FLASH!
The New York Daily News recently reported that one Colin Hagendorf of Brooklyn, New York has completed his quest of eating a slice of pizza from every single pizza place in Manhattan. For his next quest, Mr. Hagendorf will make use of every public toilet in Manhattan.

FLASH!
The citizens of Dog Shit Village in Guizhou Province, China, were ecstatic to learn that the government has finally awarded their town with a new name. Until the presentation of the new town sign.

FLASH!
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told a group of Florida voters yesterday that if he is elected he will order NASA to build a colony on the moon. No, really, he did. No joke. Except for Gingrich himself, of course.

And now let’s go live to our correspondent for breaking news from a situation developing on the expressway…Steve, over to you…

If you’ll recall, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, there was a lot of attention on the fact that the shuttle had no escape mechanism. Not that it would have done any good in the sort of disaster that destroyed Challenger. Nevertheless, when the shuttle returned to service a couple of years later, it had been retro-fitted with what seemed to me to be a rather ad-hoc escape system: a pole sticking out of the side of the crew compartment that would let the astronauts jump for it one at a time with parachutes. Now, if your spaceship is blowing up, I don’t suppose you’ve got the time or presence of mind to line up to jump like a group from the local sky-diving club, and the system was of no use whatsoever the next time a space shuttle blew up, so I don’t think you could say it was a particularly good system. But, if we are honest about it, I suppose the engineers at NASA know deep in their hearts there is actually no escape system that would work under any crisis situation with a spacecraft, and so they’re just going through the motions for the sake of appearances.

So, with that in mind, consider this post from Gin & Tacos about the escape system designed for the Apollo program called MOOSE (“Man Out Of Space Easiest”), wherein an astronaut would be expected to seal himself into a thin plastic bag with polyurethane foam and hope to survive re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere that way.

Of course, NASA *did* have the forethought to have the White House prepare a speech for President Nixon to deliver to the nation in the event that something went wrong with the first moon landing.

Much note is being made today of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, inaugurating the beginning of human travel into outer space. The first decade of the Space Age remains its absolute pinnacle, while today, half a century later, it seems less and less likely all the time that we will ever explore strange new worlds.

Since 2001, people in cities across the globe have marked the anniversary of Gagarin’s orbit by celebrating “Yuri’s Night” with hundreds of parties and special events. This year there is also a downloadable movie called “First Orbit” which recreates what Gagarin might have seen on his flight by taking images recorded aboard the International Space Station and combining them with recordings of the actual radio communications between Gagarin and the Soviet space controllers at Baikonur, along with an original musical score. There is also a smartphone app you can download on your iPhone or Android phone.

Probably not in the movie: the Russian government recently released hundred of pages of declassified material about Gagarin’s flight, including a transcript of a conversation between Gagarin and Sergei Korolev, the famed “Chief Designer” of the Soviet space program. It’s a fairly mundane interaction, wherein Korolev tells Gagarin where to find his rations (some sausage, tea, jam, and candy…but no Tang) and asks him to slap some tape on a broken control.

Also not widely discussed: Gagarin nearly died during the re-entry of his spacecraft. The capsule failed to detach from the instrument control module, causing a small fuel leak that resulted in the spacecraft not slowing as much as planned. The vehicle dangerously overheated, and Gagarin later reported smelling something burning inside his capsule. Six years later, another Soviet cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, would indeed die during reentry due to mechanical failures. Komarov and others in the Soviet space program knew that the spacecraft intended for that flight was defective, and when political pressure from Moscow forced them to go ahead with the flight anyway, Komarov convinced his superiors to bump Gagarin, who had been scheduled to make that flight. Komarov knowingly sacrificed himself to save Gagarin’s life. It was a sacrifice made in vain, because Gagarin himself was killed less than a year later when his test plane crashed. The cause of the crash was not fully determined until last year, and was grist for speculation of conspiracy for decades.

The United States will commemorate the beginning of its own manned space program with the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight next month. Despite, or because of, the early successes of the Soviet program, America would achieve the single greatest engineering accomplishment in human history to date — the first landing of human beings on the surface of the moon — less than a decade after Gagarin’s flight. But forty years after that milestone, the American manned space program has been diminished to almost non-existant. The final mission of the space shuttle Discovery was last month, and that shuttle is already in the decomissioning process on its way to becoming a museum piece. The shuttle Endeavour sits on the launch pad waiting to close out the last chapter of that history with its launch on April 29. Writing at Salon, New America Foundation think-tank policy head Michael Lind rather assiduously argues that manned spaceflight is unnecessary and unsupportable, and that NASA does and should continue to aggressively pursue space exploration with increasingly-capable robots and unmanned probes. Cosmos Online founder Alan Finkel argues even more deliberately that our technology has pushed our physical capabilities for spaceflight to their maximum in terms of both the physics involved in sending spacecraft into deep space and the biological limitations of human beings, and that we may not be able to exceed those limits for a long time, if ever. Even among the veteran astronauts, there is division over whether or not to continue a manned space program. Last year, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan sent a letter to President Obama encouraging him not to cut back on the manned programs still underway at NASA, while Russell Schweickart (Apollo 9) sent another letter calling for a change in direction and the increased role of private business in space.

It does seem more likely that any further human ventures into space will be incremental for some long time to come, and perhaps Alan Finkel is correct that we may simply never find a way for human beings to travel even as far as Mars without asking the future astronauts to go on their own suicide missions. Maybe that explains why, as astronomers discover dozens upon dozens of new planets all the time, there is no sign of interstellar transit by the beings that must exist somewhere out there. Half a century after one man gently peeked beyond the curtain of our world for the first time, we are still not much beyond that window.

Twenty-five years ago today, as I was cleaning out my desk at the first of many jobs that took me nowhere, I looked up at the TV mounted in the corner of the room just in time to see the explosion. This time of year is full of tragic anniversaries for NASA; yesterday marked the 44th anniversary of the Apollo I accident, and next Tuesday will mark the 8th anniversary of the Shuttle Columbia disaster.

Last week had its own interesting twin milestones: the 50th anniversary of the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy and his historic “Ask not what your country can do for you…” speech, and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential farewell address warning the nation about the rise of the “military-industrial complex”. Kennedy’s speech had an almost immediate effect on an entire generation of young people, jumpstarting a decade of political and social activism. Eisenhower’s speech, however, would not be truly appreciated for its insight and portent for many years, perhaps only now establishing itself as a warning too late heeded.

A little less out of the eye of the media, this January marks the 150th anniversary of the secession of the Southern states and the first hostilities that would mark the beginning of the American Civil War. The anniversary of the founding of the Confederate States of America will occur on February 7. This month also marked the 20th anniversary of the beginning of Operation Desert Storm.

This time of year also holds some personal milestones. It was at this time of year 15 years ago that I started a new job here in Massachusetts, this time a job that would actually define an entire era of my life. The winter of 1995-96 was a snowy one like this, and for a week or two I actually drove back and forth from Maine to Massachusetts every day, because I had not yet found a place to stay. I only needed a spot for myself, because our marriage had fallen apart for the second time and I was going alone, but no solution had yet emerged by the time I had to start the job. Then suddenly something did materialize and I began spending my evenings, exhausted from the slow, snowy drive, packing. I got up one Saturday morning for a day of packing after having driven home in a snowstorm the night before, when the phone rang. It was my brother Tim calling to tell me that our father had died just a few hours earlier.

There are moments we always remember. I remember that day in 1986 and how it took all day for people to become aware of the space shuttle disaster and the surprisingly indifferent reactions I got from people as I told them about it. I remember that night in 1991 when Desert Storm began, sitting in a friend’s living room, watching those eerie green videos of rocket fire and bombs falling on Baghdad live on primetime television. And I remember not really understanding the words my brother was saying to me that Saturday morning in 1996, then the realization of it dawning on me until I stood there screaming, alone, surrounded by the wreckage of a life reduced to boxes. The world, as always, moves on no matter how immense the tragedy, no matter how momentous the occasion, no matter how insignificant the individual. It is up to us to remember.

The media just about wet itself over the reports that a “Second Earth” had been discovered orbiting around a distant star called Gliese 581. The frenzy got even a little more carried away when one less-than-prudent astrophysicist asserted that he was 100% sure that there was life on Gliese 581g, based on absolutely ZERO evidence (which, I’ll give you, is usually enough for most Republicans anyway). Several weeks later, though, different data from a different team seemed to directly contradict that announcement, and it will take a couple of years to try to determine if there is really a planet there at all, or if Vogt’s team were simply trying to score some media attention ahead of a rival group.

Only a few weeks later, the same sort of thing was repeated when NASA staged a big press event, complete with mysterious pre-announcement about something big-BIG-BIG!!! that had a lot of people openly speculating that extraterrestrial life had been discovered or that an asteroid was about to kill us all, or that somebody caught Miley Cyrus smoking drugs or something. The big announcement wasn’t THAT big, but it was still a pretty interesting bit of news: a team of microbiologists announced that they had “discovered” a strain of bacteria that incorporated arsenic into their DNA. The inference was that this would have to change the way scientists defined “life” as they searched for it on other planets. This “breakthrough” didn’t even last long enough for the news cycle to forget about it, though. P.Z. Myers was all over it the very next day, as were a lot of other people, and now the lead researcher has been making mea culpas in public for letting the hype sell the story.

You probably also heard the breathless report about the man cured of AIDS via stem cell replacement therapy. This wasn’t even a new story, having been first reported as long ago as 2008, so it’s not clear to me why this suddenly got swept into the hype machine unless some lazy-ass reporter surfing Google found it and ran with it. Still, “A Cure For AIDS” is a helluva headline, and so there it went. This follow-up post at BoingBoing, though, includes the missing “rest of the story”: the “cure” was a complete one-off due to a combination of the patient’s own immune system having been destroyed by chemo/radiation treatment for leukemia, and the DNA of the bone marrow donor having a known genetic mutation that resists HIV.

Science is pretty damned amazing, but science reporting sure as hell isn’t.

In 1969, Astronaut Neil Armstrong slowly made his way down the ladder of his lunar landing craft then took a breathtaking leap to place the very first human footprint on the surface of another world. Billions of people sat transfixed in front of television sets all over the world waiting for him to speak. His words, so very carefully chosen in advance, instantly became a fixture of human history forever:

“That was one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”

Yesterday, the communications software aboard the International Space Station was upgraded to provide direct access to the Internet. Astronaut T. J. Creamer took advantage of the technological advance to secure his own place in human history by posting the first unaided Tweet from outer space:

Centuries from now, the future slaps its collective forehead.

MSNBC reports that the Discovery Channel says it has remastered all of the NASA film footage from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space flights in high-definition video, and that NASA will make the videos available to the public for free at its archives. The story doesn’t say whether that includes online access, but the films have been incorporated into a six-hour series that will run on the Discovery Channel in June, so get your TiVo ready.

Contrary to popular belief, people do not use only 10% of their brains (unless, of course, they are Republicans). PsyBlog, a British blog about topics in psychology, offers this list of Top Ten Brain Myths that most of us have at one time or another heard and/or accepted as fact. You might be surprised at one or two of them.

eSkeptic, the website of Skeptic Magazine, has this feature article from environmental engineering expert Dr. Tapio Schneider entitled “How We Know Global Warming Is Real”. Recommend this to your disbelieving right-wing friends and associates, but don’t expect them to pay much attention because it includes things like facts and figures that most of them think are “pretend”.

Concerned about the proliferation of RFID tags in everything from passports to grocery packaging? I am. Luckily, the always-enterprising folks at Instructables.com have devised a fool-proof method for neutralizing RFID tags: smash them with a hammer. It causes the least-visible cosmetic damage to those flat RFIDs that are in your passport or on your credit card, so that The Man won’t tase you, bro when he thinks you’ve tampered with it.

Geeks everywhere are limbering up their salivary glands for the expected release of the 3G iPhone in June, but the suits at Research In Motion (R.I.M.), which makes the Blackberry (the favorite toy of gadget-head biz-wizzes everywhere), are none too pleased. This NYT article from a couple of weeks ago explains how Steverino has decided to aim for the enterprise market, and how his Reality Distortion Field may be strong enough to push the Crackberry out of the briefcase of every road warrior in America.

Lastly, joe of the eponymous bookofjoe.com tells us that those crazy youngsters have figured out another totally cool thing you can do with Google Maps and “smart mobs”: find stolen cars faster than Lojack.

Do kids even still want to be astronauts when they grow up?  That was always right near the top of my list when I was a little boy.  I was not quite six years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, and I’ll wager there weren’t many American boys born between 1955-1965 who didn’t harbor at least a passing fantasy about it.  But I’m not even sure that my daughter even knows what an astronaut is.

Well, all you gentlemen of a certain age, there’s still hope.  NASA’s hiring.  The pay’s decent, and the requirements don’t seem all that tough:  you have to be a U.S. citizen, pass the drug test and the physical, oh, and the posting says “some travel required”.

(Just make sure your diaper-wearing obsessed girlfriend doesn’t already work there, mm’kay?)