The Cranky Nerd

via Bad Astronomy

That’s us. You, me, everyone. That fuzzy blob on the left? That’s Earth. The one on the right: the Moon.

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(via My Modern Met)

plantedcity:

From Reuters:

Global concern about climate change has risen only very slightly over the past two years, as consumers have focused on more immediate economic worries, according to an opinion poll published on Sunday. Nielsen’s latest global online environment and sustainability survey showed that 69 percent of 25,000 Internet users in 51 countries were concerned about climate change in 2011, slightly up from 66 percent in a similar poll in 2009, but down from 72 percent in 2007. “Focus on immediate worries such as job security, local school quality and economic wellbeing have all diminished media attention for climate stories in the past two years,” said Maxwell Boykoff, who was an adviser to the survey and is senior visiting research associate at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. Hopes for a global climate treaty have faded over the past couple of years as successive United Nations meetings have failed to clinch a binding deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which are widely blamed for stoking global warming. …

In China, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter, climate change concern has dropped to 64 percent from 77 percent in the last two years.

In the United States, the second biggest emitter and the only industrialized nation not signed up to the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol for curbing emissions, the number of those concerned has fallen steadily to 48 percent, from 51 percent in 2009 and 62 percent in 2007.

The regions with the highest levels of concern were Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: Neilsen Wire)

(via Scientific American)

A few years ago, celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking was widely reported in the press to have placed a provocative public bet that the LHC (along with all particle accelerators that preceded it) would never find the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” believed responsible for having imbued massive particles with their mass when the universe was very young.

(via Spaceflight Now)

HOUSTON — Astronauts may need to temporarily withdraw from the International Space Station before the end of this year if Russia is unable to resume manned flights of its Soyuz rocket after a failed cargo launch last week, according to the NASA official in charge of the outpost.

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(I know this is old, I’ve just always liked it… deal with it)

(via CNN)

(CNN) — NASA’s upcoming GRAIL mission will provide new information about how the moon formed and will allow students to take their own pictures of its surface, panelists announced at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Thursday.

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