DID YOU KNOW?

The world will not end on December 20, 2012, though some interpreters of the Mayan calendar insist that it will.  NASA's Don Yeomans debunks this and other myths ~ long story short, the Mayan date merely marks the end of a calendar cycle, much like December 31 marks the end of our calendar year. Add a day, and voila!  New year.  


Most people with the sense of a fruit fly would understand that it may be dangerous to guide your boat too close to a glacier or iceberg which is calving, i.e. sloughing off house-sized chunks of ice due to warming.  These folks apparently didn't get the word, and the Antarctic iceberg they were cruising next to conveyed the peril explosively.


Dew or raindrops accumulate on the bodies of insects, creating refractive jewel-like works of art.  (See image above, click to enlarge.)


Our Milky Way galaxy is populated by many thousands of gaseous bubbles, star-forming regions similar to nebulae, nearly all discovered by citizen scientists.  Champagne for all !


The most astounding fact about the universe is .... revealed by Neil deGrasse Tyson in this three-minute video.


George Orwell once remarked that "War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they can profit from it."  He seems to have been correct ~ even in the face of an international financial crisis, "Global sales of arms and military services by the 100 largest defense contractors increased in 2010 by $411.1 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute."  44 of those 100 companies reside in the U.S.  Here is a list of the top ten companies, including their products and their profits.  Their business is war, and business is good.