I loves me some geek girls.
This picture is just dirty! Click to *snicker* enlarge.

…do you see it?
Highlight below for spoiler
**spoiler**The guy on the right is sprung…if you use your imagination**spoiler**
credit to http://twitter.com/#!/pvponline for the find.
http://gizmodo.com/5689608/neon-trees
Taiwanese researchers have stumbled onto something truly magical. When gold nanoparticles were introduced intoBacopa caroliniana plants they caused the chlorophyll to produce reddish light. Bye-bye street lights? But wait, there’s more:
While lit, the glowing vegetation consumed more carbon from the atmosphere than normal (i.e. the luminescence causes the cells to undergo photosynthesis).
PopSci calls this a “triple threat,” in that the trees could cut energy costs, reduce global warming and keep streets safely lit at night. I’m more than inclined to agree.
http://gizmodo.com/5651768/this-may-very-well-be-the-first-new-earth
You are looking at what could be the fourth planet on the Gliese 581 star system, 20.3 light years from Earth. If the NASA artist rendition looks very much like our Earth… it’s because it issimilar to Earth.
Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star. A starship traveling at near the speed of light would only take 20.3 years to get there, which is not that much. Until now, astronomers had discovered five planets around this star. Some of them were too close to it, making them too hot to be habitable. Others were too far and too cold. But now, a sixth planet has been discovered right on the “habitable zone”, the fourth in distance from the star: Gliese 581g.
If the discoveries from the planet hunters at University of California Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington are right, Gliese 581g could be habitable.
Now, before you jump into the Enterprise and go there camping, roast some marshmallows, and get back leaving a lot of beer bottles and crap behind, being potentially habitable doesn’t mean that we can just go there and thrive. It doesn’t even mean that this planet is full of little green men or buxom big blue women. It just means that this is a planet that could sustain life, with liquid water and an atmosphere.
Gliese 581g has three to four times the mass of Earth, orbiting the star at an zippy 37 days. According to data gathered by the Keck I Telescope HIRES spectrometer, it’s a rocky planet with a “solid surface and enough gravity to hold to an atmosphere.”
More importantly, according to Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, not only their “findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet” but “the fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common.”
In other words, the chances of the Universe being bubbling with life of all kinds and forms just jumped beyond our most optimistic hopes. [NASA]
It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “one for the road”. Whisky, the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, is being used to develop a new biofuel which could be available at petrol pumps in a few years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/17/whisky-biobuel-scotland
AND HERE
http://www.napier.ac.uk/randkt/rktcentres/bfrc/Pages/Butanol.aspx