Sooooo you know the milky way galaxy? The one in which we reside not the chocolate bar.

Well a bunch of Australian astronomers at the University of Sydney showed a slew of astronomers up when they proved, after only a couple hours of internet-based research, that our home galaxy is a is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years thick it was previously believed to be (the width of our disc shaped galaxy remains constant, however, at 100,000 light years across).

Here’s the hilarious quote from team leader Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler from the University of Sydney news page:

“Some colleagues have come up to me and have said ‘That wrecks everything!’” says Professor Gaensler. “And others have said ‘Ah! Now everything fits together!’”

It’s been a while since I’ve longingly gazed at Nasa eyecandy. So perhaps that’s why these gorgeous photos of Mars took my breath away - or rather, slowed it down to a meditation-induced crawl. You don’t always know what you’re looking at but it sure is striking. And the captions give you some clues.

All together there are 45 images, the cream of the Mars expeditions’ crop. They are all worth your time.

The geography is akin to reading Tolkien where the names are all exotic but the feel for the place is palpable.

There’s the rainbow “Hebes Chasma region at the northwestern end of Valles Marinaris” (pictured above). There’s Mars’ south pole all covered in frozen carbon dioxide that’s referred to as the “swiss cheese terrain” for its mazes and pock marks. And then there’s the Chasma Boreale in the north pole where bands of dust and ice accumulate up year after year to look like the contour lines on a topographic map.

Otherworldly and gorgeous. Ideal for taking you away from your work and far out of the office for a spell.

Link: Mars as Art. Go!

Now I only know one person with an iphone. And I barely know them at that. But that’s not to say that I don’t covet the iphone. And got really excited to learn that if you are one of those lucky few who own this piece of sleek glossy everything all in one you can now change that planet Earth background to any of our planets and moons. Me? I like the robin’s egg turquoise Uranus.

Go download them over at WanderingSpace - quick quick, before they twig and start charging for this spacey eyecandy. 

(PHOTO: DAVE DI BIASE)

Computers can now “laugh”, so to speak, at jokes, thanks to clever programming. Its rudimentary and simple sense of humor is good enough to chuckle at this one:

Mother: “My, you’ve been working in the garden a lot this summer.”
Boy: “I have to because teacher told me to weed a lot.”

Julia Taylor and Dr Lawrence Mazlack from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, put together some software that checked to see whether each work in a joke fit with the context of the sentence. When it finds a work that’s out of place, it then runs that word against similar sounding words to suss out the word play.

According to The Telegraph:

Taylor is now working on personalising the programme to take into account variation in the user’s sense of humour. She said: “If you’ve been in car accident, you probably won’t find a joke about a car accident funny.”

Me? I want a Will Ferrell robot! That plays the cowbell!! That would make me laugh way more than any punning piece of tin.

via New Scientist