In an era of "sound-bite politics"; short-sighted goals more concerned with "team victory" than with governing, this documentary should be a part of the debate on education, energy, science and ultimately jobs in this country.

 
As we see the price of gasoline rise at the pump: the price of bringing food to suburbia also rises, as fuel prices rise for the grocers to ship food to their shelves - they transfer that cost to us, a de facto tax irrespective of political party.

 
My fondest childhood memories: my father's "victory garden" he loved to work in our backyard. Literally every vegetable we consumed was grown out back, we then purchased our meats at the grocery store. It saved us much money. Today, it would allow consumers to buy more range-fed poultry and cattle products, healthy as well as a kind of Noble savage protest. In the aftermath of 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, we're no longer looking for the Cavalry.

 
We may in the end, all need victory gardens...

Rebecca Shaw of the Environmental Defense Fund in San Francisco, California and colleagues studied the Nature Conservancy's Mount Hamilton project, which spans 3200 km²of California. They focused on 11 species in the area with known climate tolerances.

They then combined the results of 16 climate models to estimate how the local climate within the project will change between now and 2100. That allowed them to determine how each species' habitat would move, grow or shrink – and thus how much more land would need to be acquired and maintained to preserve them.

The analysis suggests that the project will need an extra 2560 km² of land by 2050. The figure had risen to 3800 km² by 2100. Shaw estimates the extra cost at $1.73 billion by 2050, and $2.54 billion by 2100. That is slightly more than double the cost of maintaining the project in the absence of climate change.

"Mo' money, mo' problems." Biggie Smalls (released posthumously). I say that with some chagrin. Pay now, or pay a LOT later...

New Scientist: Climate change will make conservation even pricier

In the search for other Earths, the main goal is to find a planet the same size as ours that sits in the habitable zone – the region around a given star where planetary surface temperature would be similar to ours, allowing liquid water to exist.

But while an Earth-sized world in one of these habitable zones might have seas and rivers, it would look quite different bathed in blue-white or red light. That could affect the development of life. To exploit the available light, plant leaves could be yellow, orange or red, according to research in 2007 by the Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

German artist Alexander Preuss, Ufunkdotnet

Call it "Dreaming Dreams," part II, and a help to teachers instructing science:

Scoopdotit: Using Science Fiction to Teach Science

Prior to Majorana's work, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with an equation that describes how quantum particles behave and interact. Paul Dirac, an English physicist, tweaked that equation to apply it to fermions, such as electrons, moving at near-light speed. That work tied together quantum mechanics and Einstein's special theory of relativity. It also implied the existence of antimatter, where every particle has an antimatter counterpart—such as electrons and positrons—and that the two would annihilate each other if they ever met. Dirac's work suggested that some particles, such as photons, could serve as their own antiparticles. But fermions weren't thought to be among them. It was Majorana's manipulations of Dirac's equations that suggested the possible existence of a new type of fermion that could serve as its own antiparticle.

One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching holes in paper with the sparks, and the paper caught on fire. Soon I couldn't hold it any more because it was burning near my fingers, so I dropped it in a metal wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in it. Newspapers burn fast, you know, and the flame looked pretty big inside the room. I shut the door so my mother--who was playing bridge with some friends in the living room--wouldn't find out there was a fire in my room, took a magazine that was lying nearby, and put it over the wastebasket to smother the fire.

After the fire was out I took the magazine off, but now the room began to fill up with smoke. The wastebasket was still too hot to handle, so I got a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for the smoke to blow out.

But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now the magazine was out of reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in the window--it was very dangerous!

Well, I got the magazine, put the fire out again, and this time kept the magazine with me while I shook the glowing coals out of the wastepaper basket onto the street, two or three floors below. Then I went out of my room, closed the door behind me, and said to my mother, "I'm going out to play," and the smoke went out slowly through the windows.