The crew stocks up on freeze-dried ice cream for this special all-space edition of scienceTASTIC.  First off, we knock out a few stories: Mark expresses his undying love for acronyms, Mike gives us a new method for sending interplanetary spam, and Joe explains how that twinkle in the sky might just be a monkey wrench.  Then it's field trip time!  We hop in a bus and head to the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to speak with scientist and award-winning author Geoffrey Landis and propulsion physicist Marc Millis.  We didn't even have to bribe them.

For all of your Geoffrey Landis needs.

Marc Millis's Tau Zero Foundation.
(Right click and save here for more of the Marc Millis interview)

This week's scienceTASTIC kicks off with Mark telling us how we can build a house out of LEGOs (November Geek Monthly).  Finally, somewhere to park my TECHNIC dune buggy.  Continuing on, Mike uses a frozen mouse to thaw a woolly mammoth, while Joe's promise of battle droids delivers on the "droids," but falls a little short on the "battle."  In round two Mark gets all leftist on us, Mike cures cosmic cancer, and Joe shares his mnemonic for distinguishing stalactites from stalagmites.  It's a virtual cornucopia of science goodness.

This week scienceTASTIC asks the tough questions and provides hasty, ill-informed answers.
How do you pull a Men In Black style memory erase on a rodent?  With a barely pronounceable enzyme, of course.
Is a $35 million space trip an ostentatious waste of money?  Yes.  And no.
What's your political affiliation?  Apparently if you vote at all you're in the Smarty Party.
How do you save a kangaroo?  Eat it.
Is the grass greener on the other side of the farm?  Dunno, but it is more fuel efficient.
Will HGH make you a better athlete?  Only if you think it will.  (From the October/November issue of Scientific American Mind - enough with the headphones, read something for goodness sake.)
And finally, what exactly is the Big Bounce?  We have no flippin' clue.

Mark is busy traipsing around the Great White North, but Mike and Joe find the strength within themselves to carry on. Even if it is to talk about an invasion of snails. Joe lifts us from this downer with a story about osmosis as a clean energy source (from the September/October Science Digest - check your local news stand), only to have Mike knock us down again by telling us the oceans are getting too acidic.  You know who's still happy?  Karl Merk.  He has two new arms. The polluted Northern Hemisphere doesn't even bother him. Hopefully we didn't tell the aliens our planet is going to heck in a handbasket.

This little adventure we call scienceTASTIC starts off with bang... a Swiss bang, that is. Then it's on to the world of solar energy and organic solar cells. We round out the big stories with a bunch of garbage. Following that we bid adieu to the LHC until the spring, give a shout out to Project Earth on Discovery Channel, and wave toward the sky as China steps into space.