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Life's Secrets From A Comet's Tail
An anonymous reader wrote to mention a Guardian report on the return trip of the Stardust mission, which has snatched material from the tail of a passing comet. From the article: "Scientists are particularly interested in comets because they believe they are rubble left over from making the solar system, which later played a profound role in the development of Earth. They probably delivered most of the water for Earth's oceans and bombarded our planet with complex organic compounds that could have been crucial to the evolution of life here. For these reasons, researchers have sought a source of comet molecules and designed Stardust to provide it." Wow, this thing has been out there a long time. When I Googled to make sure this wasn't a dupe, I ran across CmdrTaco's post about the Stardust probe entering the comet's tail - almost exactly two years ago.
/. editor reports searching for duplicate story before posting article. The reports are sketchy but many at the scene report large amounts of alcohol may have been involved as well as a badly timed joke to make Zonk think it was April 1st instead of January 1st. Reports have also come in showing that /. editors have been using an etch-a-sketch to run duplicate searches. This may answer once and for all why so many duplicate stories get posted!
/. editors are nothing more than a 1000 monkey's beating on computer keyboards accounting for the large number of duplicate stories being posted.
In other news speculation continues that