If you ever watched The Magic School Bus when you were a kid, maybe you remember this bit about Arnold turning to ice: Don’t worry, he thaws out. I always kinda believed that that’s essentially what would happen to an astronaut if one really did remove the helmet out in space. Apparently that’s not the case! A nuclear physicist and wannabe-astronaut I know informed me today that somebody who takes his helmet off in space is probably going to survive for a minute or so (and would thus have enough time to get back into the safety of a ship – maybe). No air, you say? People can hold their breath for at least a minute. Nothing about that changes by being out in space. It’s cold, you say? Yes – around 3 degrees Kelvin apparently (almost as cold as it gets anywhere in the universe) – but it takes quite a lot of time to cool you down when there’s no air hitting you to transfer your body heat to. Not exactly a snap freeze. No air pressure, you say? So you depressurize fast – on earth, ...

I just finished watching "An Inconvenient Truth" for a class assignment. Aside from its dated material now (it was released 4 years ago, which is significant when discussing as much scientific data/conclusions as were in the film), it was... eh. I did not really care for the egotistical-feeling introductory sequence where Gore walked on stage amid clapping and cheers (and between footage of his time as a politician), or for the other sequence showing his defeat in the 2000 presidential race. Neither had anything to do with the matter at hand, since he said at the outset that climate change was not a political matter (though he said later that it was, and I'm pretty sure he meant the two statements in different ways, but still). As for the science... well, I just attended a seminar (part of the class for which I watched the movie) in which almost all of it was covered in more depth and with more up-to-date data (which Al Gore can't help, I suppose). I'm not con...