Americans Travel to Mars, Take Photos of Themselves, Buy Authentic Native Crafts and Chicklets

Sometimes it feels like picking on Boing Boing is a bit like kicking a puppy, and they're certainly not the generative cause of the hyperventilatory blogospheric upwelling of passion over the descent shots of the Mars Phoenix polar lander, but they actually tag their posts well enough to find them easily. And anyway, nobody's puppy, in our experience, has quite the same tendency to occasionally act like Gavin from Kids in the Hall. "You know in Europe, you only get one spoon..."

[Edited to add] Here is the slightly—and I mean slightly—more sober take from io9, which has more photos and prettier colors. Unearthed by our crack investigative team, which stumbled across this post while searching for online retailers of crack.

First, we'll post the photo. It is awful darn yip-able; it's an image of Phoenix about to land, taken from the Reconnaissance orbiter, and for all that it's really a smudge, just thinking that this is a man-made robot being photographed by a satellite in outer fucking space gets the old microfiche of the imagination clicking and warbling.



Got our "ahhhs" out?

Good, now shift your perspective just a smidge towards the cynical: we just sent a spaceship one hundred million-odd miles and had another spaceship we'd already sent one hundred million-odd miles photograph it. The mechanisms, albeit briefly, overwhelmed the point. It's not the fact that these photographs were taken that's vaguely migrainous, it's the level of excitement over taking photos of ourselves. At least the Phoenix lander wasn't passed out on the floor of the polar tiki bar having enjoyed one too many shots of Demosian sake. Yet.



{from poor, sweet, moist-eyed Boing Boing}

The Week in Sharks: They've Been Getting Laid Far Longer Than You, You Tasty Monkey Morsel You

Oldest preggers fish found. Australian scientists discovered an embryo in a fossil primordial fish (called a placoderm, which is Latin for something awesome). Not an egg, not a teenage fish with separation issues, not a plastic fish doll that cries when you tip it over and seems to have been mutilated in a fit of prepubescent fishminism, but an embryo, replete with placenta and umbilical cord. This internal gestation of young mirrors the reproductive gizmos of many species of chondrichthyes far more than it resembles fish proper, and this is the earliest proof of this type of reproduction found to date.

Since this particular placoderm dates back 375 million years, it is almost undoubtedly a forerunner of both sharks and us monkey folk. Also, since it dates back 375 million years, it probably gave fishlip-service to chastity and then got it on freaky upside-down style in the kelp fields with a rough-hewn but earnest nautiloid.

{from Nature via those bedroom-eyed fish-sexers at Reuters}


Sharks, like Americans, go to Mexico but still end up eating American. Three sharks attacks and counting in the Yankee colonial outpost of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, have surfers panicking, which will hopefully briefly quell the whole self-righteous, in-touch-with-Gaia shit that also, at least in Southern California, somehow melded seamlessly with roofies. The be-denticled culprit(s) have yet to be identified, but Mexican officials—including the fucking Navy—are just merrily a-slaughterin'.

This technique is of questionable effectiveness so far (it presumes a single or select group of monkey-snackers, whereas no sharks actually enjoy monkey-snacking; we taste sort of rank, and anyway, it's been widely known for centuries that you just don't eat raw food in Mexico. Furthermore, from an anthropomorphological perspective, as Capt. Malcom Reynolds once said, "If anyone tries to kill you, you kill them right back"), and while no one's necessarily any safer, at least the media's been able to have a field day. So there'd be many a Malcolm Gladwell in the making disappointed if the Lunar Weight solution gets adopted: figure out a way to design a surfboard and refine surfing technique so that every buoyant Spicoli doesn't necessarily resemble a sea lion with cerebral palsy.

But until that day, the Spring Break nom nom noms will likely continue.

[edited to add] And then there's this not-so-much-green-as-puce perspective from the Michael Weiner nee Savage of ichthyology.

{from the stoically inedible AP, via ABC news}


Basking sharks enjoy great syrup, Pete Doherty. British scientists tracked basking shark migrations "from waters southwest of the Isle of Man to Canada." And like reporters, the massive, planktivorous sharks were proven to have no real conception that "the Isle of Man" and "Canada" may differ in their levels of specificity. Whether or not basking sharks made derisive comments about Quebec in their ancient, mellifluous basking-shark language remains the realm of speculation.

What is apparent, however, is that the basking shark—already endangered—ranges too far be easily protected with traditional imperial pluck and vigour <sic> from hunting by people who feel that their tummies can make better use of shark fins than said fins' owners can.

Incidentally, the two sharks tracked for this study were named "A" and "B". Hey science! Show some poetry! Lunar Weight recommends "Shark" and "That Other Shark".

{from the UK Times to us noble savages}

It Starts in Inimitable Style

Welcome to Lunar Weight.

This is a science blog, written by a cohort of science fans. Not scientists—though some of us may be scientists—and not science writers—though some of us are paid to write about science, by people who apparently know even less than we do—and for the love of God or Dawkins or JAMA not science journalists.

Just fans. Of chemistry, biology, psychology, physics, biomedicine, materials science, robotics, NOVA, hungover posting, and attention. Probably in that order, actually. So our style isn't quite as inimitable as promised, but so far there doesn't seem much imiting it.

Because this shit is awesome (the science stuff, not Lunar Weight. Well, maybe we are, but we're trying not to be smug). This shit is also occasionally profoundly silly. Even better, it's both. I mean, we're dealing with either a constant search for things that already exist, have existed, and exist quite well without our actually being aware of them (sort of like Columbus or even Leif Ericsson "discovering" the New World, much to the bemusement of various and sundry indigenous civilizations who just referred to it as, er, the World), or else an employment of the basic "hit it with a stick and see what happens," instinct extrapolated over 10,000 years of increasingly better sticks (hit it with a laser and see what happens!).

So here's what we promise. Coverage of science that interests us, with humor and insight, frequent but not guaranteed factual accuracy (please e-mail us if we get something butt wrong), occasional foul language, a sense of excitement, and the impending live-blogging of Shark Week on Discovery.