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. 

The other night I happened to flip by an episode of CSI Miami and when I saw it included a plot line involving bacteria, I perked up.  The episode, called 'Bad Seed,' had the CSI-ers investigating a woman who had been poisoned by E. coli from some contaminated lettuce she ate.  The investigators traced the source to feces run off from nearby cattle onto the farm where the lettuce was growing.  So far so good.  Then the show takes a turn and the woman's boyfriend gets sick - but not from E. coli. 

I have a neat job. Reading about science, chatting with scientists, and generally getting to exercise the curiosity muscle until it's all big and beefy--this is about as good as it gets.

But. Sometimes there are days when my dream job would really be staying in bed past noon, watching Gilmore Girls reruns until all the witty repartee makes my head hurt, and reading those trashy magazines I only let myself pick up at the gym or in the doctors' waiting room--because if you're exercising or about to get poked with a needle, my reasoning goes, you deserve a little indulgence. My point: Sometimes the best kind of work would be no work at all.

If this sounds appealing--and not just for a day or two but for a few hundred days--then polish up your resume, because your dream job has arrived: Professional Pretend Astronaut.

Thousands of scientists spend their lives studying things that are, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Viruses. Neutrinos. Black holes. Things that most human beings have never, will never, or can never see or touch.

Here's a special guest post by Pamela King, a Northeastern University journalism student interning with NOVA's web team this semester. She'll take it from here!

He was known as the "snaggle-tooth killer." Ray Krone had been sentenced to death after an impression of his teeth in a Styrofoam cup was used to peg him as the murderer of a Phoenix bartender. The victim had been found with bite marks on her body, but at that time little other physical evidence was available. DNA testing later proved Krone could not have been the murderer, and he was released ten years after his conviction.

With summer over (at least here on the east coast) the last tomatoes and peppers are being harvested from home gardens, apple picking is wrapping up at local orchards and farmers' markets are shutting up shop. 

But never fear, you can now bring the locavore movement indoors with the new Cocoon fish and meat maker.  The sleek pod-like contraption grows meat or fish from simple packets of muscle cells and nutrients. Check it out:


We were on to this idea a while ago during our very first season of NOVA scienceNOW. Check out the segment on 'lab meat' here.