Some people are building and releasing high-altitude ballons with cameras, communication gear and sensors. Seen here the result of one such launch: pictures and films taken from near-space, at an altitude of about 30 Km, where the sky is black and one can see that the Earth's curved.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also called Trash Vortex, in an area in the Pacific where mostly plastic garbage accumulates due to sea currents. The area is around the size of Texas, with about 6 Kg of plastic for each Kg of plankton.

My colleague Scott Aaronson is in a funny, and very unexpected, position. He got a text about quantum mechanics plagiarized and used in a commercial in which two fashion models discuss quantum mechanics (!!), just before hitting the catwalk. That's so funny!

There's a strong suspicion that Russia is behind a three-week wave of cyber-attacks on Estonia. If true, this would be the first such attack ever from a nation-state against another.

10 steps that could turn the U.S.A. into a fascist state, and how some of them are being taken by the Bush administration.

A free collection of short stories. Very short indeed: 6 words each. Hemingway's:
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

An article in The Guardian about how cheap, acessible, open-source rapid prototyping machines can, in perhaps 10 years, create a new industrial revolution.

An article in New Scientist about the strange new properties of a little-known crystal. In its pure form, it may be a new state of matter, a so-called string-net fluid. There's some relation to anyons and topological computing, in case you're an expert in such things...

The Cremaster film cycle by visual artist Matthew Barney has impressed me. Check out some material on it at the Gugenheim Museum website.

The company Virgin Galactic has been set up in Britain to take tourists to the edge of space. It hopes to offer flights starting in 2009, costing about £10^5 per seat. It's also partnering with NASA to develop cheaper alternatives, which may be used to train astronauts as well. Their spaceship is based on SpaceShipOne, the first private spaceship to go into space.

Worrying news about a deadly strain of tuberculosis arising in South Africa - 98% fatality rate, airborne, death within 2 weeks.