It makes sense then that scientists would want to understand more about our closest celestial companion, a rocky ally–if you will–against the inhospitable darkness of space. As it turns out, that’s what NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is for.

Launched last year, the LRO’s objective is to orbit the moon in order to take high-resolution pictures of its surface, as well as performing number of other functions including measuring lunar radiation levels and looking for deposits of ice or water.

Now, scientists associated with the program have claimed that the moon appears to be shrinking, based on the presence of several faults, called lobate scarps, that have been detected on the surface. Scientists believe the scarps were formed as the moon cooled from its original, molten state. Over millions of years the cooling process caused the moon to contract and the faults formed on the surface as a result.

Evidence suggests that some of the scarps may be relatively new, which indicates that the moon may still be shrinking. It’s unlikely that lobate scarps will be the death of Earth’s favourite satellite though, as the process will slow down further as the moon continues to cool.

The crater is located beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and has a diameter of more than 180 kilometres (that’d be around 110 miles). When the Chicxulub asteroid crashed into the Earth it released the equivalent energy of about 100,000,000 megatons of TNT, making the impact around 2 million times more powerful than the most powerful man-made explosion.

After the collision, scientists believe that a number of changes occured on the Earth. These would have included megatsunamis with waves thousands of feet high and hot clouds of dust and ash that spread across much of our planet’s surface.

Pieces of the asteroid would have been ejected out of the Earth’s atmosphere, burning up as they rose into the sky and causing the Earth to broil, igniting world-wide bushfires and causing acid rain.

Shock waves from the impact would have triggered a countless number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as the Earth watched the demise of the thunder lizards and began to prepare for the arrival of mankind.

Long-period comets that enter our solar system from deep space are deflected away from our planet by Jupiter’s immensely powerful gravitational field. One estimate claims that such comets would impact Earth as many as 1,000 times more often were it not for Jupiter’s protection.

It’s a double-edged sword, however, as Jupiter’s gravity also nudges rocks out of the asteroid belt (that Jupiter itself was responsible for creating) and towards the sun; sending chunks of space rock hurtling towards Earth.

Findings originally indicated that the average colour of the universe was an off-green colour (dubbed “Cosmic Turquoise”) but this finding was corrected one year later, in 2002, when astronomers Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry revealed that the average colour of all things is, in fact… beige.

The colour was named “Cosmic Latte” after a number of suggestions were received by the astronomers. Could our entire universe be sitting in some otherworldly coffee mug?

A recent glitch in the data being transmitted to Earth from Voyager 2 had some “experts” claiming that one of the golden records was, in fact, claimed by sentient life and that they were attempting to use the spacecraft to communicate with us.

Since April, one of Voyager 2’s onboard computers appeared to have failed, sending back garbled data that NASA computers were unable to interpret. The glitch has since been rectified, with the space agency claiming that it was merely the result of a “flipped switch” that had reset the systems aboard the probe.

But this explanation is unlikely to satisfy everyone, with many still believing that NASA are selective about the information they release to the public:

“I think a lot of what NASA says is not the truth,” said Doug Moffat, spokesperson for UFO Research New South Wales, when interviewed by the ABC.

Can NASA be trusted? What do you think?

The creature was discovered by two hikers who were walking their dogs, when one of the animals is said to have dragged the corpse out of the water. The hikers took photographs of the creature, but when they returned later the creature was gone (imagine climatic music here).

The photographs depict a creature with a long furry body, a bald head and face and large “fangs”. The lake where the creature was found has been searched, but the mysterious corpse appears to be gone forever (imagine climatic music again).

As is generally the case with Cryptozoology, the story lacks credibility due to the absence of a body for scientists to examine. It’s important to remember that if you stumble upon a previously undiscovered species you should immediately incapacitate it (preferably with buckshot) and load it into the back of your truck.

But after a recent spate of television advertisements alerted me to the fact that many companies still make use of MSG in their food products, I decided to find out what all the fuss was about.

The commercials, complete with ominous music and men with unrealistically deep voices, seem to infer that something dangerous is going on here… but what do the men in white coats think?

The first “real” concerns about MSG arose in 1968, when a Doctor named Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine complaining about a variety of symptoms that he frequently suffered after eating at Chinese restaurants. Numbness, a general feeling of weakness and palpitations were among the symptoms described by Kwok, and thus the term “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” was born.

Since then, MSG has come under scrutiny from a number of investigative bodies, none of which have been able to prove any direct correlation between the substance and the symptoms of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome (or CRS).

This includes research conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the Select Committee on GRAS Substances, the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the European Community’s Scientific Committee for Foods and the American Medical Association.

The fact that so many people remain dubious about MSG, says far more about the power of suggestion than it does about the dangers of food additives. It is astounding to think that—despite research by a number of reputable bodies indicating evidence to the contrary—a statement made more than 40 years ago can effect our behaviour and invoke such fear.

The advertisements that I mentioned earlier exploit this, intimidating consumers into spending more money on “all natural” snacks, lest they develop migraines, fall into comas or have heart attacks.

To MSG or not to MSG? That is the question. But current research seems to indicate that we should all be far more afraid of our mobile phones than of our packet noodles.

It’s weird, “going away”. For a time you live somewhere else, you look out at a different view and then—before you know it—you’re back again and it’s as though none of it ever happened. In a lot of ways going on a holiday isn’t that different from visiting Narnia. No matter what adventure and whimsy you encounter on your journeys when you get back everything seems just the same as it’s always been. The mundane settles over your life once more and the scent of pine trees is replaced with that of mothballs.

And that all sounds a little more depressing than I intended it too. As a self-professed hermit, I believe that the benefits of being home cannot be ignored. No longer are you forced to climb trees in search of wild fruit for your supper, but can rely on the comforts of a microwave and a well-stocked freezer. For the record, I don’t currently own a microwave because I don’t trust them. But if any microwave companies want to send me a microwave for free (preferably one capable of time travel and/or the remote detonation of fireworks) my opinion could well change.

Enough! That’s enough! The point is that I’m back. But surely the world didn’t stop turning while I was away, surely there were still some sort of “important events of note” that I missed out on. Of course there was.

Hugh Hefner saved the Hollywood sign. I first learnt that the Hollywood sign was in dire peril while watching Ellen, something that is becoming an alarmingly frequent habit of mine. At the time she was calling for donations to save the iconic letters and revealed that no less than $900,000 was needed to prevent them from redeveloping the area around it.

“Pfft,” I said aloud in my empty hotel room. “Why, surely $900,000 is but a drop in the pan for many Hollywood residents. Surely the sign is not in such dire perils as this Ellen would have me believe!”

A mere one day later my powers as the world’s most powerful clairvoyant was proven, with the announcement that Hugh Hefner (I think he has something to do with magazines, but I wouldn’t know anything about that) had single-handedly donated the required funds in order to save the Hollywood sign from certain destruction.

The thing that worried me about this was: how long until “They” (you know… Them) start asking for even more money to ensure the continued existence of the sign? Surely the future of the Hollywood sign is still “hanging over a barrel of monkeys” (I messed that up, didn’t I?), as they say.

Actually, no. As it happens, the Hollywood sign itself was never really in peril at all and the fact of the matter (like anyone cares about those) is that it was merely the uninhabited land to the west of the sign that was in question. This had more to do with displacing wildlife (they have wildlife in Los Angeles? Surely that vixen, Ke$ha, doesn’t count…) than it did with saving any sign.

So what exactly did Heff contribute his hard-earned dollars for? Does he even know what’s going on anymore? Oh yeah, apparently it was part of a deal to buy the actual land that the Hollywood sign occupies; a deal that also involved Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Neither of them seemed to get nearly as much media attention as Hugh Hefner did, which I guess is to do with their relative lack of involvement with marvelous female breasts.

An oil-tanker leaks into the Gulf of Mexico. This is one of those news stories that makes me genuinely sick to my stomach. But as an oil-swilling inhabitant of the Earth, it’s difficult to point the finger. The fact is we’re all reliant on oil and it’s this reliance that makes such horrifying environmental disasters possible in the first place.

The great “climate change debate” that has filled our news screens in recent months seems to miss the point entirely, because whether or not human beings are responsible for climate change does little to acknowledge the countless ways in which we are undoubtedly damaging the planet every day in pursuit of full gas tanks.

It’s disgusting and disasters like this should be enough motivation alone for us to investigate alternative energy sources…

Like nuclear fusion.

“Nuclear fusion, what?” I hear you say. “Isn’t that the foolish stuff of science fictions?”

Well yes, of course it is, but that’s not going to stop a bunch of hot-shot scientists from firing the world’s biggest laser in the hopes of creating the Earth’s tiniest star (there’s a whole sort of philosophical appeal to that statement that means I’m sticking to it, even if somebody tells me it’s hopelessly incorrect).

The aptly-named National Ignition Facility began “powering up” it’s lasers last week, as part of a plan to fire 192 intersecting beams of light at a single point in the hopes of creating a reaction six-times hotter than the centre of our own sun.

Of course it’s not dangerous. Never is with these scientist types.

It’s been nice knowing you.

Costing around USD $848 million the project will run for five years, transmitting high-resolution images and video to astronomers who will use the data to gain a better understanding of solar weather, including solar flares which can disrupt short-wave radio communications on Earth and prove hazardous to astronauts in orbit.

Astronomers hope that data from the SDO will eventually enable them to predict solar flares before they happen—a goal that has proven problematic in the past. Dubbed the Hubble Space Telescope of heliophysics it is certain that the Solar Dynamics Observatory will dramatically improve humanity’s understanding of the Sun and the variety of wide-ranging effects that it has on our planet.

Much of the machinery onboard the telescope has since become inoperable, since it ran out of liquid hydrogen required to cool the many parts of the device. Nonetheless, Spitzer continues to function in a number of useful capacities and just last month detected a pair of “primodial” black holes believed to be almost as old as the universe itself.

The black holes were spotted 13 billion light-years away from our planet, appearing to scientists as they would have been less than a billion years after the birth of the universe.

Although we’re still a long way off driving spaceships into black holes in the hopes of discovering dimensions full of pineapple, I am always going to be intrigued by something heavy enough to fall through the very fabric of space itself.