I’ve had terrible trouble explaining to people how Creative Commons licences might enable new forms of collaborative art – I just don’t have that sort of imagination. Luckily, other people do have it, as the CC blog reports. So, you get an open-licensed picture from one website, draw or remix a random doodle on another, then combine and mess around with the result on a third site which creates a unique URL at which the final product can be viewed. Print that picture on a T-shirt along with a barcode that can transfer the URL into a suitable mobile device, and all of a sudden there’s something very cool and very weird going on…

I’ve posted a fair few items about Second Life recently, mostly concerning facets of it that intersect closely with meatspace. So to get some balance, I thought I’d share an example of how distant from consensus reality that place can get – ladies and gents, it’s service time at the Church of Elvis! I can’t imagine there’s anywhere quite like that in reality – except perhaps in Vegas.

Hey, how do you fancy sending your name on a mission to Mars, and getting a certificate to prove it? No, seriously – just go sign up and, while spaces remain, your name will be added to a list that will be included on a DVD and carried to the Red Planet by the Phoenix probe, along with ‘messages to the future’ by various luminaries of space exploration and advocacy for the edification of future inhabitants. Let’s hope their playback device isn’t region-locked, eh?

Chalk one up for American particle physics. The boffins at Fermilab have discovered two new subatomic particles, the ‘sigma-b baryons’, which are apparently the heaviest ever measured. We’re another step closer to uncovering the way the universe works.

Good news! Missing NASA moon landing tapes have been found – in the dusty basement of an Australian physics department lecture hall, of all places. Don’t get too excited, though – these aren’t the notoriously ‘mislaid’ video footage reels, but they contain data transmitted by the science apparatus that the Apollo crew set up around the lander. It’ll be interesting to hear what the hoax-conspiracy lobby has to say in the wake of this firm evidence for the Moon landings having really happened.