For Sale: One Shuttle, used.

From New Scientist:

Space shuttle for sale, fully loaded, air conditioning, one careful owner. It's the ultimate bargain. NASA has cut the price of a space shuttle to $28.8 million. The vehicles will go on sale after they finish constructing the International Space Station, scheduled to be later this year. The New York Times reports that NASA had hoped to get $42 million for each vehicle but lowered the cost in the hope of sealing a deal. It has three to sell, although one of these, Discovery, is already promised to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

If an entire shuttle is beyond your budget, consider a main engine instead. NASA had hoped to charge up to $800,000 for these but lack of interest has forced it to slash the price. They are now available for free: a bargain in anybody's language. Just bear in mind that the buyer must pay for postage and packaging.

Check the skies for Lulin

From the CSM:

Over the next three nights, skywatchers should expect their best views yet of Comet Lulin. It makes its closest approach to Earth — some 38 million miles away — on Tuesday, Feb. 24.

To the naked eye, the comet looks like a fuzzy patch of hazy light against the night sky. Use binoculars or telescopes, and you’ll be able to pick out its brighter center, along with its dual tail — a brighter tail of dust, and a dimmer one of ionized gases the comet sheds as its sun-warmed ices change directly from a solid to a gas.

Lulin, formally known as C/2007 N3, will dim quickly through March, thanks to the kick it’s gotten from the sun’s gravity. Then it’s Oort-a here — heading back out to its kin in the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of icy construction debris left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.

Comet Lulin will make its closest approach to Earth on Monday night. The circled X shows the comet's position at seen from Boston at 10 p.m. local time. It appears in the southeastern sky near Saturn, at the tip of Leo the Lion's hind leg.

Gordon Freeman spotted near LHC

From VideoGameBlogger:

This photo discovered by Shacknews appears to show an unwitting Gordon Freeman standing in the CERN test chamber. Soooo eerie! Let’s hope he was working to prevent any accidents.

But while interesting, enough with the history lesson, let’s compare these two stories to uncover what makes the above picture so eerie.

1. CERN has just started experimenting with the Large Hadron Collider, which is a worldwide scientific cooperation project built in collaboration with over 8,000 physicists from over 85 countries as well as 100’s of universities and laboratories. It’s aimed at discovering the secrets behind how the origins of the Big Bang. Right now they are being sued by the European Court for Human Rights who fear the 27km/17miles long underground Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth by creating a “black hole”!

2. Is any of this starting to sound familiar? In the Half-Life game series, players assume the role of Dr. Gordon Freeman, a recent graduate theoretical physicist who must fight his way out of a secret underground research facility called the Anomalous Materials Lab. The research and experiments being done there into teleportation technology have gone wrong and caused a time-space catastrophe called a “resonance cascade”!

Behold the power of the crowbar!

Largest particle collider conducts successful test

From the LHC:

The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. (0836 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the US$3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

The start of the collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collision of protons could eventually imperil the earth.

The skeptics theorized that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

Well, we're still here....for now....