Science Friday

I'm working on my Halloween costume (Yoshi!) so I'll cut straight to the news this week:

The Great Orange Satan has an awesome post about the solar system. TONS of pretty pictures. James already linked to this earlier today, but I was planning on linking to it anyway and it deserves the extra link.

A huge Pliosaur skull was found on Britain's aptly-named Jurassic coast. Pliosaurs were basically the most intimidating sea beasts ever. They lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the same time the dinosaurs were stomping over the land, but they could easily have eaten a T-Rex for lunch and still been hungry for dinner.

Besides being really a really fun toy, Google Earth is enabling some people to do some really great things. A few North Carolinians were featured for their work fighting mountaintop removal mining.

Humans might not be able to sprint that well, compared to other animals, but we're among the best at distance running. I'd heard previously that humans used to chase deer and run them to exhaustion before we got horses and projectile weapons, but it's nice to know how we could do that.

A federal agency is offering grants to ambitious alternative energy research projects. Among them: engineering organisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into gasoline and diesel.

Geocities, an iconic 1990s web phenomenon that allowed countless angsty preteens (including me!) to make their own websites, has shut down. Yahoo bought it and neglected it, and all the angsty preteens moved to Myspace and then Facebook, and poor Geocities had nothing left.

The biggest asteroid to hit Earth in more than a decade exploded over Indonesia earlier this month. At 40-50 kilotons (TNT equivalent), it was up to 4 times as powerful an explosion as the Hiroshima bomb. And not nearly as powerful as the 30 megaton Tunguska impact in Siberia (1908).