Just a quick note to mention a couple of them. First, the Moon Princesses won their bid to host Deep South Con 50 in Huntsville, June 2012. I'll speak for all and say "Congratulations!" A lot of hard work went into the bid effort and it paid off. Now we get to wait to discover what they have in store for DSC 50. Not for long though. The con's less than two years away.

No, that's not a clock you hear ticking, ladies... Or is it?

Montana State - 21.6, Auburn - 6.6 — What sport has fractional scores? Gymnastics for one, but this wasn't a sport. It was a student competition sponsored by NASA to develop a robot for collecting lunar regolith. The Montana MULE far outstripped its competition, scooping up double the mass set as the minimum for the contest and tripling that gathered by the Auburn entry. As I wrote Josh to gloat about my alma mater's conquest of (one) of his, Tigers are no match for Bobcats when it comes to digging sand out of a sandbox. Go Cats!

Greg sent out a note about today's Astronomy Picture of the Day , this one of the Soviet lunar rover, Lunkhod 1, describing it as "steam punk on the Moon". Indeed, that is what the image calls to mind. If Verne or Well's moon voyagers had taken a motor vehicle with them, it might well have looked more like Lunkhod than anything else. Interestingly, after being lost for nearly four decades, Lunkhod 1 was found again and its laser reflectors successfully used once more by terrestrial scientists.

Lastly in this aggregate of space news comes an answer to a question which came to my mind during the astrobiology panel at the recent ImagiCon: "What are the byproducts we should look for to detect the types of life forms we might expect to find on a world like Titan?" We know free oxygen, indicated by large amounts of ozone in the spectrum of a planet's atmosphere, would be a solid indicator of something like our form of life. As to methane or hydrogen breathers, Dr. Perry Gerakines, who ably directed IC's Hard Sciences track, didn't have an answer. To his knowledge, there simply wasn't any research of consequence on the idea. Imagine my surprise and delight when a stop by Coast to Coast AM led me to an article on New Scientist on exactly this subject.

Linked off io9, comes this article about language, its evolution, and the implications for science fiction. An interesting read, it touches on the use of language in world-building and points out how much language can change in a short time. Consider how impenetrable some, indeed many, modern students find the works of Shakespeare, works the author Paul Kincaid points out, which were written to understood by the least educated during the Bard's day. We've encountered similar, though not as drastic, examples with several of the classic titles Inner Worlds has read over the years. Stylistically, a Heinlein juvenile from the 1950's is quite different from a modern young readers title by, say Cory Doctorow. And the evolution of language is accelerating under pressure from technological advances almost every day, perhaps leaving one of his jargon-heavy works seeming as outdated as parts of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book seemed with its 2050's world and 1950's phone system.