Star Wars VII?

Yesterday, a major disaster struck the modern world. Millions are grieving, along with me. No, I'm not talking about Hurricane Sandy.... I'm talking about the devastating deal that led to lucasfilms being aquired by Disney, which resulted in the announcement of Star Wars VII, VIII, and IX. The Star Wars series seem to be getting worse and worse as time goes on, which are ranked as (from best to worst): IV, V, VI, III, II, I. Adding another 3 films will just ruin the series' already tarnished reputation. We can all see what happened to John Carter: Disney's latest sci-fi flop. Who knows what they will do to this series. 

Despite the overwhelming despair, I still have hope; A New Hope, if you will. Deep down I obviously hope that Disney will be hiring creative geniuses, and actors that will blow away good ol Harry Ford. The odds are not in my favour, as history clearly shows, though. Overall, today Disney wasted $4.05 billion on a dead franchise, while the american economy is still in tatters.

BREAKING NEWS: MASS TURTLE GRAVE

"Bones upon bones... we couldn't believe our eyes." Says Oliver Wings, the unfortunate paleontologist that stumbled on the mass grave of more than 1800 Jurassic Era turtles in China's province of Xinjiang (I couldn't pronounce it either). Poor Oliver was just minding his own business, looking for other dead things, when they found the huge number of turtles in their watering hole.

The turtles were said to have converged on the watering hole, because of -you guessed it- a lack of water, or drought. The turtles happily awaited the rain, but alas the rain came too late. By the time it got there, most of the turtles were probably dead, and their bodies rotting. The rain came with a vengeance, and brought with it a wall of mud, which covered and killed the remaining population.

This is only scientific speculation, however. For all we know, there was a massive World War in the Jurassic period, between the turtles, dinosaurs, and other prehistoric life. Is it not fishy that the dinosaurs AND these turtles were prone to mass extinction? Clearly, the turtles developed nuclear weapons, and used it to eliminate all of the dinosaurs. However in the processs, they wiped out a huge number of their own. Embarassed of their mistake, they tried to bury their fallen comrades in various graves throughout the world, and it is only now that we are discovering this.

VOTE OBAMA FOR THE TRUTH!

Strange Batteries

Speaking of paint, how do you think it would be possible to have battery concealed in that paint? First off, lets start with a normal battery. A standard household battery is comprised of a positive cathode and negative anode, separated down the middle, and a "Current Collector" to gather the charges passing through it.

The spray-paint battery works in the same way, except the cathode/anodes are the top/bottom layers of the paint, which a current collector in the middle. Could you imagine... If instead of covering that asteroid with just regular paint to move it, we could make it into a 180 square km battery?! That would be as insane as jumping from the edge of space... Almost. The implications of this techonology are massive, except it will take an unnecessarily long time to make into a product, no thanks to the lack of scientific funding!

Paintball... For Science!

It's getting closer to that apocolyptic date of 12/21/2012, and what have we done to prepare? Nothing! Well, unless your an MIT graduate student, who studies asteroids. He (among others) proposed that asteroids with a collision course with Earth, should be redirected -not with nukes or rockets- but with paintballs! Simulations who that if you were to fire two pellets (5 tonnes) of white paint at the asteroid, which would cover most of the surface of the rock.

This doesn't seem like it would do much, but it isnt the initial paint blast that is meant to move it. The photons (light) from the sun will have more of a surface to bounce off of, which would slowly but surely redirect the asteroid, in this case, Apophis.

What could be better than an astronomical game of paintball? How about an astronomical game of paintball IN SPACE!?

                 (99942 Apophis, a Near-Earth Object.

                                 creative, I know.)

The Milky Way is hungry?

How does it feel to know that our galaxy is a cannibal? According to researchers at Yale University, The Milky Way has been constantly gobbling up star clusters and small galaxies. I won't judge though, since I for sure can't go millions of years without food... especially that tasty tortellini... Anyway, this is a pretty important discovery for everyone, since it goes to show how little we know about the things around us. For example, we have only explored roughly 5% of the ocean, and we've already come across things like that insane looking deep sea cucumber (right). We have also recently found out that in around 4 billion years, our galaxy and our closest neighbour Andromeda (M31) will collide, in a uneventful event. Since there are such vast distances between stars, it is highly unlikely that it will affect us in any way, since the nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri at around 40 trillion km away. If the sun were a Ping-Pong ball in Paris, then Proxima Centauri would be a pea-sized ball in Berlin. However, stars are a lot more dense towards the center of the galaxies, but even then it would represent one Ping-Pong ball every 3.2 km. 

Basically, it's cool to know of these space and science things, but they really don't matter to us, since they'll either happen so far in the future we can't even comprehend, or they just won't affect anything at all! On another note, my tortellini is finished cooking, and I am mighty starved.

(Watch this if you want to see a long-drawn out, probably inaccurate simulation of the collision!)