Coredump

Update: Ah, it’s awake!

We’ll see you when you wake up.

The Phoenix Mars Lander, with its batteries depleting, has gone to sleep mode as recovery efforts continue.

While we’re in the subject of anthromorphism, check out and follow MarsPhoenix’s other cohorts on Twitter. I wished we had this back in my science high school days — it would have been a blast. (Pointy nerd hat on.)

Just because something is not on the Internet does not mean it is untrue.

- Adam Rogers, Wired Science

“Given a number of cities and the costs of traveling from any city to any other city, what is the cheapest round-trip route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city?” [Travelling salesman problem, Wikipedia.]

Well, don’t despair, Mr. Loman, because DNA computing is on the rescue. DNA computing works like this:

Release thousands of DNA sequences into a pool, and the simple thermodynamics of hybridization means each strand will end up finding its partner. Thus the dream of DNA computing - massively parallelized by the ability of many, many small pieces to diffuse and hybridize in a solution. Via Madprime.org.

Uh, okay. Right… For those of us who like pictures, Discovery magazine offers a beautifully rendered comics:

Got this childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, or at least work with NASA. And with news like this about the Stardust project, who wouldn’t? [via Boing Boing]