Big freaking boom. It’s small blurry video, but the incredible massiveness of it all is still amazing. The plume rises above the cloud layer.

Lou Anders passes long this link to a company that builds ‘NanoSphere’ finishing technology that makes for self-cleaning surfaces. On clothes.

The money shot is of honey being washed off fabric with some water and neither substance remaining. There’s a ketchup stain on my current favorite shirt, so color me intrigued.

Glenn Reynolds links to an interesting article about ‘zero energy’ homes, or at least homes that use somewhat less than a quarter of the same energy the average US house does. They’re being built by Habitat for Humanity and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Unlike some past low energy homes, they’re no more expensive or visually different than other standard looking homes. I can’t imagine I’m the only interested in a house that ends up knocking 80% off my gas and electric bill.

NASA is getting ready for its next Mars Lander to be launched. The Phoenix will be landing in the polar region, where we know ice exists.

Ice means water. Water might mean a better chance of determining if life exists on Mars. It will be checking the conditions to see if they’re amenable to life.

That seems to be a bit of a wishy-washy mission statement, though, and it would be a bit more exciting in their press releases to know if these instruments can do more than just check conditions and maybe give us a hint about the big question: is there life?

While it’s not quite ‘beam me up, Scott!’ fans of Star Trek and SF in general will find this article about using quantum dots, which allow for the identical signature of an atom to get sent somewhere else on the quick means teleportation. More of a breakthrough for communications (think Ursula K. LeGuin’s Ansible) and computing than in creating the Human Fly, but still pretty nifty.