Don’t ask me what a geegaw is. I don’t even know how to pronounce it. But somewhere in my mind, it is on Big List of Nonsensical Silly Words That Mean “Generic Name For Unknown Object”, and that is good enough for me.

Another phenomenal week in science. Indeed, my browser (and my RAM) overfloweth. Got a few creepy crawly heebie jeebie stories to share, but don;t worry, I have an Awesome News FROM SPACE to compensate for any skin crawling sensations you might be experiencing.

What can I say? I love the creepy stuff. At heart, I am just a weird little boy.

But let us start off with someone simple, interesting, and completely freaking cool first.

Destroyers of Planets

Check out the awesome science that those crazy kids at the Harvard Shock Compression Laboratory get to do.

Their mission : come up with various celestial collision scenarios, make up some simulated planetary stuff, then shoot it with a gas gun at speeds of up to 3 km per second at other planet stuff and record the hell out of what happens.

Why? Other than it just being cool, the idea is to get a clue as to what happens when large space objects collide, like say the asteroid collision that some think caused the Moon to shear off from Earth many millions of years ago.

And while they can’t show us the actual collisions, they can show us what happens to the stuff they use for the collisions.

It’s at the very end, but watch the whole thing, because the nerds are cute.

Bring On The Rats

Now, on with the creepy. First, seems like our friends down in Seattle might just have a big, big problem on their hands when they start up the Alaskan Viaduct project next.

Namely, they might set of a Biblical armageddon type event that has been dubbed The Ratpocalypse.

See, according to one theory, when the giant boring machines (which are never boring to me) start drilling their way into underground Seattle, a lot of rats and (gah) roaches who have had that area as their own for centuries are going to be freaked out by the noise and they will swarm up from below and into the buildings and homes of Seattle.

This seems like kind of a big deal to me, and I really hope these people are wrong. It is hard to know how much credence to give this theory, as it is being put forth by exterminators, who would both be the people in the best position to know what rats and roaches are going to do, but also the most likely to benefit financially from people thinking the Ratpocalpse is coming.

Also, one little note from the article :

Sprague is launching a campaign urging business owners near the waterfront to start protecting themselves now. The company is using bike billboards that say, “Save your building: Ratpocalypse is coming.”

Bike billboards? How freaking Seattle is that? It really is our sister city.

Nature Out Of Balance

But that is not truly creepy. The real hardcore stuff is coming out of Guam lately, and they are seriously in trouble because of a non-native snake that has invaded their fragile island ecology and made things go Very Wrong.

The snake in question is the brown tree snake, and it was accidentally introduced back in the 1940’s. Oops!

And the thing is, the brown tree snakes eat birds. All kinds of birds. And before the snake came along, Guam had a hell of a lot of species of birds. Thanks to this unassuming brown snake, the island of Guam has lost 10 out of every 12 species of bird.

And that is Bad. But it is not Creepy. Oh, but there is more.

See, all those birds had a favorite snack, and that snack was spiders.

And what happens, kids in Ecology 101, when all the things that ate the spiders are gone? After all, the snakes do not eat spiders.

That’s right, class. You end up with LOTS AND LOTS OF SPIDERS.

Here’s a bullet of pure nightmare :

“You can’t walk through the jungles on Guam without a stick in your hand to knock down the spiderwebs,” Rice researcher Haldre Rogers said.

The jungle is covered with spiders. Like I needed yet another reason to never ever ever want to go into the jungle again, ever.

And how do you fix a problem like that? Bring the birds back, the snakes will just eat them again.

My heart goes out to you, Guam!

The Farthest Star

And while I feel like this is the third or fourth time I have reported this, apparently, this time it is really really officially true : one of the Voyager spacecraft is heading out of the Solar System!

And as the article says, yes, this is huge. Launched in 1977, this human made object will be the first human thing to leave our solar system, ever. It is our herald, our explorer, our wanderer between the stars, our introduction to the rest of the Galaxy.

And it has already been through a lot. We did not sling this tiny craft into the cosmos with only the interstellar void in mind.

Before heading out to the Great Unknown, it visited Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus and gave us amazing pictures and data from all of them in their turn.

And now it will leave the heliosphere of this solar system and wander the interstellar void, to be perhaps picked up by some void hopping aliens who will marvel at this strange artifact from a bizarre and distant world, from a species that clearly wants to get to know them better.

Hopefully, we will not come across as needy or stalker-y.

Well that is it for the science roundup for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when you will hear Miss Piggy say : “Will anyone who reads this blog even get this reference?”.

Oh well, sometimes you have to do the occasional thing just for yourself.

Seeya next week, folks!