Knowtex

If you're staying home from work today because of Hurricane Sandy, you might be able to help out a team of scientists from the University of Utah and Purdue.

Put all the water on this planet into a single sphere and it would have a diameter of about 860 miles, says the United States Geological Survey. For reference, that's roughly the distance between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Topeka, Kansas.

I'm at the Science Online conference this week in Raleigh, North Carolina. SciO brings together scientists, bloggers, and journalists to talk about communicating science to the public, how we screw it up, and how we can do it better. You can follow along at the #scio12 hashtag.

The Ig Nobel Awards bestow honors on scientific research that is simultaneously silly-sounding, and utterly fascinating. This year's awards will be presented tonight, in Boston, and the show is sold out. But you can watch the whole thing here on BoingBoing.

Science Museum are failing grown-ups...

Here's an oldy but goody: Video of astronauts from Apollo 15 proving Galileo's hypothesis that, in the absence of wind resistance, two objects will fall at the same rate regardless of how much they each weigh.

Mmmmmmm, delicious context. When the news says "massive," this is what they mean. Thanks to Scott Stevenson for making this and sending it my way!

In the NYT, science writer John Noble Wilford reports that scientists have finally pinned a firm date on the earliest evidence of advanced tool-making by Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans. The new study dates the axe shown below to 1.76 million years ago.

@flyingjenny made this excellent needle felted rendition of a scene from the NASA Hubble Servicing Mission 4 as part of an Etsy craft competition. She plans to use the funds raised from its sale to get to a space tweetup in Germany.

Samuele Riva, an Italian blogger, is being sued by Boiron, a France-based homeopathic "remedy" multinational. Riva dared to mock the company's claim that its Ooscillococcinum has no "active ingredient".