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April 2009 Archives

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Astronomers have all got very excited about this picture this week.

The orange blob in the middle is a star which exploded 13.1 billion years ago and is the most distant object ever spotted from Earth.

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Move over Yuri Gagarin, take a seat Alan Shepherd, the first two-legged fella in space was Ham the space chimp.

On January 31, 1961, Ham was rocketed to where no man had been before on board a dodgy Redstone missile from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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Boarding pass please! It's that time again to hop on Looney Airlines for a flight to Screw-loose Island.

Now I haven't a clue if God exists, but I'm pretty sure most people, religious or not, have at some point wished they could sit the big man down for a cosy chat.

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We've gone dinosaur crazy here at Weird Science Towers.

Just a day after ruminating on the cause of their sudden disappearance, a report on Eureka! suggests dinos didn't die out straight away after all.

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You don't have to be funk meisters Was (Not Was) to know a meteor impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Well it turns out we could be wrong. According to a report on Eureka!, this theory is being seriously challenged.

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The Boston Globe's excellent Big Picture feature has cast its eye on Saturn this week - and what spectacular photos they are.

It features incredible snapshots taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft of the ringed planet and its moons.

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Crocodiles are old. VERY old.

They hung out with dinosaurs 200 million years ago and have come through many of the big extinctions which blight our planet from time to time.

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The mighty bacon sandwich has been a favourite of many meat-eaters when it comes to recovering from the night before.

According to a report from the Mirror, a few rashers between two slices of crusty bread really does help your body get rid of booze more quickly.

Humans learn from hobbits

By Daniel Smith on Apr 22, 09 05:33 PM

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Remember the discovery of the bones of a 1m-high ancient humonoid in Indonesia a few years ago?

Well, it turns out even though the 'hobbit' had a brain the size of a grapefruit, Homo floresiensis was a dab hand at making tools.

Could we all be pot heads?

By Daniel Smith on Apr 22, 09 05:21 PM

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A new study has shown our brains make their own marijuana.

US and Brazilian scientists have made a startling discovery - we're all high as a kite.

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Authors

Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.

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