Rest in Peace, little Space Bat dude

My Mister and I have been following the news about the now-famous free tail bat who accompanied space shuttle Discovery on its most recent launch. Tragically, NASA reports that Space Bat "likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit."

You'll find more details and photos at NASA.gov, and a touching tribute to Space Bat on the Space Bat Memorial page.

In the words of an unknown forum poster at space-bat.com, "Damnit, I promised I wouldn't cry".

Anything Into Oil

For Brian Appel—and, maybe, for an energy-hungry world—it's a dream come true, better than turning straw into gold. The thermal conversion process can take material more plentiful and troublesome than straw—slaughterhouse waste, municipal sewage, old tires, mixed plastics, virtually all the wretched detritus of modern life—and make it something the world needs much more than gold: high-quality oil.

read more | digg story

I heard about this company in 2004 and thought the idea was intriguing. I just saw the above article wander by on Digg.com. Yeah, it's an article from 2006, but it's still fascinating. I don't know if it could ever translate into an alternative energy source on a large scale. But it gives me hope that even if we burn up most of the available underground oil, it will still be possible to create enough oil for other important petroleum products that we take for granted, like plastics.

The company doing this is Changing World Technologies, Inc.

Anatomically Correct Brain Cake

How to Make an Anatomically Correct Brain Cake - wikiHow
If ever you're in the mood, or in the company of neuroscientists with something to celebrate, you may have need to create an anatomically correct brain cake.


Photo care of Jvoytek on wikiHow.
Click the photo to see the full article.

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I never knew that I needed to know how to do this, until someone posted it on the interwebs. I didn't go looking for this. It came looking for me on my Google homepage under "how to of the day".

Brilliant!

Ok. Back to work.

Many splendored thing...

As a transplant to Minnesota from Southern California, I've found winter fascinating. There are so many kinds of snow. One of my favorites is a kind of snow pellets. They're not hard and icy like sleet or hail. They tend to be small, and remind me of the little white Styrofoam balls you find inside some bean bag chairs. They don't happen often, but when they do they're delightful to watch in my easily amused opinion.

After 4 years here, I still hadn't found any local who could tell me what they are called. Some hardly knew what I was describing, which seemed odd to me. I'd been given answers such as "sleet", "angel poo", "snow BBs", and "What? Oh those. No idea. It's a kind of snow."

I finally solved the mystery online. I found a chart on SnowCrystals.com showing the various kinds of snow flakes, and good descriptions of how each forms. (Click the thumbnail to see the chart.)

My "snow pellets" are apparently called graupel, and form when a regular snowflake gets "rimed", as described by Kenneth G. Libbrecht of Caltech.

Clouds are made of countless water droplets, and sometimes these droplets collide with and stick to snow crystals. The frozen droplets are called rime. All the different types of snow crystals can be found decorated with rime. When the coverage is especially heavy, so that the assembly looks like a tiny snowball, the result is called graupel.