The humble wooden contraption with which Galileo made the astronomical discoveries that would transform science Photo: Florence, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza 
Keeping track of time is one of the brain's most important tasks. As the brain processes the flood of sights and sounds it encounters, it must also remember when each event occurred. But how does that happen? How does your brain recall that you brushed your teeth before you took a shower, and not the other way around? (Credit: iStockphoto)
From Live Science:
Artist concept of the X-37 advanced technology flight demonstrator
Joseph Sohm / Visions of America / Corbis
Auctioneer Charles Ashton with the first national road atlas
Men vs women: Who will top the trivia tree?
NASA: Next generation. NASA's slender white Ares 1-X towers some 327 feet above its launch pad, with the space shuttle Atlantis in the distance being prepared for a November launch. When (or if) completed, the Ares 1 and its Orion crew capsule will become NASA's newest taxi to low-Earth orbit. (NASA) 
Technical Area 21 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, during a brief morning rain and hail storm. Mark Holm for The New York Times
Urban legend? Gators don't really live in the sewer.
From Future Pundit:An article in New Scientist about the NASA Ares rocket program reports that a White House advisory panel chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine recommends against further development of the Ares rocket because it will take too long to develop.
Read more ....The rocket is set to make its first test flight on 27 October. But the committee believes the rocket will not be ready to loft crew to orbit until 2017, two years after the ISS is scheduled to be abandoned and hurled into the Pacific Ocean, Augustine said. Extending use of the space station to 2020 would not make much difference, since this would eat up funds available for Ares I and delay its first flight to 2018 or 2019, added committee member Edward Crawley of MIT.
Body hair difference is more pronounced between chimpanzees and humans than within our own species. Biologists have puzzled over the same genes cause both types of variation, not just with respect to people, chimps and body hair, but for all sorts of traits that differ within and between species. New research shows that, at least for body color in fruit flies, the two kinds of variation have a common genetic basis. (Credit: iStockphoto/Warwick Lister-Kaye)
Detail from the Alexander mosaic. From the House of the Faun, Pompeii, c. 80 B.C. Credit: National Archaeologic Museum, Naples, Italy
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.
The first message I got from my wife last week was happy news indeed: “Solar guys are working on our roof!” As readers of this blog know, we’d started the process of installing solar panels back in February, and we had no idea what were getting ourselves into. The red tape for the state and utility subsidies took through the end of May. Then we had to get our roof restored, which added a couple of months. In early July, I told myself, the wait was over. How wrong I was.
From New Scientist:It's not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.
That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night?"
The discussion was part of "Quantum to Cosmos", a 10-day physics extravaganza, which ends on Sunday.
While most panelists professed to sleep very soundly, here are seven key conundrums that emerged during the session, which can be viewed here.
From Technology Review:
'Search is a huge thing for us, I think about it a lot,' says Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive of Twitter Photo: GETTY Imagine a world where you were given answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s the future of search according to the chief executive of Twitter, the site every tech company wants a piece of.
Evan Williams doesn’t often give interviews. He usually leaves that to Biz Stone, his colleague and Twitter’s co-founder. I found this out the hard way as I chased him down the stairs at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this week.
From The Net Effect/Foreign Policy:
Photo: Bright idea: The Pharox light bulb lasts 25 years or longer if used for four hours a dayThey say that, despite its initial cost, each bulb will pay for itself in just three years.
After that, each one used could shave around £9 a year off a typical household electricity bill.
Read more ....
It's Cool, I'll Just Write It On My Arm Including all known Lanthanides and Actinides? via Densemstuco 
Composite drug-releasing fibers used as basic elements of scaffolding for tissue and bone regeneration. (Credit: AFTAU)
Largest and smallest species of eyelid geckos appear here in proportion, though somewhat smaller than life size. Credit: Zuzana Starostová & Lukáš KratochvÃl
Heavy Artillery: U.S. Marines clean an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif. Bridges made from recycled plastic are not only about to support the weight of this tank, but also can provide a cost-effective alternative to steel and concrete construction. Lance Cpl. Kelsey J. Green/U.S. Marine Corps
From CNET:
From The BBC:
The cost of solar panels dropped almost in half in the last year in Germany.
Read more ....In the last year — solar panel prices dropped to $2.10 a watt from about $4.10 in Germany — and only about half the global manufacturing capacity is being used, said Steve O'Rouke, an analyst with Deutsche Bank.
"We've seen an awful lot of angst and difficulty," O'Rouke said. "You have to expect some companies to go out of business."
Deutsche Bank is forecasting a structural over-supply in the market until at least 2011.
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SHIP TRACKS: Could ships spraying sea mist to boost cloud reflectivity cure climate change? Already, ship tracks can be picked out in marine clouds, as pictured here, thanks to the interaction of ships' exhaust and water vapor in the atmosphere. Courtesy NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.
From the L.A. Times:
Super-Concrete Let's see if they can break this Air Force Office of Scientific Research 
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M63: The Sunflower Galaxy. (Credit: Satoshi Miyazaki (NAOJ), Suprime-Cam, Subaru Telescope, NOAJ)
Mars colonists could use caves for protection from potentially deadly cosmic rays streaming down from space. (NASA / October 24, 2009)
Origin Story. A new study challenges the giant impact hypothesis, which suggested the moon formed from a cosmic collision. NASA
President Obama speaking on clean energy at MIT on Friday.
NASA artwork traces each phase of a future mission to the moon and back.
From Blog Critics:
Did a comet impact really kill off megafauna such as the mammoth,
Phones for Warfighters U.S. Army/Tech. Sgt. Cohen A. Young 
Soybean sprouts struggling in dry conditions. Biologists have now solved the structure of a critical molecule that helps plants survive during droughts. (Credit: iStockphoto/Matt Niebuhr)
William Radcliffe / Science Faction / Corbis
Photo: Monkey think, monkey do: By translating electrical signals from a monkey’s brain into muscle contractions via implanted electrodes, an animal with a paralyzed arm was able to grasp a ball. Credit: Christian Ethier, Lee Miller 
The galaxy cluster is a billion light years further from earth than any other discovered.
An Iberian wolf jumps a fence intent on his dinner in this stunning
