The future is... now?

Scientists find a potentially habitable planet (called Gliese 581g) within the Libra constellation.

(When do the WALL·E robots go into production?)

Language of the universe

"You cannot understand the universe without learning first to understand the language in which it was written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its letters are triangles, circles and other geometric forms. Without this language humans cannot understand a single word of the universe. Without it we wander in a dark labyrinth."

-Galileo Galilei

Earth, as seen from Mars

First image of Earth ever taken from a surface beyond our moon

via NASA's Flickr page

The More You Know: Synesthesia

Do numbers, letters or days of the week have colours or smells? They might if you experience the unusual phenomenon called Synesthesia. To a synesthete, one or more sensory channels cause a kind of "cross-talk" that triggers experience in another channel.

A synesthete may experience colours with numbers or letters (very common), colours with sounds or musical notes (also common), taste or touch with certain sounds (less common) or even colours with changes in temperature (more rare).

No one really knows what causes Synesthesia, but neuroscientists are fascinated by it and are conducting research to try to better their understanding. Some believe that we all started out as synesthetes, but lost the ability in early childhood.

More, from Wikipedia:

"In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while [...] numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise)."

An example of how a word might be perceived by a synesthete:

BREAKING: Water on the moon!

NASA confirms they have uncovered "significant" amount of water on the surface of the moon

Typography = awesomeness²

(Click to enlarge!)

(Source)