I don't doubt that some people feel that knowing the physics of baseball removes some of the romance from the game. Me? I think it makes the game all the more fascinating. CNET's Daniel Terdiman writes about a presentation on the physics of baseball by Paul Doherty at San Francisco's Exploratorium. Doherty talks about how curveball's curve, why knuckleballs are so damn hard to hit, and where the sweet spot is on a baseball bat.

It was bad enough when the corn biofuel debacle drove up gas and food prices, but now the biofuel debacle is messing with my beer, as chronicled in this article on Reason.

Actually, I already knew this -- the my local brewery, Weyerbacher, had already explained how ethanol was driving up their costs by increasing demand for corn, leading to a shortage of less profitable hops.

When I hear people lamenting the eventual end of the Age of Oil, and gnashing their teeth about where our power is going to come from, the science fiction geek in me has to laugh. The sun radiates enough power to keep us in electricity for billions of years; we just need to figure out the most efficient way to capture it. Which is why this story is such a good read; it discusses using fast-growing algae to produce oil, which then can be used as biofuel. While still experimental, it's already proving itself to be far more efficient then producing ethanol from corn, and even better, it could be use to sequester CO2 from factories, since the algae needs CO2 for photosythnesis.

This is the sort of innovation we need, not dead ends like corn-based ethanol that end up using more fuel then they produce, while simultaneously driving up food prices as more and more land is planted for corn rather than other staple crops.

Earthquakes cause vibrations. Certain Mac and PC notebook computers come with vibration detectors used to shutdown their hard drives should the computers fall. So why not, asks a seismologist, use the accelerometers on the computers as a distributed network for detecting earthquakes?.

You can help out by visiting the Quake Catcher Network's home page. Right now it only works on Macs, but a version for HP laptops is coming soon.

I'm glad to see that some of the more mainstream publications are coming to the realization that ethanol is a boondoggle that's going to end up costing us billions, both at the gas pump and at the dinner table, without making a significant impact on global warming emissions. The latest of these articles is by Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone , and here's the point that I think everyone needs to understand:

This is very cool. Google has awarded a million dollars in grants, and is offering $10 million more, to those supporting and developing plug-in hybrid cars that are not only more fuel efficient, but can plug into the grid and sell power back to it during peak hours. Granted, it's only a few million dollars, but it seems like Google's just getting its feet wet here -- hopefully we'll see more initiatives, and more private funds, from them in the future.

CNN reports that the first commercial jet with an onboard anti-missile laser system is now in operation. It's part of a pilot program to see how Northrop Grumman's Guardian anti-missile system behaves on a working commercial jetliner, and what impact it has on its maintenance and operational schedule.

The system works by firing an invisible laser beam at the guidance system of an on-rushing missile, disrupting it and causing the projectile to miss the plane. The goal is to prevent attacks by shoulder-launched missiles, but since officials say it could take 20 years to equip the commercial fleet with such system, you have to wonder if it's worth it. Won't some other, more modern threat to planes have emerged by then? Or will the missile technology be so cheap and widespread that we'll have terrorists regularly taking potshots at jetliners as they fly overhead?

Practical hydrogen powered vehicles are something that most geeks would love to see within our lifetimes ... and preferably much sooner. BMW's Hydrogen 7 series offers a glimpse of that future with a gas/hydrogen hybrid that puts a hydrogen fuel tank (actual liquid hydrogen, not fuel cells) and allows the drive to switch between gas and hydrogen at the bush of a button. Wired test drove one of the Hydrogen 7's in Germany and offers its insights into the prototype including the good (very low emissions that are mostly water vapor), the not-so-good (the eventual boiling off of the hydrogen over the course of 10-12 days) and the potentially nervewracking (refueling said hydrogen fuel tank).

Ok, it's not the great dirigible filled future that so many science fiction stories and films have heralded (or in the case of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, re-imagined) but helium-filled, stratosphere-soaring, robotic aircraft could one day provide us with easily accessible wi-fi and cellular access almost anywhere in the world.

I love the idea that these things could eliminate the need for cellular towers, which at best disrupt the skyline, and at worst distrupt the skyline while attempting to look like a completely unconvincing pine tree.

The International Astronomical Union proposes to end the debate over what is and isn't a planet by creating a new two-part definition: the body must orbit a star, and it must be sufficiently large to be forced into a spherical shape by gravity. Read the full story on Space.com.

There's much debate over this proposal however, as it turns Pluto's moon into a planet (actually, the pair end up as a double planet) but giant moons that dwarf Pluto but orbit larger worlds (like Earth's moons, or Jupiter's Galileo satellites) would still be moons. The definition would also mean that the asteriod Ceres would now be considered a planet, as would the newly discovered Kuiper Belt object informally called Xena. The formal name of these diminutive orbs would be "plutons", but they'd still be considered planets, and there could be a lot of them. One estimate says we could end up with as many as 24 planets in the solar system if the IAU goes with this definition.