As all you Darwin fans out there probably already know, today marks the 150th anniversary of the great man's work, 'On the Origin of Species.'  And here at NOVA we have been ramping up for this event for some time.

While Darwin's 200th birthday (last February) was celebrated with gusto, I think it's equally (if not more) important to toast his decision to publish his 'dangerous idea' about evolution.  This was something he struggled long and hard with - until one day a letter arrived in the mail that would force his hand.

Where did all the mammoths go?

There has been a burst of research on restoring the blind's sight lately, including the development of an artificial retina and a gene therapy treatment that has brought fast and meaningful improvements in patients' vision. It sounds like in the not-too-distant future, blindness could be curable. But while we pour all our attention on the eye treatment, we neglect the fact that other organs could help "see" too - like the tongue.

Stuff! It's all around us. The metals, plastics, glass, fibers and other materials that make up our homes, our cars, our electronics, our everything! Most of the time we accept this stuff for what it is and don't give it another thought. But not David Pogue. 

David is a New York Times personal technology columnist and CBS news correspondent who wants to know, just what is all of our stuff made of? How strong can materials get? On how small of a scale can we work with them? How clean can we get our technology? And how smart can a material become? From the first man to craft a tool using a rock, to the future of robots so small they'll navigate your blood stream, we'll be following David as he searches for the stories behind the materials that make up our world in this four-part program set to air in the fall of 2010. 

I'm Dan Parsons, a production assistant on the Stuff crew. So far in production we've locked down the treatment for one of the four episodes, titled "Strong, Stronger, Strongest" and should have the second, "Small Smaller Smallest" complete soon. We've lined up some interesting adventures for our host including trips to a demolition derby, an active Navy aircraft carrier, a steel mill, a diamond cutter and to MIT for a slow-motion look at exactly how things break. There's still a long road ahead of us, so keep checking back as production continues for an inside look behind the production of Stuff!

Last week NASA announced the preliminary results of the moon smashing LCROSS mission that NOVA scienceNOW covered this past summer, and now it's official. There is definitely water on the moon.


(Image courtesy Northrup Grumman/NASA)

When we last left LCROSS, in July, the spacecraft was speeding along its slingshot trajectory toward the moon. On October 8th, about 10 hours before impact, the satellite released Centaur--the white, cylindrical rocket stage in the image above--and nudged it into a collision course with the well of a crater on the moon's surface. The rest of the spacecraft followed about 10 minutes behind Centaur, ready to start taking data as soon as the initial collision kicked up enough dust to analyze.

The crash was less dramatic than hoped. Scientists originally predicted that the headlong impact could send plumes of material shooting up to 10 kilometers above the surface--a reaction that would be visible to telescopes across the country. But, perhaps because of the spongy nature of the moon's surface, the dust didn't spray much further than a single kilometer high. At first, the mainstream media deemed the mission a flop.

But in the months following that impact, NASA scientists sifted through the data and found that the plume, though smaller than anticipated, was hardly a disappointment. The results released last week show that plume contained at least 26 gallons of water.  (None of that was water in the liquid form we're used to, since the lack of atmosphere on the moon causes solid ice to sublime directly into a gas.)

What does this mean? For one thing, the moon may be more viable as a way station in space than previously thought. If we can harvest and use the moon's water, either to sustain humans in space, or as the raw material for making hydrogen fuel, we might be able to use the moon as our stopping place and leapfrog on to other planets.

But, as our friend from Reading Rainbow used to say, you don't have to take my word for it.

Check out this podcast, in which David Levin talks to David Morrison of NASA's Lunar Science Institute and asks him to explain why we should bother going back to the moon.

Still not psyched about the new discovery?
Hit play to hear "Water on the Moon," a song composed (and performed in part) by LCROSS deputy project manager John Marmie.

Worried about warming but confused about carbon? Try University of Chicago geophysicist David Archer's The Long Thaw, which tells you nearly everything you need to know with down-to-earth clarity and brevity. Archer is known for his studies of "the long tail" - the lifetime of CO2 released by human activities - which he and his colleagues have shown will continue to heat up the planet for thousands of years to come. He calls it "a climate storm" with an impact that will "last longer than Stonehenge." Yet reading The Long Thaw is sobering and enlightening rather than depressing. It's packed with informative, accessible background on past climate cycles and why they are relevant to assessing today's warming. Ultimately, Archer argues, the fate of our climate depends on what we do with earth's vast coal reserves. If we burn all that coal, it has the potential to take us to a hothouse world last seen not long after the demise of the dinosaurs. Yet Archer doesn't preach or waste much space on climate skeptics. His clear-eyed epilog settles quietly on the issue of ethics. Solutions to warming will only work if the nations that have benefited most from fossil fuels take on most of the burden of fixing the problem. The Long Thaw is published by Princeton University Press (2009, $22.95).

Meet NOVA intern Bo Zhang, a graduate student in Boston University's science journalism story. In her first Inside NOVA post, Bo describes an electronic contact lens that can read your cholesterol level, blood sugar, and more--all from your eyeball. You can read more from Bo at Free Radicals, a brand new web magazine from the BU science journalism program. I'll hand the microphone over to Bo:

I just found out that President Obama is speaking at MIT (just a hop, skip and jump across the river from our offices) about clean energy research and to promote Senator Kerry (D-Mass.) and Senator Boxer's (D- Calif.) energy bill.  You can watch online here.  Or it's on live on the White House's channel on Fri. Oct. 23 at around 12:30 pm EST here.  Obama is only the second sitting president to visit MIT (Bill Clinton was the first in 1998, when he gave the commencement speech). 

Gentlemen, please take a moment to be thankful that you are not an Australian redback spider.

Just one in five bachelor redbacks ever finds a lady redback to call his own. If he's lucky enough to get that far, just as his search comes to an end and mating begins, she eats him. Alive. While they are mating. NOVA scienceNOW covered this gruesome seduction, and explained its evolutionary utility, in a profile of University of Toronto evolutionary biologist Maydianne Andrade. After all, if you only get to mate once, you had better be sure the mother of your spider babies isn't going to go hungry.

Now, Andrade and her colleagues have uncovered a fiendish new detail in this strange romance. To earn the right to be devoured, the male redback has to perform a prolonged (100 minutes, minimum) courtship ritual. If his wooing isn't up to snuff, his would-be partner will eat him (are you sensing a theme here?) without mating and move on to the next suitor.