Dispatches from the scientific frontiers. At Unscrewing the Inscrutable, Brent Rasmussen is blogging about the landing of the Cassini-Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan. (He was liveblogging, but it’s a little too late to actually get it live, unless you have a time machine, in which case contact me. On second thought, don’t.) “Cassini” is the NASA spacecraft, “Huygens” is the ESA probe that actually went to the surface. Fantastic science, not to mention cool pictures, all for quite a bit less than the $500 billion it will cost to send people to Mars.
Meanwhile, in association with the World Year of Physics, we have something Einstein couldn’t have anticipated: Quantum Diaries (also noted by Peter Woit) is a collection of year-long blogs by particle physicists, giving you a glimpse into their sexy and exciting daily lives. They are mostly experimentalists, so those of you who hang out at blogs like this one can see how the other half lives. I will give a shout-out to Stephon Alexander, who is on record as saying that my GR book is “off the hook.”