Just another nerd.
Yes, we Earthlings are about to take our revenge. For millions of years, uninvited comets have been crashing willy-nilly into our planet creating chaos and destruction. Now, though, the Earth fights back!
In 2005 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is going to make comet Tempel 1 pay by launching a 350kg vehicle and smashing it into the unsuspecting comet to create a crater about the size of seven football fields.
That’ll teach it (and teach us a lot about this sort of cratering). (Via BoingBoing)
A Dutch company is apparently going to market a birth control pill that reduces the number of menstural periods women taking it have to about three a year.
What most people do not realize about oral contraceptives is that women taking them have periods largely for marketing reasons than for medical reasons. The initial versions of oral contraceptives that were tested were taken every day and completely suppressed the menstrual cycle.
The problem was that women in these initial studies many decades ago complained about this side effect, being concerned that it was unhealthy or just finding it discomfiting. So the contraceptive pill makers developed the now almost universal scheme whereby women do not take the pill for several days in order to allow menstruation to occur.
One of the side effects of non-oral contraceptives, such as Depo Provera, is a tendency for menstruation to cease after about a year. I suspect women today are not as freaked out by this as their counterparts in the 1960s were.