Saturday, July 30, 2016

Assortment

-- Some scientists studying the way the Pacific Beetle cockroach feeds its young -- unlike most insects, it bears live offspring instead of eggs -- have determined that its "milk" could become an excellent source of nutrition if it is found to be safe for human consumption.

I will starve myself right to death if people start putting that in food.

-- Business Insider lists 13 signs that you may be working with a psychopath. If your current job involves getting either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump elected president, you might or might not be working with a psychopath, but you are dern tootin' likely to be working for one.

-- Some folks have decided to roll the dice on the idea that Alpha Centauri has an earthlike world in its orbit and build a space telescope that will be able to take a picture of it. The project, called Mission Centaur, hopes to have its telescope in orbit by 2019 and begin photographing the HZ, or "habitable zone" of the Alpha Centauri A and B system ("Alpha Centauri" is actually a binary or two-star system. If you want to get picky, it's a three-star system that contains the red dwarf Proxima Centauri as well). Donations and fund-raising will help them do so.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star to our sun, only four light-years away. Still, anything found in its orbit would be a strict look-but-not-touch scenario. The fastest spacecraft flying today would still take 10,000 years to reach it, and by then we probably would have developed much faster ways to get there.

-- The Smithsonian Institute is looking for a beer historian. It's planning an exhibit on American craft beer and needs someone to research that history and prepare the exhibit. No word on sampling, but if that's a part of the job then changing your name to Norm Peterson might get you a second look.

2 comments:

latoberg said...

Regarding the first, I believe that Lois McMaster Bujold already saw this one: butterbugs.

Friar said...

It sounds better than Pacific Beetle Cockroach, but still...