Science stuff of the week

The "we're all gonna die...well, maybe not" story of the week:

Asteroid 2009 VA Barely Misses Earth...

FromTheGonzoBlog calculates how much damage a meteor that size could cause, depending on what it was made of and how it hit.
Worse case scenerio?
Imagine a 3,800 foot wide, 800 foot deep crater suddenly becoming an obvious landmark in your hometown, wild stuff.

Astronomycast podcast discussion here

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Nanohair inspired by sea urchins.
From Technology Review: (The nanobristles) spontaneously curl into a precise array of helical bundles when immersed in an evaporating liquid. AAizenberg likens the phenomena to the way wet, curly hair clumps together and coils to form dreadlocks...

Via BoingBoing.
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In humans, however, curly hair is caused by a single gene.

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But a lot of questions about the toxicity of nano particles is still being questioned.
if you love protesting chemicals, just wait till nano particle hysteria starts
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Putting textbooks on Kindles could save money, but they are "too hard" for the visually impaired to figure out how to use the text to speech function, so the PC want to ban them from some universities as "discriminatory".

Silly me. I thought if you went to college, you'd be smart enough to figure such things out.
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