'Why are they doing that?' The Hills Girls bravely confront the LHC and the Big Bang (E! Channel) Superb! The Large Hadron Collider has barged its oversized supercooled magnets into the very popular US teenie drama, “The Hills.” Now I’ve heard it all. Not only did the LHC grand switch-on...

Admiral Kirk (William Shatner at his best) removes his specs, Lt. Saavik (an impossibly thin young Kirstie Alley) looks scared.... it could only be The Wrath of Kahn, the classic 1982 Star Trek movie. For this week’s edition of the Carnival of Space, Tim Neale at the Tomorrow is Here takes us on...

Steve the Cat celebrates Halloween on the Phoenix Mars Lander (NASA/SteveTheCat.com) After an uncertain couple of days, NASA has regained contact with the ailing Mars lander. Yesterday, scientists announced they were having difficulty communicating with Phoenix after the on board electronics were switched...

The end of the line? (NASA/JPL) Late on Tuesday, NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander entered “safe mode.” Before this, NASA scientists were working to conserve power by shutting down non-critical systems. By powering down instrumentation such as the heaters that warm Phoenix’s robotic...

A little bit of beautiful - the Earth rises over the lunar horizon (JAXA) Using its High Definition Television (HDTV) camera, the Japanese lunar probe Kaguya captured an astounding video of the Earth slowly rising above the lunar horizon. The video was actually released at the start of this month, but...

W00t! A huge thank you goes to Dave Mosher at the excellent blog Space Disco for adding Astroengine.com to the Blogs.com “Top 10 Space Blogs”! Not only did my site make it into the top 10, by sheer alphabetical luck, Astroengine is also right at the top. Awesome! I’ll wear my badge...

Epic fail? I think not (credit: current.com, edit: Ian O'Neill) On September 28th, Elon Musk proved he wasn’t a dreamer and blasted the world’s first commercial rocket — Falcon 1 — into Earth orbit. SpaceX have put their previous launch failures behind them, rightfully filing...

Does Digg love the Universe Today again? Great news! It would appear that after only day one of the campaign to have the Universe Today un-banned from Digg.com, somebody in the admin staff was obviously paying attention (unless they are an avid reader of the Universe Today website too), and realised...

Universe Today? Banned?? The Universe Today website has been banned from the social bookmarking site Digg.com. This might come as a surprise to many as the Universe Today is a great source of space, astronomy, science and educational news. Why would such a great resource be banned from a site that is...

Wow, what a stressful day! On writing One-Way Mission to Mars: Top 5 Items to Pack last night, I had no idea about the consequences. This morning the article exploded onto the front page of Digg.com, sending a flood of traffic into Astroengine.com. Although my bandwidth is more than capable of dealing...