Our Super Cool Sky & Other Nerdy News

This is mesmerizing. I clicked on this post from Markos while I was doing five other things at once and quickly forgot all about those other things. I have been playing with this thing for 15 minutes, not realizing how long I had been sitting here doing nothing else. If you're an astronomy nerd, or if you just get stuck staring at the sky sometimes, be careful because even though I had seen a lot of these images before it has very different feel when you can actually see where they lay in space. Awesome.

More in Nerd News:

A 67 million year old mummified duckbilled dinosaur is being uncovered in North Dakota after discovery in 1999.

The debate over "little people" of Flores heats up with new evidence in Palau. Adaptive evolution or separate species?


And In Today's Should Be On The Front Page, Not the Science Section
Did you know the Old Arctic Ice is melting? No, not like it used to, this is new disturbing news. It's losing its long-term thick ice that reflects the sun's solar energy back out to space instead of absorbing it like it will once it becomes water. The loss has continued even through the winter months, and because the newer, protective layer of ice is vulnerable due to its thinner and saltier consistency, the loss is expected to continue to through the summer:

"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away," commented Walt Meier from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder.

"It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there."
....

Most projections of climate change in the Arctic suggest the ocean may become ice-free by the middle of the century, but one forecast released late last year said it could happen by 2013.

Fucking wonderful. Waterworld was a crappy movie (sorry, Andrew). This is another major issue that HAS to be addressed NOW. Obama has to quickly break out a global plan for not only how to curb long term climate change, but also how to deal with it as it begins to rapidly affect our environment and economy.

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