Marshes of the Moon.

“‘It’s really wet,’ said Anthony Colaprete, co-author of one of the Science papers and a space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He and his colleagues estimate that 5.6% of the total mass of the targeted lunar crater’s soil consists of water ice. In other words, 2,200 pounds of moon dirt would yield a dozen gallons of water.“

In keeping with recent studies, NASA is set to announce that there appears to be quite a lot of water on the moon, which would greatly facilitate setting up shop there. Alas, “the U.S. likely won’t be involved in manned voyages to the moon anytime soon…But other countries are gearing up. China has pledged to land astronauts on the moon by 2025, and India has plans to do the same by 2020. Japan wants to establish an unmanned moon base in a decade.” And, hey, why go to the moon when you can spend a decade in Afghanistan?

Earth Too.

“‘We’re pretty excited about it,’ admits Steve Vogt, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of the team, in a masterpiece of understatement. ‘I think this is what everyone’s been after for the past 15 years.’” And then some! Apparently, astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet yet in Gliese 581g, a relatively short 20 light years away.

“[I]t probably has a solid surface just like Earth. Much more important, it sits smack in the middle of the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at just the right distance from the star to let water remain liquid rather than freezing solid or boiling away. As far as we know, that’s a minimum requirement for the presence of life.“

Some might remember that Gliese 581c was all the rage two years ago. Apparently, this one — in the same solar system but only just discovered — is even closer to the real deal. (Good thing the NASA authorization just passed…)

Fifty Years at Gombe.

“On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika…She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and — as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika — her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try.“

Fifty years after her studies began, pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is honored (again) by National Geographic. “She created a research program, a set of protocols and ethics, an intellectual momentum — she created, in fact, a relationship between the scientific world and one community of chimpanzees — that has grown far beyond what one woman could do.”

The (No) Big-Bang Theory.

“In his proposal, time and space can be converted into one another, with a varying speed of light as the conversion factor. Mass and length are also interchangeable, with the conversion factor depending on both a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light (G/c2). Basically, as the universe expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length. As the universe contracts, the opposite occurs.“

By way of cdogzilla, PhysOrg’s Lisa Zyga describes a new cosmological theory by Wun-Yi Shu of Taiwan that, among other things,does away with the Big Bang. “Essentially, this work is a novel theory about how the magnitudes of the three basic physical dimensions, mass, time, and length, are converted into each other…The theory resolves problems in cosmology, such as those of the big bang, dark energy, and flatness, in one fell stroke.”

The King is Not Amused.

“‘I know really, really, really smart people that work typically at depths much greater than what that well is at,’ Cameron said…’Most importantly,’ he added, ‘they know the engineering that it requires to get something done at that depth.‘” Director James Cameron divulges more about his attempt to help “those morons” with the Gulf Gusher.

This may just seem like King-of-the-World hubris, but Cameron is a smart and demanding technical innovator who has spent a great deal of time over 25 years studying deep-sea technology.) I’d at least hear what he had to say. “‘The government really needs to have its own independent ability to go down there and image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation,’ he said. ‘Because if you’re not monitoring it independently, you’re asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene,’ Cameron added.“

I was so much older then…

“On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.” Via the NYT, a new study finds older people tend to be the happiest among us.

“‘It could be that there are environmental changes,’ said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, ‘or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.’” My guess, from where I sit at 35 — perspective, a.k.a. wisdom. You don’t live to 85 by sweating the small stuff, and by then you probably have a pretty good sense of how things tend to shake out anyway.

A Cure for Cancer? Well, a vaccine, anyway.

“‘We believe this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines prevent polio and measles in children,’ Vincent Tuohy, Ph.D., the study’s principal investigator and an immunologist at the Lerner Institute, told WOIO. ‘If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer,’ he added.“

Some good news for the day: Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic believe they may have zeroed in on a vaccine for breast cancer. “The key, Tuohy said, is to find a target within the tumor that isn’t typically found in a healthy person. In the case of breast cancer, he and his team targeted a-lactalbumin, a protein found in the majority of breast cancers, but not in healthy women, except during lactation. Therefore, the vaccine can rev up a woman’s immune system to target a-lactalbumin, stopping tumor formation without damaging healthy breast tissue.”

Nothing New Under the Burning Sun.

“‘This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.’ So wrote Albert Einstein in a letter to his one time collaborator, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann in 1920.“

A recent history-of-science paper by a Jeroen van Dongen of Utrecht University looks into the anti-relativity theory movement of the 1920’s, and how it compares to today’s climate change denialism. “Anti-relativists were convinced that their opinions were being suppressed. Indeed, many believed that conspiracies were at work that thwarted the promotion of their ideas.” (See also: Evolution and Scopes.)

All these worlds are yours except Europa.

“Studies showed the moon could have enough oxygen to support the kind of life we are most familiar with on Earth…[T]he new study suggests this oxygen-rich layer could be far thicker than before thought, potentially encompassing the entire crust.” A examination of crust-stirring on Europa increases the potential for some kind of oceanic life on Jupiter’s moon. “‘I was surprised at how much oxygen could get down there,’ Greenberg said.”

Say Hello to Synthia.

“‘We think these are the first synthetic cells that are self-replicating and whose genetic heritage started in the computer. That changes conceptually how I think about life,’ said the leader of the project, J. Craig Venter, whose self-named research institute has laboratories and offices in Rockville and San Diego.“

O brave new world that has such bacteria in it: Scientists unveil their first synthetically-created, self-replicating cell. “Although the cell is primitive and lacks its own membrane, the techniques developed to create it promise groundbreaking advances in gene engineering and the rise of designer genomes. The achievement also raises ethical questions, not only about the creation of artificial life but the legitimacy of patenting it.”