In the News July 12, 2008

Brett Favre Wants to Play More Football- Not in G.B.

Brett Favre has asked the Packers to release him so he can return to the NFL with another team. His latest retirement reversal isn't welcome news in Green Bay. The Packers said it would do "what's right" in response to Favre's request. The 38-year-old Favre retired March 6 after a 17-year career, openly sobbing as he contemplated a future without football. But almost immediately, he began dropping hints that he was having second thoughts.

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Return of the Vinyl

There have been rumors spinning for a while. Now it has been confirmed.
EMI will release two Coldplay albums, four Radiohead titles and Steve Miller's "Greatest Hits" on August 19.

Universal Music Enterprises will release 20 albums on vinyl this month and an additional 20 at the end of August, while Warner Music Group will issue 24 to 30 albums from its catalog and 10 to 12 new releases from September through the end of the year, according to executives at those companies.


Some Fred Meyer and Borders, Best Buy stores have said publicly that it will experiment with carrying LPs.
Seems as if the baby boomers want their LPs back.
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American's and their Pot

In a survey published this month in PLoS Medicine, a journal of the Public Library of Science, Americans were twice as likely to have tried marijuana than the Dutch, according to the survey. In fact, Americans were more likely to have tried marijuana or cocaine than people in any of the 16 other countries, including France, Spain, South Africa, Mexico and Colombia, that the survey covered.

Researchers found that 42% of people surveyed in the United States had tried marijuana at least once, and 16% had tried cocaine. About 20% of residents surveyed in the Netherlands, by contrast, reported having tried pot; in Asian countries, such as Japan and China, marijuana use was virtually "non-existent," the study found. New Zealand was the only other country to claim roughly the same percentage of pot smokers as the U.S., but no other nation came close to the proportion of Americans who reported trying cocaine.The survey also found that more Americans not only experimented with drugs, but also tended to try pot and cocaine for the first time at a younger age compared with people in other countries.

Just over 20% of Americans reported trying pot by age 15 and nearly 3% had tried cocaine by the same age. Those percentages jumped to 54% and 16%, respectively, by age 21.



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The Latest From Mars

The latest picture from Mars. NASA / JPL / UA /TAMU / James Canvin

This is just one small part of a panorama showing Phoenix Mars Lander's
surroundings, produced by weather researcher and former astronomer James Canvin.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has touched Martian soil with a fork-like probe for the first time and begun using a microscope that examines shapes of tiny particles by touching them.

Getting Color Pictures From Mars Takes Art And Science
Producing pictures of Mars in color is an art as well as a science. Sometimes the technical limitations of spacecraft operating tens of millions of miles from Earth limit what they can do. Even if everything works perfectly, it can take a while to combine the imagery taken through different filters. That's why you'll almost always see the black-and-white versions of Martian scenes first.