NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too

If our tenure on Earth is anything to judge by, humans are not very good planetary tenants. Now, with a (nearly) clean slate on Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is already trying to prevent us from destroying a second planet.
Earth broke another all-time heat record again. "We are living in the steroid era of the climate system," one researcher says. Together, there's nothing we can't do! Except for reversing global warming.
Antarctica Is Melting and There's No Way to Stop it
Most of the focus regarding Earth's rising sea level has been on the Arctic Ocean, where ice in the North Pole has been melting rapidly for decades. But now there's even worse news: in the South Pole, Antarctica is beginning to melt and the results will be catastrophic.
Los Angeles, Again With The Earthquakes
A magnitude-5.1 earthquake blew Los Angeles' high last night, striking at 9:09pm local time for about 30 seconds, with at least five aftershocks ranging 2.7-3.6. Authorities across all affected counties have confirmed gas leaks, water main breaks, and a rock slide near the earthquake epicenter around Brea in Orange…
So, There's Another Earth Populated by Super-Advanced Beings (Possibly)
Depending on how you feel about extra terrestrials, either your greatest fear or hope may soon be confirmed. Astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK (which, by the way, is the most English name for anything ever) have studied 6,000 observations of the Tau Ceti star and found that there may be as many…
There Are 7 Billion People in the World Today
On the last day of October 2011, the global population of an upstart branch of the primate order will reach 7 billion.
What It Feels Like to Fly Over Planet Earth
Here's a gorgeous time-lapse video constructed (by James Drake) out of 600 publicly-available photos taken from the International Space Station as it orbited around the Earth. Our only gripe: No music! We would have gone with this, or maybe this. But we're open to hearing your suggestions for a space jam if you post…
L.A. Names Environmental Science School After Al Gore, Builds It on 'Toxic Soil'
Los Angeles has named a new high school of environment science after former vice president Al Gore and author/activist Rachel Carson. And what better way to honor the two great environmentalists than by building the school on a contaminated site?
Stephen Hawking Says Aliens are Coming To Get Us
As part of a new Discovery Channel series physicist Stephen Hawking says that he's convinced aliens are out there, but that we should avoid them because they will probably come to earth and kick our asses like in the movies.
Why Wiccans and Virgins Can't Be Friends
A source working at Comic Con tells us that organizers are purposefully putting Avatar events far from Twilight events because they fear a melee between the Fanboys and TweenGirls. Hopefully there will be enough
wolf T-shirts for everyone.
The Surly Bonds
[An image of a thin band of Earth's atmosphere taken from the Space Shuttle Atlantis yesterday; image via AP]
BBC Accused of Bias by the Most British Man Who Ever Lived
Lord Christopher Monckton (pictured left—that's really him!) says his wacky denials of global warming were unfairly skewed in a recent BBC documentary on the environment. Lord Monckton—a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and not an invention of Evelyn Waugh's—claims, "They made it sound as if these were just my…
'No Impact Man' Is Amazingly Still Married
Remember Colin Beavan, the 40-something Brooklyn writer who forswore toilet paper and showers in pursuit of a book deal about being green? To us it seemed that his wife, a kindly Business Week editor by the name of Michelle Conlin, was only hanging on by a thread. We're surprised to find that, months later, it seems…
