Blacker than Black

Lab-coated geniuses in New York have turned carbon nanotubes into the most light absorbant material ever created. Now they just have to figure out what to do with it.

Here's the BBC News story.

Stressed Blood Used to Repair Heart

Since printing a new heart isn't an option yet, try exposing some of your blood to UV light and ozone then reinjecting it. The damaged blood triggers an immune response that tricks the body into repairing its heart. Cool.

Here's a video link at Science Daily.

3D Tissue Printer

Need a new heart? Print one.

Hubble Will be 90 Times More Powerful

Great news! Not only is the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, source of all those great astro-images, scheduled for life-extending maintenance during a NASA visit this August, it's also getting a pair of new instruments, the Wide-Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, that give the scope the power to look back to less than 1,000,000 years after the Big Bang.

Here's the Space.com story.

"2008 Will Really be the Year of the Spaceship"

That's what soon-to-be space pirate Sir Richard Branson had to say when his partner, Burt Rutan, unveiled the world's first not-quite-finished passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

And right after that Sir Richard announced there won't be any passenger flights on Virgin Galactic until 2009, making that more of the Year of the Spaceship, but, whatever. I still want to go for a ride.

Here's the New York Times coverage of the unveiling, but you'll have to register to read it.

Old Faithful Webcam

I've never been to Yellowstone to see Old Faithful erupt, and now I don't have to! The geyser has its own webcam courtesy of the techno-rangers at the National Parks Department.

Old Faithful Geyser WebCam -- Yellowstone National Park