A Real Periodic Table

For my favorite chemistry professor.

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Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

7th-Grader: Obama, Most US Presidents Related

A seventh-grader and her 80-year-old grandfather are allegedly the first people to discover that President Barack Obama is related to all other U.S. presidents except one.

BridgeAnne d'Avignon, who attends Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, traced that Obama, and all other U.S. presidents except Martin Van Buren, are related to John "Lackland" Plantagenet, a king of England and signer of the Magna Carta.

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Thanks To Keith at BagOfNothing

Big Picture: Launch of the Ares I-X

On Wednesday, October 28th, NASA launched its Ares I-X prototype vehicle, the first launch from Kennedy's pads of a vehicle other than the space shuttle since the Apollo Program's Saturn rockets were retired. NASA's Constellation Program's 327-foot-tall rocket produced 2.96 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and reached a speed of 100 mph in eight seconds. The two-minute sub-orbital test flight encountered a few problems along the way, as the launch pad was slightly damaged, a planned stage separation did not go quite according to plan, and a possible parachute failure led to a hard splashdown for its first stage. The Constellation program is under pressure as a recent committee report depicted it as overly expensive. The Obama administration is set to make a decision in the next several months about the near-term direction of U.S. Space Policy. (28 photos total)

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