Lunar

Friday marked the 43 anniversary of the first lunar landing.  Here, in commemoration, is the long lost audio:

The Mind of Meat

O Pioneers!

I love this.

I drink it up.

I think it's time that the US start heavily funding NASA again. This might be the only way to end this recession:

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics.

Paging Scrooge McDuck. (Via HuffPo)

Alien Radio

I wish I still did community radio. If I did, I would use the audio of this to build a sweet station id.

Get excited! We're bombing the moon! The moon men have had this coming for ages!

George Lucas must be stopped

A random search about upcoming 3D films yielded this terrible piece of news:

Star Wars: George Lucas has announced plans to remaster all of the Star Wars films in 3D. When this might actually happen is anyones guess.

More here.

Lunacy

Salon's got an awesome article up about lunar resources, and asks the question, "Who owns the moon?" (Hint: It's not you.)

Lunar soil is rife with platinum group metals, which are exceedingly rare on Earth and are key to helping hydrogen fuel cells operate efficiently. Then there's the real golden ticket: helium-3, deposited on the moon's surface by radioactive solar winds. When combined with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, helium-3 can initiate fusion reactions so potent that scientists estimate a single space-shuttle load of the stuff could power all the homes and businesses in the United States for a year.

"The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the Earth," former Indian President Abdul Kalam told attendees at 2004's International Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon. Gerald Kulcinski, director of the University of Wisconsin's Fusion Technology Institute, thinks helium-3 could potentially power future long-distance space travel, though it could take decades before a commercial helium-3 reactor becomes available.

Via Geraldo Canavan.

Friday links

A few nice links from BoingBoing today:

If the NC drought doesn't entirely prevent me from having a garden this summer, bee colony collapse will. At least we'll get a fine documentary film about it.

A Japanese team aboard the International Space Station is to release a paper airplane into the earth's orbit. That's called comedy.

And, the police are still taseing people. And it still manages to kill them, even though Tasers are not lethal. We swear.