Send Your Face To Space on the Next Shuttle - Mashable

Slap a Map Across Your Gmail or Buzz - ReadWriteWeb

How to use a semicolon - The Oatmeal [via ARTCRANK]

South Africa 2010 World Cup Twitter Lists - TweetDeck Directory

DJ Hero 2 confirmed, release date October - CVG

Help NASA sort through thousands of Mars images and have fun learning about space exploration at the same time!  There have been so many images taken of Mars that scientists cannot sort through all of them by themselves.  So, they have asked the public to help them sort through the images through their website Be A Martian, which was created with the help of Microsoft.  

From BBC News article:

Players at Be A Martian can earn points in one game by helping Nasa examine and organize the images into a more complete map of the planet.

Another game gets users to count impact craters to help scientists understand better the relative age of rocks on Mars' surface.

Nasa hopes the mix of real data and fun will also inspire the planetary scientists of tomorrow.

"We really need the next generation of explorers," says Michelle Viotti, from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions.

"And we're also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There's so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important." 

Have fun and make your own discoveries!

[via BBC and Nerd Salad]

Find out how MIT students Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh took this image of Earth for less than $148.  Link (Thanks, Mt Holly Mayor!)

Planetary systems much like our own may be more common than what we thought:

Dr Dominik told BBC News: "We found a system with two planets that take the roles of Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System. These two planets have a similar mass ratio and similar orbital radius and a similar orbital period.

"It looks like this may have formed in a similar way to our Solar System. And if this is the case, it looks like [our] Solar System cannot be unique in the Universe. There should be other similar systems out there which could host terrestrial planets."

Link to full article.

Here is a map which shows the first moonwalk done on July 21, 1969.  Link to full image.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of when the Soviet Union successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into space.  NASA has written a restrospective story of Sputnik, including photos and references, on how the satellite gave rise to the space age and the U.S. - U.S.S.R. space race.

Related:
Sputnik program [Wikipedia]
Sputnik 1 [Wikipedia]
Arthur C. Clarke on Sputnik [BoingBoing]
Richard "Ultima" Garriott owns a Sputnik [BoingBoing]
I-Reporters' dreams launched along with Sputnik 50 years ago [CNN]

The European Space Agency launched a 'pregnancy test' into space which will search for signs of life on Mars.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) postage-stamp-sized experiment, called the "Life Marker Chip" (LMC), was launched last week aboard a Russian rocket launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. Strapped to the ESA's large Foton-M3 capsule, the tiny experiment harbors more than 2,000 life-detecting samples that glow if they encounter life-critical compounds, such as proteins or DNA.

Scientists and engineers hope the life-sensing chip can remain viable in the harsh radiation, temperatures and vacuum of space during a trip to Mars.

"This will be the first time that these types of materials will have flown unprotected in space in a manner similar to a flight to Mars," said Andrew Steele, a molecular biologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.

The LMC experiment works like a pregnancy test, which uses color-changing chemicals to pick up traces of hormones found in greater numbers after conception.

Link.

I'm not sure what planet (Could that be a ring of Saturn?) this moon belongs to, but it is a stunning picture.  Does anybody else think that moon looks like the Deathstar?  Just a thought.  Link to larger image.

Stephen Hawking went weightless 8 times today aboard a Boeing 727. This is all in preparation for a future trip into orbit.

Thursday's flight served an initial test run to see if Hawking had the "Right Stuff" for an even more ambitious journey: a rocket-powered rise to the edge of outer space, perhaps aboard the spaceship now being developed for Virgin Galactic. That craft is due to enter service in 2009 or so, and taking such a flight would check off what Hawking has said is his "next goal."

Previously:
Stephen Hawking going weightless
Stephen Hawking Urges Us to Move to a New Planet

Never before has hair washing been so fascinating to me. I guess in space you do it with a squirt bottle and try not to spill.

Do you suppose commercial space exploration could be partially funded by a 24/7 Real World show which feeds a real-time broadcast of people doing space stuff?