NASA Photos of Speceships

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA07923
Space ship near astroid
Artist's Concept of Deep Impact's Encounter with Comet Tempel 1

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA04604
Spaceship near comet
Deep Space 1 Using its Ion Engine (Artist's Concept)

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09939
two groups of two stars with dust ring around one pair
Evidence for Strange Stellar Family (Artist Concept)

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10075
big antena in orbit around red planet with grey planet in background
New Horizons at Pluto

Full Color Hemispheric View of Venus Centered at 180 Degrees East Longitude

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00159
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00158
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00157

Full color pictures of Venus.

The Crown of Tethys

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia08400.html

The crater (450 kilometers or 280 miles across) is a remarkably well-preserved example of an ancient multi-ringed impact basin: The outer ring is defined by steep, cliff-like walls that descend to generally broad internal terraces. The inner ring is formed by a prominent, crown-shaped, 140-kilometer (88-mile) diameter circular band of icy mountains. Multi-ring basins are seen on rocky bodies as well as icy ones.

First Sign of Chocolate in Ancient U.S. Found

http://www.livescience.com/history/090202-earliest-chocolate.html

The residues, found on pottery shards excavated from a large pueblo (called Pueblo Bonito) in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, suggest the practice of drinking chocolate had traveled from what is now Mexico to the American Southwest by about 1,000 years ago.

Now, researchers think a similar ritual may have taken place in villages in Chaco Canyon. Patricia Crown of the University of New Mexico and Jeffrey Hurst of the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition found traces of theobromine, which is in the Theobroma cacao plant that bears beans from which chocolate is made, on the shards. (The Hershey Center was established by the Hershey Company in 2006.)

Since the cacao plant is tropical and can't be grown in New Mexico and other places in the United States, the researchers think the chocolate beans came from Mesoamerica, with the closest source being about 1,240 miles (2,000 km) away from the Chaco site.

Natural disasters doomed early civilization

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090119/ap_on_sc/sci_ancient_calamity/print

They found that a massive earthquake, or series of quakes, struck the seismically active region, collapsing walls and floors and launching landslides from barren mountain ranges surrounding the valley.
In addition, layers of silt indicate massive flooding followed.
Then came El Nino, a periodic change in the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean, which brought heavy rains that damaged irrigation systems and washed debris into the streams and down to the ocean, where the sand and silt settled into a large ridge, sealing off the previously rich coastal bays.

Paper Details Sites on Mars With Plumes Of Methane

Paper Details Sites on Mars With Plumes Of Methane

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/science/space/16mars.html?ref=us

When the presence of methane was reported in 2004 by three teams of scientists, the findings generated surprise and skepticism because only a few explanations seemed to be plausible.

One was geothermal chemical reactions involving water and heat in volcanoes or underground hot springs. But evidence for recent volcanism on Mars is scarce. Also, volcanoes would be expected to spew other gases like sulfur dioxide, and those are not plentiful in the planet’s atmosphere.

A second possibility is biological. On Earth, a class of bacteria known as methanogens breathes out methane as a waste product.

77 Quirks: Adding Character to Starships in the Far Future

77 Quirks: Adding Character to Starships in the Far Future

http://www.estarcion.com/kaleja/77quirks.html

This is a method for randomly adding "character" to a particular starship or ship class. As with most such things, it should be used with a large grain of salt, and the referee should feel free to ignore or alter anything that doesn’t work well. The phrase "referee's discretion" gets bandied about quite a bit. Either ship-class-based or individual-ship-based Quirks, or both, can be used.