The Time website just came out with a cool photo essay about animals in space. The photo essay is supposed to commemorate NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, but I’m more interested in the animals themselves.

Are they heroes? Pioneers? Hapless experimental test subjects?

The handful of images including the one above may not suffice to reach a conclusion, but it does give a person a lot to think about.

Slideshow here

The Time Magazine website’s just posted up a supercool slideshow about meteorites and the damage they’ve caused on earth. Some pretty awesome pictures there, but the real fascination comes from the strong reminder the photos present that when it comes to cataclysmic meteor strikes on earth, it’s not a question of “if” but “when”.

Check out the slideshow by clicking on this link.

And you’re in outer space.

This is what’s happening in the International Space Station, whose one and only (Russian-built) zero-gravity urine collection system has been having problems of late.

Thankfully the recent Discovery shuttle mission includes the delivery of a new machine. Gives “relief mission” a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

Nadezhda, whose name in Russian means Hope, was a cockroach. She was taken up into space on an orbiting laboratory with the appropriately sci-fi-sounding name of Foton-M, where she conceived last September.

Her little baby roach-onauts were the first roaches conceived in outer space. They were said to have matured at a faster rate than normal.

And recently, a third generation of roaches, Nadezhda’s grandchildren, were born in a Russian lab. They displayed normal growth rates and are doing well, like, I suppose, all cockroaches do, wherever the heck you put ‘em.

54 year old Jeff Peckman wants his city council to set up an 18-member commission for the purpose of dealing with the presence of space aliens on this planet.

Peckman will make his proposal at next week’s “review and comment” meeting. He would then need to collect four thousand signatures in order to get his proposal in the November ballot.

 It all began with a curious champion.

World boomerang champion Yasuhiro Togai wanted to know if boomerangs worked in outer space, so he gave a bunch of paper boomerangs to Takao Doi, an astronaut with the Japanese equivalent of NASA.

Doi took the paper boomerangs with him on his next trip to the International Space Station and tried them out there.

They worked perfectly.

That’s because  boomerangs rely on air resistance, not gravity, to fly and return to the thrower.

Takao Doi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, did the experiment while visiting the space station as part of NASA’s latest space shuttle mission, which is scheduled to land on Wednesday.

The boomerang behaved no differently than on Earth, flying back to Doi after he threw it. “It flew just like on Earth, and I was really surprised and impressed,” Doi told his wife in a chat from space, according to Japan’s Mainichi Daily News.

World boomerang champion Yasuhiro Togai gave the paper boomerang to Doi and asked him to try throwing it in space. “It was a gift,” JAXA spokesperson Kumiko Tanabe told New Scientist. Togai also gave Doi pointers on how to throw it.