My office computer got haunted today, and the beast manifested itself in the 8-key on the keyboard (the key above the letters, not the keypad). If I had a file explorer window open somewhere in the background while working with some other programs, and I then needed to type something that included the number eight, I naturally press the 8-key, and what happens then? The file explorer window in the background suddenly jumps to the front of all windows and steals the focus. If I closed all open file explorer windows the 8-key worked just as it should, but as soon as a file explorer window was present the key magically turned into a file explorer summoner. The 8-key on the keypad worked just fine, […] Read more

Space Shuttle Discovery touched down at Kennedy Space Center at 11:16 am EDT today after a successful assembly mission to the International Space Station delivering the new Japanese Laboratory Module called "Kibo" (which translates into "Hope").Now we have to wait all the way until October 8th for the next shuttle mission, STS-125, to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Summer have arrived in Norway (although it’s taken a short break now). It has been hot and the beaches have been crowded. This reminded me of a little thought experiment you can try on your own the next time you’re on the beach.While you’re there, grab a handful of sand. How many grains of sand would you guess you had in your hand? One hundred thousand? A million? Even more? Now try to think how many grains of sand there are in total on that beach. A number you can hardly imagine, right? This number would actually be close to the number of stars in our galaxy (roughly 3 x 10^11, or 300 billion).Now look at this latest photo from the Hubble Space Telescope. What […] Read more

Last night NASA successfully landed the Phoenix Mars Lander in the northern plains of Mars, where it will investigate whether the site could once have supported microbial life. This is a feat on its own, but Wil Wheaton just tipped me off (via Twitter) to the latest blog entry from Phil "The Bad Astronomer" Plait where he shows us another great feat. Not only have NASA landed on Mars again (The current odds for a successful landing is about 50%) but they’ve actually managed to photograph the Phoenix parachuting to the ground using the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is so awesome I don’t know what else to say. UPDATE: I uploaded a better and high resolution photo of the descent. You […] Read more