Exoplanets

The holy grail in the search for exoplanets is to find a rocky, Earth-like planet that orbits its star in the "habitable zone", where is liquid water is possible. There are several ways to detect these planets, and even determine what their atmosphere is like, but by far most exoplanets that are discovered (over 1000 now) are huge gas giants like Jupiter, unlikely to support life. However, as we know from our own gas giants, these massive planets can often have very interesting moons, so the recent discovery of a Jupiter-like planet in our galaxy is causing a bit of a stir, not because of the planet itself but because it very probably has rocky moons also in the habitable zone.

 Gliese 581d

A discussion

It's always nice to come across a sensible conversation on belief and non-belief as opposed to the usual "debates" where the same old points get dragged out and beaten senseless. Here we have a discussion between Seth Andrews AKA the Thinking Atheist and a Methodist minister named Bob.

Missionaries

Past, present, and future missions to objects in our solar system, with pictures!

There are no hover boards yet, but there is this

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/inform/

Shaming the "day moon"

I think this new Pete Holmes show got some potential. Lots of off the cuff riffing and funny time moments.

In this clip Rory Scovel (eventually) does his bit about the day moon.
"Get out of here! You don't see the Sun coming out in the nighttime do ya? Show some respect"

A sci-fi playlist, for sci-fi people

Here are a few songs with a science fiction feel to them, you know what I mean?

Effective population

I came across this idea here. The effective size of a given population is, from what I understand, the minimum idealized number of individuals you would need from that population to reproduce the genetic diversity of the actual population. It's not easy to find an explanation of this stuff in layman's terms, but this article at genomena.com seems relatively understandable. Actually, here is one in Scientific American that goes over all this stuff, and very briefly.