This year's Earth Day committee (whose members run the gamut from Shaquille O'Neal to Former Vice President Al Gore) is urging everyone to commit "Acts of Green" in observation of the 40th anniversary of the holiday.

Acts of Green are pledges to do something to celebrate the Earth--it could be as simple as taking some time today to head out into a park and appreciate nature, or turning out the lights and holding your own personal "Earth Hour."

It's great to see some of the ideas and pledges people keep sending in.

(Click on the image see a live version of the Acts of Green, and add your own ideas. You might have to reload a few times because of heavy traffic to the EarthDay.org site.)

It's been more than a year since I did my last formal exercise in energy conservation--the Powering Down blog right here on NOVA Online. But some of the habits I picked up then have stayed with me.

I still bike everywhere I go, and I still cover my windows in plastic during the winter months. (I was surprisingly excited to weatherstrip all my windows last fall. Apparently I'm a secret home-improvement geek.) I'm still vegetarian, and I'm  working on that whole "local, in season produce" thing. I turn out the lights when I can, and don't leave my computer on overnight. 

Earth Day has sparked so many more great ideas that I'm eager to add to my routine, like not requesting a receipt at ATMs, or using online banking to reduce the amount of mail that your financial institution sends out.

Add your Acts of Green. What ideas do you have?

During a break between snow flurries last night, I slogged out to the MIT campus to watch the Autonomous Robot Design Competition. This year, the teams built autonomous "space cats"--Lego robots charged with hunting down and bringing back robot mice that (mostly) wandered the field of play.

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.

I was checking in with slashdot this morning and I came across an eerie video that I am compelled to share. Now you too can gaze at your screen in bemused horror for a few minutes.

Meet HAL 5, the new robotic exoskeleton from Cyberdyne Inc. (Not Cyberdyne *Systems*.

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