Science is Cool: Asteroid to Buzz Earth on Friday

Could the Mayans have been off by a few months? The asteroid that is going to buzz by the Earth on Friday is as long as a football field, and will pass much closer by than the moon does. It could even potentially take out a satellite. Which would be cool. Let's just hope our scientists are very, very accurate with their predictions. "Off by a hair" is a pretty big deal when you're dealing with things of this scale!

Image from source, Space.com

[Excerpt]

Asteroid 2012 DA14's Friday Flyby: A Stargazer's Guide

Scientists and amateur observers alike are eagerly awaiting Friday's historic flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14, which will zoom inside Earth's ring of geosynchronous satellites. . .

Read more at: Space.com

What if Newt Gingrich Won?

Brilliant illustration from Mother Jones.

This is of course not a serious post. I'm not asking if by some weird record-keeping anomaly that Newt Gingrich may have actually won the primary. Ha! No, what if--in an alternate timeline and/or reality (as in Fringe)--Newt won the Presidency? What would that look like? I think we can count ourselves fortunate that we will never, ever know. But what if?

[Excerpt]

Gingrich Wins! (An Alternative History)

Wolf Blitzer blinked, blinked again, and tried, for the fourth time, to read the script in front of him. The news had come across the wire just a few minutes earlier, and it still didn't seem real. More like a magical illusion, like the hologram projector they had unveiled in 2008 and then scrapped a week later. He had really liked that hologram projector. To hell with it, Wolf thought. Just tell them what you know. He took a long pause and looked into the camera. "We're watching this very closely," he said. . .

Read more at: Mother Jones

Science is Cool: We're About to Get Buzzed by an Asteroid

Closer to us than the moon is! Maybe it'll take out the FOX "News" satellite.


[Excerpt]

Asteroid 2005 YU55 To Narrowly Miss Earth

Image from Huffington Post

An asteroid a quarter-mile-wide will, astronomically speaking, narrowly miss Earth next week.
And while it is the closest an asteroid this size has come to the home planet since 1976, there's no need to call Bruce Willis ... yet. . .

Read more at: Huffington Post