Swans on Tea

I remember reading about this last January, and now I see via Bee at Backreaction that it’s in the news again.
Floating banana’s appeal for funding slips
Despite getting about $105,000 from Quebec and federal art-funding agencies, Canadian artist Cesar Saez’s flying-banana project appears to be meeting turbulence. According to his project’s webpage, the Geostationary Banana Over [...]

Researchers tug at molecules with optical tweezers
MIT researchers have developed a novel technique to measure the strength of the bonds between two protein molecules important in cell machinery: Gently tugging them apart with light beams.
They don’t really go into what’s novel about this. The optical tweezers technique has been around for a while.

Quick link to Cocktail Party Physics: demon spawn
Maxwell’s demon, with a bit of a modern twist that makes it apply to laser cooling.

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A side comment by Matt about quizzes triggered a thought (so many of these interactions are induced rather than spontaneous)
I have all my old lecture notes and materials so the only real thing I have to do is make up new quizzes. Students are good at nothing if not gaming the system and they’d notice [...]

Real-time satellite tracking ISS, GPS satellites, Hubble, etc. Even the shuttle when it’s up there.
via Kottke

I’ve read on a couple of blogs about The Amaz!ng Meeting 6, (TAM6), with some promises of summaries. A couple have been posted. (I’m still waiting on reports from some of you. Listen, I’m not joking. This is my job!)
The Bad Astronomer thinks it was the Best. Meeting. Ever.
Neurologica posts [...]

I’ve been putting up with the new Dilbert website abomination for however long, a couple of months at least, and the fact that Scott Adams is a fellow Hartwick alum doesn’t mean I’m going to cut him any slack — the website breaks the first commandment of web design.
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
Adobe’s (ADBE) [...]

NASA to Attempt Historic Solar Sail Deployment
A few years ago, the Planetary Society attempted a mission like NanoSail-D called Cosmos I, but the launch vehicle failed and destroyed the undeployed spacecraft. Montgomery and team believe that NanoSail-D, however, will unfurl four gossamer wings from its pod in the blackness of space like a butterfly from [...]

So, Blake wrote a post on What Science Blogs Can’t Do
Deedle dee dee-dee
Brian at Lealaps weighed in
If you know absolutely nothing about evolutionary biology, physics, ecology, or any other discipline you care to name you are not going to find the equivalent of a college course here on the science blogosphere. That doesn’t mean that [...]

Science nabs lying fisherman
And he was found out without the need to pee in a cup. (Though it’s possible he may have done so anyway, for other reasons.)

Bizarre Lunar Orbits
“The Moon is extraordinarily lumpy, gravitationally speaking,” Konopliv continues. “I don’t mean mountains or physical topography. I mean in mass. What appear to be flat seas of lunar lava have huge positive gravitational anomalies—that is, their mass and thus their gravitational fields are significantly stronger than the rest of the lunar crust.” Known [...]