Moonwater

When NASA 'bombed' the moon last month, I was on the San Juan river. We made a bunch of sarcastic comments about the implications of the moon bombing, but it appears to have worked:

It turns out there's plenty of water on the moon - at least near the lunar south pole, scientist said Friday.

"Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount," said Anthony Colaprete, a principal project investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center.

The discovery came from an analysis of data from a spacecraft NASA intentionally crashed into the moon last month.

Colaprete estimated the impact kicked up at least 25 gallons of water.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120387476

Most interesting, with the possibilities for further lunar exploration.
Now, where should we bomb next?

Life in the tar pits

OK, this is really strange:

For years, educators at the Hancock Park site could only guess that methane gas was being released as the byproduct of oil creation 1,000 feet below the surface.

Researchers at UC Riverside have finally found the answer: Hardy bacteria embedded in the natural asphalt are eating away at the petroleum and burping up methane.

Of the bacteria the researchers isolated in tar pit samples, about 200 to 300 are previously unknown species.

And scientists are weird:

"We found some really great bacteria," Crowley said. "The types we found are all very specialized for life in extreme environments."

Living in the asphalt means living with no oxygen, almost no water and lots of toxic chemicals, he said.

But I'm wondering if this might lead to a variety of new technologies.

What makes these petroleum-eating bacteria interesting is their potential environmental application, Crowley said.

Their ability to break up complex hydrocarbons could help clean up oil spills or clear the holds of oil tankers.

Some of the species they discovered in the genus Pseudomonas, for example, could help degrade trichloroethylene, a solvent in dry-cleaning and metal degreasing that is a major groundwater contaminant, Crowley said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tarpits14may14,0,2989385.story?page=2&coll=la-home-center

Water

Found on another planet.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Evidence of water has been detected for the first time
in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer said on Tuesday, a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth.

Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b.http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN1043498020070411

It's nice to know that our local scientists are keeping busy.