Science Friday: goodbye to the moon, extraterrestrials in the midlands, and Darwin's eraser-- web 2.0 style

Get it while it's hot

Well, the great midlands meteorite hunt of 2010 is on. Sighted pretty much everywhere, and causing many a call to the local authorities, a meteorite that streaked across the skies earlier this week is thought to have landed somewhere in the midlands.  The Irish film board have already received film scripts:

IT CAME FROM CARLOW!

Whether or not the meteorite was an alien vessel, carrying a monster that will emerge from the bog and terrorise small villages is yet to be seen, but given that the Hubble telescope recently sighted a Klingon Bird of Prey (only a week after the conference over in the UK no doubt!) it seems that we should move quickly to welcome our new meteorite-riding overlords.

Move quick, but move first

It turns out good guys finish (and start) last, but they're much quicker overall.   In "The Quick and The Dead: When Reaction Beats Intention", the researchers actually set out to see why the good-guy gunslingers in westerns seem to draw more quickly.  It turns out that the difference lies in the bad guy drawing his gun with intention, and the good guy drawing out of reaction.  You couldn't make this stuff up.  

If you love your moon, set it free

With Love Lab coming up, you might be feeling a bit emotional, and that's ok, especially if you were particularly attached to the idea of humanity returning to the moon.  But the Guardian Arts blog has a great requiem for the moon mission from a distinctly aesthetic point of view:  "When a man stood on the moon, action seemed to replace contemplation – conquest to succeed staring. Stargazing had been a prelude to this. It's as if history froze at that moment. But it did not. The journey to the moon was an interruption in a much more rewarding and human effort to understand the universe. The truth is that we have made enormous progress since the 1960s – not in "conquering" space but in discovering it with our eyes and minds."

Looking inward

If you're more into exploring the expanse of the human genome than the expanse of space, you'll go gaga over Ben Fry's interactive project that reveals the evolution of the greatest tome on Evolution.  On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Spaces actually shows you how Darwin revised his seminal text over the many different versions.

It's Almost Science

Lastly, there's a very serious science lecture coming to the O2 arena, for those of you who are Ricky Gervais fans.