shills are hoping for and use the lull to invent something that, you know, works.
Check out 5 Myths about the male body. Top myth? Mine isn't awesome. To make sure I always notice, I bought this new mirror that reflects from any angle.
At Scienceblogs, Greg Laden seems to be tired of the board war between Chris Mooney and PZ Myers so he has defused it by going on a hissy fit about Christian fundamentalists who are secretly running the US government and claiming that everyone in America is prejudiced except him. I thought he was kidding at first - then I wondered if he owns a lot of cats. But now I am a subscriber because it isn't often we get to watch once-serious writers devolve before our eyes.
If you scratched your head when the government introduced the concept of "saved jobs" earlier this year (I loved it - how do you dispute how many jobs we might have lost without a stimulus?) and sent the Congressional Budget Office into a tizzy, you'll love the latest economic indicator by top economic adviser Larry Summers.
He says things must be better because fewer people are Googling the term "economic depression." I liked him better when he was claiming girls couldn't do math. At least then he was only running the finances of a college.
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