Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Science! She wrote her thesis on 
- Avalanches on Mars Caught on Camera! -- You can see the dust cloud. If that's not enough for you, the HiRISE team has just released 75 pages of droolworthy new Mars pix. Whoever is in charge of cropping these things has a good eye for composition. This is your official time-waster for the week.
- NOVA Geoblog: Mineralogy of the atmosphere -- Will we eventually see an "urban varnish", like desert varnish but with more coal fumes?
- Welcome two new geoblogs: Looking For Detachment and Geology Happens!
- Wanted: Gray Literature on Women of Color in Science -- Please pass your hidden gems to Mia Ong.
- Happy birthday, Scientiae! -- a new Scientiae! Yay! This month's theme is "renewal".
- April Scientiae call for posts -- the theme is "fools and foolishness" - get cracking!
- Journal / Author Name Estimator -- Paste in your abstract and this thing will tell you where to send it. It includes almost no geology journals, so if you paste in an abstract it'll probably tell you to send it to Nature. Hey, at least a machine thinks my thesis is revolutionary!
- Science Toys -- Fantastic DIY edutainment projects. Includes instructions for extracting iron filings from sand, and using them to make magnetorheological wonder fluids.
Finally, this week's geoblogosphere fad is to post pictures of yourself doing something very dumb. Geotripper started it, Chris, Kim, Ron, and The Lost Geologist have all joined in. Mine's below the fold.
Yup, this was pretty dumb. Now, I also have a picture much like Ron's, where I am poking a long metal pipe into an active lava flow. But that's actually quite safe, as these things go - you might fall into the lava if the terrain is rough and you are clumsy, but in Hawaii the lava is not likely to explode on you. In order to take this innocuous-looking picture of the business end of a lava tube, though, I had to clamber down a little scarp and onto a lava bench.
Lava benches are unstable accumulations of new land that frequently collapse into explody boiling ocean. You really don't want to be standing there when they do that.
This is one of the reasons that BACK OFF, I'M A SCIENTIST makes such a great bumper sticker.
Update: Geotripper is keeping a running list of all the death-defying geologist stories.
Environment
Comments
Cool, Science Toys has the paper-cup-and-string phone for the 21st century: it's the laser voice transmitter and receiver!
Posted by: Ellery | March 5, 2008 11:31 AM
Seventy-five pages.
Today is obviously the day I get no work done.
Posted by: Cyrano Jones | March 5, 2008 1:26 PM