Speaking of Mars, Pepsi warns us not to let your rover go unmonitored. (Large video file.)  
Mark Sachs

Willy Ley's Conquest of Space Dep't: This afternoon, NASA scientists announced the rover program had discovered evidence of the presence of water at Meridiani Planum on Mars at some time in the past.  

A coin depicting Emperor Domitianus is going on display in London. Domitianus was found guilty of treason for declaring himself emperor and having the coins minted.  

Combining two things I like quite a lot, paleontology and paleomapping, we have a discovery of fossilized dinosaur skin which suggests the ancient shores of the North American midcontinental seaway may have been mapped incorrectly.

An analysis of the skin showed that it had been preserved by a mineral that shows up in relatively rare environments.

The mineral, called pyrolusite, is known to form when marine water mixes rapidly with river water.

Probably within a matter of weeks after the dinosaur's death, the mineral latched onto the decaying skin before it could be ravaged by scavengers and preserved it so well that it has lasted to the present, Wegweiser said...

But a question nagged - if pyrolusite formed at the intersection of marine and fresh waters, how could it have shown up when the western edge of the prehistoric inland sea was supposedly 245 miles to the east?

Millions of years ago, the Western Interior Seaway covered much of the Midwest, stretching through present-day Houston to Nebraska, South Dakota and into the eastern portions of Montana and Wyoming, Wegweiser said.

Recent maps on the ocean's "paleo-shoreline" don't come close to Elk Basin, where the dinosaur skin was found.

"Am I telling you I'm moving the paleo-shoreline? No, but I'm telling you I have a problem," Wegweiser said. "The ocean had to get here somehow."

Hanging out, down the street, in the twenty-first century. --J.D. DeLuzio

1 March 2004

A Miracle of Science is updated (and has been updated a few times before), but surely you already know that.  

Apparently, the vast majority of walk buttons in New York aren't hooked up to anything at all any more. They're the victims of computerized traffic controls.  

With shows like The Great American Celebrity Spelling Bee in existence, we'd better really hope the Universe isn't a simulation, or we're all just a cat's whisker from being adjudged lame and turned off...  
Fred Coppersmith

Too Late to Help Dep't: For the fellow who was searching for "monty python" "size of mickey rooney", the reason you weren't getting that many search results is that the quote is part of "Yakko's Universe" from Animaniacs. Perhaps you were thinking of "The Galaxy Song" from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life?