Wowza
From CNN.com: "A U.S. scientist claims to have thawed out a new life form, which he said raises questions about possible contemporary life on Mars.
The organism froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago, and was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, said Richard Hoover from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama." (emphasis added)

To me, that doesn't necessarily raise questions about life on Mars, so much as it raises questions of something out of Stargate...
Still, pretty cool.

The iPeople
For the iPod users among us, I've posted a response to a column by Andrew Sullivan over at RftR, concerning iPod culture.

/shameless self-plug

Questions about the future of science
Jake, you and I have disussed this kind of thing in the context of the global warming debate before, and today I came across Caltech Michelin Lecture given by Michael Crichton, that addresses the issue. It's a bit long, but take the time to read it whenever you can.

I knew I'd find it
A while back, in discussion of global warming, I mentioned that I had overlayed a graph of sunspot cycle length and the annual-mean earth temperature, and found that they coincide remarkably well. As it happens, I was trying to reproduce my work, when I came across a significantly more scientific paper than mine that does the same thing. You'll be amazed at how closely Solar Activity and Climate correspond.

Jake -- Not to rain to heavily on the parade, but having looked in the subject more it appears to not be all of the story. It is correct that solar cycles correspond very closely with recent term temperature variations (and I would emphasize near term because we only started measuring this recently). However, estimates of the actual energy resulting from these variations show that they are not sufficient to explain all of the recent increases in mean global temperature. The question of whether increases in solar radiation are amplified by "greenhouse" effects is unclear. The whole problem with the global warming debate is that we really don't know whether a small temperature increase is amplified or reduced because we don't understand the role of water vapor (the primary greenhouse gas) in these circumstances. So while solar variation probably has something to do with it, it is probably premature to write it off to that completely. Correlation after all is not causation.

Lileks hits 24 critics
And he hits them hard.