A few items from this morning's menu:
At the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Spotts compares the situation of Voyager 1 to that of a child on a long car trip asking, "When will we get there?" The spacecraft is supposed to be getting close to what's called the heliopause–the boundary between the farthest reach of the solar wind and the surrounding interstellar wind. But it's still not there, leaving theorists grasping for explanations.
The AP's Alicia Chang gives us a nice write-up of NASA's Dawn spacecraft as it "spiraled away" from the asteroid Vesta toward the dwarf planet Ceres, on its way toward completing its tour of the two largest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is powered by ion engines, which are more efficient than conventional rockets, she reports.
For more on the day's top news–the massive project to investigate the biological "dark matter" in the genome–see this enlightening blog post by Ewan Birney, one of the 442 (!) scientists whose names appeared on the new publications from the project. (Also see Tracker Faye Flam's post for more on the coverage.)
Maggie Koerth-Baker at boingboing.net points us to beautiful NASA video of a coronal mass ejection, or, as she puts it, an opportunity to "watch the sun burp." You should take the opportunity.
Rachel Zimmerman at Commonhealth alerts us, via Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, to important and overlooked reporting on Medicaid in the presidential campaign. Don't be distracted by the discussions of Medicare–this Romney proposal could deny insurance to 30 million people off of the program, Klein says.
-Paul Raeburn
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