One astronaut’s trash is another state’s treasure. That’s the message from California as the Golden State officially registered a collection of 106 objects left behind on the moon by the Apollo 11 mission as a state historical resource. The collection encompasses about 5,000 pounds of objects, including the bottom stage of the lunar lander and the American flag planted on the moon’s surface by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

And it’s not just the tools and the flag–California has also claimed custody of bags of human waste left behind.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the logic behind the unusual decision:

The first landing on the moon by humans, on July 20, 1969, was “one of the most historical events in the last 100 to 200 years,” said Jay Correia, a historian with the Historical Resources Commission. California had a major role in developing the technology that made the trip to the moon possible.

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It’s official. Even people in space are tweeting. NASA announced today that astronaut T.J. Creamer on the International Space Station has become the first person to tweet directly from space, making use of a brand new direct Internet connection. Creamer tweeted: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Yay. Space tweets. Sweet.

In the past, astronauts could use email and twitter–but they had to relay their messages to ground control in Houston, who then sent them on. But now, thanks to the new system of personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, astronauts can take advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and browse the Web directly.

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If you are a single male, please answer the following questions:

Repellent body odor? No?

Superfluous and abundant body hair?

Socially awkward? No again…?

Then why are you still single? And what are the odds of you finding a girlfriend this year?

Economics grad student Peter Backus of the U.K.’s University of Warwick pondered that question, and put his mathematical skills to good use to calculate his chances of hooking up in 2010. As Backus found, the odds of him finding an appropriate love interest on any given night out are 1 in 285,000. Backus used the Drake equation to calculate these odds of finding love and wrote it up as  “Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK.”

As New Scientist explains:

For the uninitiated, the Drake equation was set out by Frank Drake, one of the founders of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It estimates the number of alien civilisations we should expect to find in our galaxy.

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Instead of spending time and money planning a manned mission to Mars, why not send an army of robots into space to do all the work? A fleet of robots could be deployed to explore far-away planets, according to researchers at Caltech’s Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory.

From the Telegraph:

Robotic airships and satellites will fly above the surface of the distant world, commanding squadrons of wheeled rovers and floating robot boats…The systems will transform planetary exploration, says [Wolfgang] Fink, who envisages the cybernetic adventurers mapping the land and seascapes of Saturn’s moon, Titan—believed to have lakes of standing liquid—as well as closer planetary neighbors like Mars.

Researchers say the robots could command themselves and other robots with little input from ground control. All of which seems like a great idea, since the human space flight program isn’t likely to take off anytime soon.

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Image: NASA

• Hit the red-light district on the cheap: Berlin brothels are offering discounts to “green” customers that arrive on bike.

• New robotic prosthetic hand lets users regain their sense of touch.

• Do space flights make people crazy? The European Space Agency is looking for a few volunteers to spend 520 days in total isolation to study space travel’s psychological effects.

• Going green? Not if you own a pet. A new book argues that owning a dog has the same carbon footprint as driving 6,000 miles a year in a Land Rover.

• Mix & match brains: Scientists try to create a bird chimera to study the evolution of birdsong.

Astronauts can’t be all business all the time; sometimes you just have to cut loose. Well that’s exactly what billionaire red-nosed clown Guy Laliberte intends to help the astronauts do when they blast into space tomorrow.

From the AP:

The man who hopes to be the first clown in space, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, said Tuesday he would tickle fellow astronauts as they sleep aboard the International Space Station.

The crew must be ecstatic to have him aboard. Laliberte might want to stick to handing out red noses and let the astronauts rest up so they can, um, fly a space shuttle.

MSNBC.com compiled a slideshow of their top nine space antics, a list that will surely include Laliberte’s ticklefest in the future. But for now it seems that astronauts’ favorite pastimes involve playing space golf, eating space fast-food, and dumping space trash.

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Image: NASA

• Bizarre condition of the day: phantosmia, where you smell something and can’t stop smelling it, sometimes for months.

• Thank goodness we’re doing something productive in space: A satellite is tracking and improving French wine harvests.

• The Romantics managed to mesh science and poetry. Any hope for the rest of us?

• Technology can be sexist; news at 11.

• Is the double-secret hangover cure really…asparagus?

It seems hygiene in space is all the rage. First, it was the odor-resistant underwear that one astronaut wore for a month. Now, China’s space program has come up with 100 rules for potential ‘nauts—and anyone with bad breath, dental cavities, body odor, or a family history of serious disease within the past three generations need not apply (apparently the program is looking only for “super human beings”).

The BBC reports:

Shi Bing Bing, a doctor at the 454th Air Force Hospital in Nanjing, eastern China, said the new rules will help China send the best of the best into space.

“Bad body odour will affect fellow colleagues in the narrow confines of a space shuttle,” he said. “These astronauts could be regarded as super human beings.”

Mr Shi’s hospital has now carried out a first screening of candidates to weed out those who fell foul of the 100 rules. A further two screenings will whittle hopefuls down to the small band who will follow in the footsteps of China’s space pioneers, chosen in 1997.

We hate to say it, but sometimes discrimination stinks.

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Image: flickr / Valerie Everett

Humans have sent plenty of things into space—monkeys, other humans, and those cute little invertebrate tardigrades, just to name a few.

Then came the hope that we could add solid cheese to that list. A group of British cheesemakers attempted to send the dairy product 18.6 miles into the atmosphere using a weather balloon with a GPS tracking device, and digital camera attached.

Once the 300-gram chunk of cheddar cheese reached its destination, the cheesemakers hoped, it would float peacefully back to Earth, thanks to a parachute that deployed once the balloon hit space. But to the chagrin of cheese-lovers everywhere, the mission met with disaster, and the cheese is now MIA, according to the Daily Mail:

Within ten minutes of taking off the tracking system failed. “We think it’s somewhere in the East of England—possibly in Essex or Hertfordshire,” said Dom Lane, of the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers’ Group. “We wanted to take a photograph of a piece of cheddar floating majestically in the firmament with the curve of the Earth below it.”

Let’s hope the cheese doesn’t fall from the sky onto some unfortunate fellow’s head.

Want to see more? Check out this cheesy video, courtesy of BBC News.

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Image: flickr / Joi

Most of us have experienced this frustrating situation: Nature is calling, so you rush to the nearest restroom, only to find that it’s sporting an “Out of Order” sign. Annoying, right?

Well, at least you weren’t hurtling through space at the time, hundreds of miles from the nearest plumber. Apparently, the toilet on the International Space Station has broken down, leaving the 13 crew members onboard with just a backup loo, and the crew of the shuttle Endeavour using the W.C. on that spacecraft.

According to BBC:

Mission Control told the crew to hang an “out of service” sign until the toilet can be fixed….

If repairs fail, Apollo-era urine collection bags are on hand, Nasa said. “We don’t yet know the extent of the problem,” flight director Brian Smith told reporters, adding that the toilet troubles were “not going to be an issue” for now.

The main toilet, a multi-million-dollar Russian-built unit, was flown up and installed on the US side of the space station last year. It had broken down once before, requiring a rush delivery of a replacement pump by the shuttle Discovery in 2008.

Another toilet-related problem arose earlier this year. That one was due to regulations that hold that Russian crew members on the ISS cannot use the American toilet.

In any case, let’s hope NASA gets the W.C. situation figured out soon. After all, it’s pretty hard to pull over for a pit stop 220 miles from Earth.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons