Information for those thinking of buying a home telescope

It's a cute graphic, but not much more than that. You move the cursor and the simulated night sky moves in response - and it's a great example of how the Internet can take us in the wrong direction. Do you remember kids getting books and ... gasp ... going outdoors at night, looking upward and finding those constellations, instead of searching for them on an animation?

Journal of yet another unhappily unemployed scientist who has taken up writing while biding her time - this one is an ornitologist living in New York.

Infrared photos of a few extrasolar planets. Don't expect much - you just see points of light - but they've been imaged in Infrared light.

A magazine written for the intelligent layman.

Free, research level articles in a variety of scientific fields. When one remembers that research journals often go for hundreds of dollars per year in hardcopy form, a resource like this is appreciated even more, in this time of widespread long term unemployment in the pure and applied sciences.

Professional organization homepage, links to articles vetted by people who do so with a certain level of credibility.

The seasonal ice cap at the South Pole (the one made of dry ice) is evaporating as Astronomers at the University of Arizona watch. A brief discussion of the geology that results.

Find out if any upcoming solar storms are approaching.

Further discussion of a fringe science article I mentioned earlier, over on the Ravine, my journal / homegroup here on Diigo.

A very strange fringe science piece that I'll talk about in a bit (see next link, one place up on my profile): somebody claims to have found an ancient stone circle under the Lake that, as one looks at it, doesn't seem very circular. Thinking that somebody might be a little desperate to find something to publish.

A thought to keep in mind as you read this - what happens to the already overburdened graduate whose job gets outsourced, and then can't find another because he's deemed "overqualified" for the low skilled, low wage jobs available? Answer: Look up "capitalization of interest" and then note that one can't erase student loan debt by declaring bankruptcy. What will result will be the mathematical equivalent of charging compound interest on a loan that the graduate has been deprived of the means of repaying.

... and this is the experience the lucky candidates are having!

Entertaining classroom demonstration

A parody of environmental action sites, this is said to have fooled a fair number of the middle school students who saw it into thinking that they were reading about a real species.

Researchers attempting to create something reminiscent the earliest life, based on RNA instead of DNA, achieve a success.