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The National Science Foundation has announced a new 5 year plan that is tailored to help science better understand solar energy. It was announced that the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Chemical Bonding Center (CBC) project, called "Powering the Planet," will increase the number of it's collaborators. The goal of the project is to ultimately develop a way of using solar power economically and efficiently. The process of converting solar power into hydrogen and oxygen fuels will also be studied. I say it is about time, but the $20 million dollar award for the entire project is really just as they say, “a spit in the ocean.”

Scientists are asking themselves why the jellyfish population is increasing so much and can this spell new diseases for us?

The Phoenix Mars lander, a vehicle that cost the U.S. Taxpayers over $480 million, has passed it's projected 90 day life span. It was thought that as the area where it landed entered the winter season, it would get so cold that the probe would be destroyed. This hasn't happened yet and NASA scientists have said that the Phoenix is now living on borrowed time. They have said in the past, "If we're successful, this mission will be remembered for being the first to do direct analysis of ice or water on the surface of Mars," There has been no mention of any life being seen or detected, but rumors still abound on the Internet, that a Phoenix camera picked up something swimming under the ice. It could be that the Phoenix will not be remembered for testing for water, but for being the first probe to discover life on another planet. In line with all this, most scientists now believe that the gullies and valleys on Mars were formed by water.

The Guyana health ministry is monitoring reports of a mysterious illness in Venezuela. The illness seems to be most potent among the Amerindian communities. Missionaries were responsible for reporting the new found illness. The ministry states that they have not been able to confirm the mysterious illness yet, but they are not taking any chances and have contacted the Pan-American Health Organization. Another strange illness has been reported among the Columbia River windsurfing community. They have started to call it “River Nose”. The symptoms are clogged nose, extreme congestion, fever accompanied by fatigue along with other symptoms. Water samples are being examined to try and find the reason for the disease, but nothing has been found as of the writing of this article (09/03/08). About the only thing that scientists know for sure, is that everyone that has been examined for the disease has had some contact with the Columbia River.

Prison authorities in Nepal are really puzzled. It seems that 54 prisoners were able to break out of one of their jails. Authorities have called this jail break, "a startling incident". Yep I bet it was. I guess it was not a covert escape, because the authorities state that a large number of policemen were firing at them. Why wasn't anyone hit? Well here is what one prison authority said when talking about the posts at each corner of the walls, "They are in such places that policemen on sentry duty on such posts at four corners on the prison wall can't fire at the main gate and towards the direction the inmates fled." Think any prisoners noticed this, I think they did?

People are wondering why so many ufo investigators have died. Some suspect foul play, because they may have discovered something and could have been silenced. Some of those that died were Phil Schneider, Ron Rummel, Ron Johnson, Ann Livingston, Karla Turner, Danny Casolaro, Mae Bussell, Brian Lynch and Captain Don Elkin. In conjunction with some of the investigator's violent deaths, here are the names of a few scientists that died ahead of their time and who were working on ufo investigations, Roger Hill, Jonathan Walsh, Ashad Sharif, Trevor Knight, Peter Ferry, Alistair Beckham and Andrew Hall, Dr James McDonald, M.K. Jessup and Dorothy Kilgallen. Is it unsafe to find out too much about ufos and reveal your findings?

NASA has developed a low tech method to dampen shocks for the crew that goes to the moon, it is the use of springs. You would think that NASA would try and cut down on weight, not add 17 spring apparatuses to the rocket to make it even heavier. They say that the rocket can handle it, I say that all the weight that would be saved by not using them, could have let the astronauts take extra useful equipment with them to the moon. Jules Verne wrote about using springs on a rocket back in 1887. Could this be where NASA is getting it's avdanced ideas from?

Barack Obama, the democratic candidate for president, has promised that if he gets elected, he will give NASA an additional 2 billion dollars to close the gap in the space race. If he gets elected and carries out his promises and gets us out of Iraq, the extra two billion to NASA will be very easy to pay for, because he will be saving the government trillions, not to mention the wear and tear on the equipment and men of our military.

Astronomers are puzzled about some recent discoveries that they have made. They have discovered some strange densely populated galaxies that are very compact and exist in the early universe. What they mean by early universe is that when they look at galaxies that are billions of light years away, it takes those billions of years for light to reach us. This means that depending on their distance from earth, some were formed when the universe was very young. The mystery lies in the fact that this is the only area where these galaxies are found and the astronomers and scientists would like to know why. It is thought that rapid expansion has occurred and that is why none can be found in nearby time. In other words, they became puffed up.

As we continue to ratchet up pressure on Russia, could we be hurting our space program? The answer to this is yes. If we retire the space shuttle in 2010 as we said that we would, we need the Russian Soyuz to travel to the International Space Station. Of course, as I have said in the past, we really don't have any need for that station anyway. We could just abandon it and there would be no loss and we would save a lot of money.

Why has NASA delayed the mission to the moon that was to search for future landing sites? A NASA spokesperson said they picked a new launch window of February 27, 2009, to relieve pressure on their schedule. He also said, "When we looked at the trade-offs ... it seemed like a wise thing to do," Where they just behind schedule, or were there other considerations that we don't know about?

Scientists were surprised to find that cows were being used a lot further back in time than they had suspected. They had thought that the use of cows dated back to about 5,000 B.C., but now they have found 2,299 pottery vessels that show that cow's milk was used at least 2,000 years before that date. It is now thought that this practice goes back much further and that the evidence is just waiting to be found.

A shipwreck was found in Lake Ontario and it is thought to be that of the HMS Wolfe, a ship that took part in a great naval battle during the War of 1812. After the war was ended, the ship was scuttled in the waters off Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

There is a mysterious hum being heard in a part of England. As a matter of fact Lord Phillips said that he was disturbed by it and woken up. He called it the “Sudbury Hum”. At first he thought that it was an old air conditioner and went to shut it off. It was not that. Others in Sudbury have also heard the hum and experts are scratching their heads, as they try and figure out where it is coming from. One witness said, “You can only hear it when the wind blows and it is something like the sound when you blow across the top of a bottle.” There are several cases on record, where strange humming noises have been reported all over the world and many still remain a mystery.