I am about to invent a new drink, or possibly bake a very oddly shaped cake. I shall call it “Death by Saturn”. Fudge will be involved somewhere, although where I shall procure it on a Friday night in the middle of the crime-ridden ghetto I call home I am uncertain.

Part of my job involves keeping on top of the latest news in astronomy, and as such sometimes I get to hear about a lot of very unusual developments in the field. Some of it is cutting edge science, and some if it… well, it’s good for a laugh.

This conspiracy theory has been doing the rounds for a year or so, but it has been resurfacing again lately. It originated with this essay.

It suggests that NASA’s Cassini project, which involves a probe orbiting and documenting Saturn and its moons, will conclude in a deadly final act – NASA will plummet the probe into Saturn, where it will detonate and ignite the planet in a glory of nuclear fusion.

Saturn becomes a new sun, frying Earth in the process – but providing the potential of new life on one of its moons for those with plans to escape and found a New World Order.

It is called “The Lucifer Project”.

Serving suggestion

Cassini’s four year mission reached its conclusion this month, which is why all the crazy is popping up on the internet again. HEAD TO THE HIGHLANDS, DOOM WILL SPARE NONE!

I could attempt to debunk Project Lucifer myself, but Ian O’Neil at Universe Today has already done a sterling job.

NASA appears to have no plans to Lucifer it up a notch; in fact they recently announced that while Cassini’s original mission has come to an end, they now intend to begin another mission, to study Titan and Enceladus in even greater depth.

I’m curious, collective internet-brain – has a story involving something like Project Lucifer appeared in anything you’ve read over the years? I have a sneaking suspicion that I have seen this very plot in a comic or short story previously, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some science. With self-raising flour. And an ice-cream scoop.

(FYI: The image in this article is an artist’s impression of Galileo burning up when falling into the Jovian atmosphere (the conspiracy nuts say this was NASA’s first attempt to create a new sun) by David A Hardy)

This has been a guest post by Wendy White, not MGK (some people seemed confused in the comments of Will’s last article). Honestly, would MGK need to ask people where that plot was lifted from? HE PROBABLY WROTE IT.

You can find Wendy at Solar Whelk, hiding from the REAL oncoming apocalypse which involves magnetised hammers, Bruce Willis and an episode of The Days of Our Lives.

…Tata Motors developed the world’s first commercially mass-produced car run off compressed air.

MIT scientists just figured out how to make solar energy forty times more efficient (in a manner that allows one to upgrade old solar cells to boot).

I frequently hear complaints from people in other countries about their mobile phone service. Well, you know what, people in other countries? You can all suck it, because Canada has the worst mobile phone service in the entire fucking world. People living in countries in equatorial Africa look at Canadian mobile phone plans and say “holy shit, are you people serious?”

Here is the latest bit of genius from the ad wizards who came up with the last one: Bell and Telus (which is owned by Bell but maintained as a separate company) want to charge users fifteen cents for every text message they receive. Seriously! Their excuse is “our network can’t handle this staggering stream of data from all these text messages!”

Now, the largest SMS text messages clock out at 1120 bits (of course most texts aren’t anywhere near that large considering how long most texts are, but hey, let’s use the maximum). Now, Canadians (all of them, including the ones signed on with services like Rogers or Fido, which Bell doesn’t own and therefore we shouldn’t count, but again, let’s play “fudge the numbers for Bell’s benefit”) sent 10.1 billion text messages last year. So if we do the math, we see that SMS messages took up a total of 11.3 trillion bits of bandwidth! THAT’S SO MANY BITS!

Or, more simply, it’s about one and a half terabytes of bandwidth over the course of a year. That’s not small, but it doesn’t sound like, you know, enough to crash the cell network or anything.

But wait, it gets even better! See, Bell and Telus plan to charge users not for the texts they send, but the texts they receive! So if you get spam texts (increasingly common even despite filtering attempts), or unwanted texts from that person you slept with and then decided WHOA BAD IDEA, you have to pay for them. Very generously, Bell and Telus representatives have said they’ll review any contested SMS bill as regards unwanted texts, with all the legendary speed and faithful service Canadians have come to expect from Bell Canada (official motto: “no, fuck you“).

Of course, thanks to this post, I know now that Apple is so pissed off at Rogers – exclusive vendor of the iPhone in Canada – over Rogers’ shitty-ass data plans (sixty bucks for four hundred megs of data? WTF) that they’re refusing to sell iPhones in Canadian Apple Stores and diverting shipments of iPhones meant for Canada to Europe instead.

I love living in a technological communications duopoly! It’s awesome!

The end of gallium.

The folks over at Balloon Juice are mocking John McCain’s proposal of an “X-Prize”-like monetary prize incentive for developing more efficient batteries. The general thrust of criticism is that if you’re going to have government investment in business, better to have it targeted for research efforts that pay off faster than as an undirected, unorganized “prize” that no serious research team would consider worthy of the effort (since the payoff in designing a better battery is having patents on the better battery, not the three hundred million smackers).

This isn’t entirely incorrect, but it overlooks the one definite plus of an X-Prize-like incentive; it widens and democratizes research effort. It was only about a century ago that the majority of invention was done by talented amateurs – and this during the Gilded Age, remember.

My favorite example is probably the Wright Brothers, who invented powered heavier-than-air flight on their own; they were distinctly not part of the research community involved in designing heavier-than-air flying machines, so much so that it took over thirty years for the Smithsonian to recognize that they actually invented it. They had no scientific background and essentially invented the basic theory of propellor aerodynamics because nobody else had done it.

What other Wrights could be lurking in the background, needing only an incentive, however meager and illusory it might be, to kickstart their heads? For that reason alone, X-Prizes are worth pursuing as part of any environmental or energy technology strategy.

I know a lot of my readership tend to be more scientifically inclined than me, so I’ll ask:

the Large Hadron Collider is set to power up next month. Now, I’m generally of the belief that scientists aren’t blitheringly stupid when it comes to danger, so I suspect the arguments made in this paper have been refuted somewhere, but where could I find that?

EDIT TO ADD: Okay, it took me a while (Google is occasionally unhelpful since most of the hits are going to the alarmist pages), but this page is a good counter.

A Livejournaller-slash-driving enthusiast tours a brand new Tesla Motors dealership.

Belly fat linked to increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

ZeroHouse.

Of course, there’s the question of expense, but… damn that is cool. All you have to do is park it somewhere; it’s like a trailer home, except future-awesome.

(In the year 2120, rednecks will live in ZeroHouses.)

Ben Goldacre writes a long, long and extremely pointed post on homeopathy and its practitioners.

Short version: he does not like it greatly!

Come on, you can’t go wrong with a story like “impoverished surfer comes up with workable unified theory of physics.” That is sublimely awesome.

So let me get this straight:

1.) we have discovered another, Earth-like planet, potentially capable of supporting life;
2.) it orbits a red sun;
3.) it’s a larger planet, and the gravity there is stronger than it is here;
4.) it is twenty light years away, so it could have exploded nineteen years ago and we would only know about it next year.

Clearly, we must watch the skies for incoming escape pods. Alert Kansas!

(Oh, come on, you thought of it too.)

A Stanford University study shows that children are more likely to prefer the taste of a given food when it is packaged in a McDonald’s container – it didn’t matter if the food is McDonald’s food or not, as the kids universally said any food they were given with a golden-arches symbol on the package tasted better than any food given to them in plain packaging.

This confirms what many people have suspected all along: namely, that children are stupid.