Cooling weather, freezing code, warming climate... it's Science Friday!

WHAT IF... closes this weekend, so be sure to check out the future forms and designs on display it before it's too late!  And while you'll most likely be bombarded with news on the Copenhagen climate summit, check out this re-design of the controversial "Danish text" via Wordle and the Guardian:

And as we hear debates about rising sea levels, carbon emissions and the like, new studies show us that climate change can be pretty calamitous.  Turns out, 5 million years ago, Gibraltar was basically a huge dam, keeping water out of the Mediterranean.  Can you imagine sea levels rising 10 metres a day?

If Climate scientists leak secrets, then physics bloggers are gossips.

If the first sentence "The physics blogs are abuzz" does anything for you, then check out this rumor that a paper is about to appear in Nature announcing that a dark matter particle has been found. 

Unfortunately, Nature's Senior Editor emailed the Resonances blogger to say the rumour "is completely false".  I want to believe... 

Back to the Bludget...

Along with funny-looking climäte news frøm København, The budget will be all the rage for the next while. If it's is getting you down, just know that we're in good company-- even Harvard is scaling back their shiny new science complex.  Luckily, it looks like "Investment in regional and smaller museums like Marsh’s Library, Hunt Museum, Science Gallery, Print Museum, Foynes Flying Boat Museum and the James Joyce Centre will continue..."

Look on the bright side...

Turns out the first-ever binary star to be discovered has more to it than meets the eye.  A colleague of Galileo discovered one of the stars in the Ursa Major is actually a binary system, and subsequent discoveries have  upped the number of stars in this most famous of constellations.  The most recent revelation shows that the system is actually a sextuplet of stars.

If that's put you in the mood for astronomy, don't miss the Astronomy Ireland Christmas Lecture on Monday night, Dec 14th, from the Director General of the European Southern Observatory.

Christmas is a science!

What's on your wishlist this Christmas?  You know you're never going to use that useless combo pocketknife-espresso machine, right?  From the "dog wags tail when happy" school of thought comes a paper proving that we're crap at assessing whether we'll actually use a holiday gift, whereas strangers can tell it to us straight up.

"People make optimistic predictions about themselves," he says. "They expect relationships to last longer, tasks to take less time and things to turn out generally better than they will." And when they ask for a waffle-maker for Christmas, they think, "I'll use this all the time!" (via)

Too cold to code?

And lastly, are you wrapping up bits and bobs before you relax by the yuletide?  Governments around the world will be rapidly pushing out legislation in the lead up to the winter holidays.  Anything that doesn't get through is shelved until next year, and just as new laws and budgets get 'frozen' during winter, so does technology development.  That may be why there have been a flurry of new apps from the likes of Google, which supposedly has a code freeze as well:

"Apparently Google has a “code freeze” policy that goes in place sometime in December. If you don’t get your product/service out the door by then, it gets pushed til when the freeze is lifted, likely sometime in the new year." (via TechCrunch)