Science News for 25th February

The pick of this weeks news from New Scientist:

Hard up NASA.
As the NASA budget get cut more and more, Michael Griffin (NASA's Chief Administrator) has elected to cut the science budget, rather than those for the ISS or the replacement for the Shuttle. NASA currently gets 0.7% of the total US Federal budget.

Life off Earth.
Margaret Turnbull, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has combed a catalogue compiled by the Hipparcos satellite and select those that were more likely to have planets that could support a civilisation as developed as our own.

Turn the computer off, it works better!
OK this doesn't apply to your own household computer, but rather to the latest Quantum Computer. Apparently the machine works best when the photon (used to produce the data) is allowed to "flirt" with the program's components rather than actually pass through it.

Space is running out of space!
Surely not! However the room available in orbit of the Earth is getting smaller and smaller. As we have launched more and more satellites that complete one job the space available has got less and less. The chances of satellite collisions has increased recently and of course the debris that we leave up there is causing more and more problems. A small fleck of paint in orbit could quite easily punch through a sheet of aluminium a cm or so thick.

For those non-Chelsea fans!
In the Soundbites section of New Scientist, Jose Mourinho is quoted as saying "Sometime you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists." This was whilst explaining that Stamford Bridge is not as bad a pitch as it looks.

A little further away from Physics, and definately for the Adults!
Sex with a partner is 400% better than masturbuation.