You think: I don't have 25 minutes for this. But then it turns out you do. Time moves differently in outer space. Plus, Sunita Williams is so relaxed about the whole orbiting-the-earth thing, and such a deft tour guide, that you'll find it hard to stop watching. At least, I couldn't.

Welcome, new great reason to watch television. Please go ahead and waste the next 21 minutes' worth of your employer's money. The below episode aired last Wednesday, but the post I wrote didn't make any sense. I went ahead and rewrote it because the next one is on tonight. Also, I don't really know anything about this Nick Kroll character, so if he's some sort of misogynistic racist homophobe or something, don't get all mad with me. (I don't like those guys either.) Enjoy!

Kroll Show airs Wednesday nights on Comedy Central.

I now regret writing this opening to my short piece on ghosts in literature...

What is a ghost? It is a memory without a body, a memory made of nothing. In our universe, living matter forms a memory. Dead matter doesn't do anything. A rock, for example, only moves when the wind moves it, rolls when water pressures it.

Jacques Monod:

There are living systems; there is no living 'matter.' No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.

The famous short film by Charles and Ray Eames...

This post's tipper is Ian Ruotsala.

New Scientist...

Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion – slightly more than NASA's Curiosity Mars rover – and could be completed by the 2020s.

• NASA

The Keck team envisions launching a slow-moving spacecraft, propelled by solar-heated ions, on an Atlas V rocket. The craft would then propel itself out to a target asteroid, probably a small space rock about 7 metres wide. After studying it briefly, the robot would catch the asteroid in a bag measuring about 10 metres by 15 metres and head back towards the moon. Altogether it would take about six to 10 years to deliver the asteroid to lunar orbit.

The sad story of the grylloblattid...

This brave, mobile, tough little insect has been on the planet almost as long as the cockroach. It's a survivor. But in its time on Earth, it has moved from sunny, glorious forests to emptier, colder places. Now, it's the only big insect that makes its living in perpetual snow. Most insects stop moving when it gets too cold. But not this guy. He lives on ice.

And even so, the grylloblattid (or ice crawler, as it's called) is running out of options because all over the world, the ice it lives on is melting. Another earthling with nowhere to go. And when the ice goes, it's not clear what happens next.

• NASA

This post owes everything to Nathaniel Elliot Tanner Rogers.

Space.com:

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests.

"It's a staggering number, if you think about it," lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. "Basically there's one of these planets per star."

With all of this in mind, let's turn to a passage in Thomas Gold's influential The Deep, Hot Biosphere:

The surface life on the Earth, based on photosynthesis for its overall energy supply, may be just one strange branch of life, an adaptation specific to a planet that happened to have such favorable circumstances on its surface as would occur only very rarely: a favorable atmosphere, a suitable distance from an illuminating star, a mix of water and rock surface, etc. The deep, chemically supplied life, however, may be very common in the universe. Astronomical considerations make it seem probable that planetary-sized, cold bodies have formed in many locations from the materials of molecular clouds, even in the absence of a central star, and such objects may be widespread and common in our and in other galaxies. It is therefore a possibility that they mostly support this or similar forms of life....

• ISS

Space.com:

Astronomers have discovered a potential "rogue" alien planet wandering alone just 100 light-years from Earth, suggesting that such starless worlds may be extremely common across the galaxy.

The free-floating object, called CFBDSIR2149, is likely a gas giant planet four to seven times more massive than Jupiter, scientists say in a new study unveiled today (Nov. 14). The planet cruises unbound through space relatively close to Earth (in astronomical terms; the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years wide), perhaps after being booted from its own solar system.

• Photo by Jeff Bowman
• This is a real thing.

Do you know about frost flowers? They are amazing, and researchers at UW, including Jeff Bowman, who took this picture, are looking into the blooms that form spontaneously, forming whole fields of flowers, suddenly, on the ocean.

Here's Robert Krulwich's NPR story, with gorgeous photographs, and here's the more science-y stuff.

Science Daily:

Tropical montane cloud forest trees use more than their roots to take up water. They also drink water from clouds directly through their leaves, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have discovered.

NBC:

The mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago also did in lots of lizards — including a newly identified creature that's been named Obamadon gracilis in honor of President Barack Obama.=
Obama already has a type of fish (Ethiostoma obama) and lichen (Caloplaca obamae) named after him...

NASA:

Scientists unveiled today an unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever before.

• NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC

This Independent story seems like it's probably bad news:

The reproductive health of the average male is in sharp decline, the world's largest study of the quality and concentration of sperm has found.

Between 1989 and 2005, average sperm counts fell by a third in the study of 26,000 men, increasing their risk of infertility. The amount of healthy sperm was also reduced, by a similar proportion.

The findings confirm research over the past 20 years that has shown sperm counts declining in many countries across the world.

Nobody is sure why this is happening, and there's no sign that the decline is leveling off. We may have already hit Peak Sperm.

With so few words and almost no effort, Neil deGrasse Tyson offers the most rational answer possible to the big and old question: Is there purpose in the universe...

Did you know that Time magazine nominated the Higgs boson for its Person of the Year? It's true! So stupid! Michael Moyer at Scientific American explains that it gets dumber:

Under ordinary circumstances, we would be all for the elevation of the Higgs to “Person of the Year” status, if only to further honor the heroic efforts of thousands of scientists and engineers who made the discovery possible (more on that below). But Time’s nomination threatens to do more harm than good. Every single sentence in Time’s nomination contains at least one serious error. The magazine scores a perfect five for five.

Moyer then fisks the nomination, which even got Peter Higgs's nationality wrong. Go read the blog post for a great illustration on how ineptly the media tends to handle scientific matters.

There's a live press conference you can watch on the Huffington Post right now in which NASA scientists are discussing their findings. It seems that the polar regions of Mercury seem to have a lot of water, and possibly organic matter.

UPDATE 11:35 AM: NASA is now taking questions directly from the public via social media. You can find more information about this discovery at Space.com:

Temperatures on Mercury can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius), but around the north pole, in areas permanently shielded from the sun's heat, NASA's Messenger spacecraft found a mix of frozen water and possible organic materials.

The first question was about what this means for the possibility of some sort of life on Mercury. The scientist answering the question says "the more we learn about the solar system, we find it's a soggy place." "Let me be clear that no one is saying that there is life on Mercury," a killjoy explains, but he says "Mercury is becoming" a site for "astro-biological interest" and "in terms of the book of life, there are some early chapters" and "Mercury is helping us answer those questions" in those early chapters.

We even get to see the bathroom and learn how to do number one and number two in space.

The tip came from Luke McGuff.

This is the most distant object known to humans...

• NASA

Indeed, if you were to fly into this future time, communicate with an intelligent life form in our now-isolated galaxy, and tell them that there are truly other galaxies in the universe, you'd be considered mad. No amount of science could prove the truth of your statement, could prove that other galaxies exist and that the universe was once filled with the galaxies we see all around us today. You would be right, the science would be wrong, but there would be no way of knowing or showing this fact.

Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope...

• NASA/ESA

Tightly bound by gravity, globular clusters are composed of old stars, which, at around 10 billion years old, are much older than the sun. These clusters are fairly common, with more than 150 currently known in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and more which have been spotted in other galaxies.

A story about measuring starlight...

Astronomers using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made the most accurate measurement of starlight in the universe and used it to establish the total amount of light from all of the stars that have ever shone, accomplishing a primary mission goal.

"The optical and ultraviolet light from stars continues to travel throughout the universe even after the stars cease to shine, and this creates a fossil radiation field we can explore using gamma rays from distant sources," said lead scientist Marco Ajello, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics...

As you read the article, I recommend listening to Model 500's "Starlight."

The total sum of starlight in the cosmos is known to astronomers as the extragalactic background light (EBL). To gamma rays, the EBL functions as a kind of cosmic fog.

...Hawaii:

In the first inventory of minerals on another planet, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity found soil that bears a striking resemblance to weathered, volcanic sand in Hawaii, scientists say.

• NASA

The idea is beautiful because it so simple:

In the event that a giant asteroid is headed toward Earth, you'd better hope that it's blindingly white. A brightly colored asteroid would reflect sunlight — and over time, this bouncing of photons off its surface could create enough of a force to push the asteroid off its course