British cheese makers who launched a cheddar cheese into space via a weather balloon have lost track of it when the tracking beacon stopped working.

The BBC reports:

The plan was for the balloon to pop at the edge of space, and the cheese to float down to the ground by parachute.

The mission was being made to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first men to land on the moon.

Let’s hope this won’t be our first contact with aliens. They might just think we’re walking ham & cheese sandwiches.

There’s an iPhone app for everything these days (except flash based video or games – get off your ass, Apple!). One of the stranger apps out there for U.S. based people is one to find registered sex offenders near your location. The app is called Offender Locator and uses the GPS to find the user’s location and then maps the sex offenders near that location.

God Bites Man states:

Tapping on one of the ‘pins’ dropped on to the map brings up a photograph of the offender, as well as their address, date of birth and list of convictions.

I bet the people at 4chan will be clamouring to get this app.. but not for the reasons the app developers intended…

I was reading this article on astronomy which headlined with “Dark impact mark in Jupiters south polar region” from about a week ago.

Needless to say it reminded me of one of my favourite books of all time: 2001 A space Odyssey and its subsequent followup 2010, Odyssey Two by renowned SciFi author Arthur C. Clarke.

One of the articles written about this phenomenon on blogs states:

Giant planet Jupiter is sporting a mysterious black eye, which astronomers believe is the scar from a powerful comet or asteroid impact. The dark spot, about the size of the Earth, suddenly appeared near the planet’s south pole and resembles markings left when a disintegrating comet hit Jupiter 15 years ago.

Does this remind anyone of this?

In 2001 and 2010 monoliths are discovered all across the solar system, apparently left there by alien intelligences who want to steer the human race towards the next step in evolution. The planet Jupiter is ignited as a new sun as proof of their awesome power. Of course real life is often just as interesting, if more (pardon the pun) down to earth in it’s execution.

Scientificblogging’s website quotes:

“It could be the impact of a comet, but we don’t know for sure yet,” said Glenn Orton, a scientist at JPL. “It’s been a whirlwind of a day, and this on the anniversary of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Apollo anniversaries is amazing.”

Needless to say, we’ll keep you informed of any developments or sightings of monoliths. Here’s the trailer from the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey – Directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Bill Maher puts forth a good case against for-profit everything.

Craig Ferguson puts his finger on why everything sucks these days.