Until recently, most of what scientists know about whales comes from dissecting the ones that have washed ashore or through examining captive specimens.

Now scientists are using small, remotely controlled helos to maneuver above a whale’s blowhole and sample the mist it blows into the air. Their blowhole could be thought of as somewhat similar to our nostrils in the sense that during exhale there’s an accumulation of mucus and other interesting matter. These samples can reveal bacteria lurking in these beasts.

Phoenix communicated with NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter Thursday. The communication reinforced a diagnosis that the spacecraft is in a precautionary mode triggered by low energy. Mission engineers are assessing the lander’s condition and steps necessary for returning to science operations.

NASA’S Phoenix Mars Lander, with its solar-electric power shrinking due to shorter daylight hours and a dust storm, did not respond to an orbiter’s attempt to communicate with it Wednesday night and Thursday morning

Halloween is all about scary things like evil jack o’ lanterns, witches, goblins and little furry, squeaking, flapping bats.

So it’s appropriate that today we learn that something is killing the little brown bats of the Northeast, and researchers may have fingered the culprit: a fungus.

For Halloween, I think I prefer this kind of bat (Sexy Batgirl Superhero Costume):

Kelly from advantageedu.com educated me on a gem of a blog article recently with a long list of links to open courseware resources on science topics.

My favorite from the list? It’s gotta be Satellite Engineering which is about the problems, solutions and the basics of subsystem design in engineering spacecraft. It’s by MIT and has topics like “Design of an Artificial Gravity Mars Mission“. How cool is that?

Great work pulling that list together, I’m saving this to my favorites.

Sorry, but i need to see the bees reciting (buzzing?) Pi or performing some interesting arithmetic before I’m impressed. Counting to four just doesn’t do it for me.

Bee trivia:  Did you know that Scotland produces a whiskey liqueur made from honey? It’s called Drambuie.