I got two moon stories here – both intriguing or silly, whichever way you look at it.

First, scientists have announced that they have discovered a moon on Saturn that appears to contain the basic ingredients for life — warmth, water and organic chemicals.

The small Saturnian moon is called Enceladus where scientists reported seeing geysers at its south pole continuously shooting watery plumes some 500 miles off its icy surface into space last Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

The plumes were seen through the cameras of the Cassini spacecraft when it flew over the surface of Enceladus last March 12 as part of an ongoing joint US-European exploration of Saturn and its moons.

Scientists working on the mission did not say if they had detected any actual evidence of life on this moon. Obviously, they have not, otherwise they would reported such finds in minute details.

But they said the building blocks for life were there, describing the plumes as a surprising organic brew sort of like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas.

“Water vapor was the major constituent. There was methane present. There was carbon dioxide. There was carbon monoxide. There were simple organics and there were more complex organics,” Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said.

Organic molecules contain carbon-hydrogen bonds and can be found in living things, scientists say.

Okay, okay, no quarrel with that. Let’s assume that indeed life is feasible on Enceladus – that we can someday build a home there, and lazily sit by the window with a cup of cool Saturn-made soda and watching a grand view of Saturn will all the rings around it.

But what if the place does not have the same gravity as here on Earth, what if there’s no cable TV there, what if there’s no Internet there, what if there are no malls there, no cinemas, no restaurants, etc.? How are we going to enjoy life simply watching Saturn and its rings?

And, in the first place, how do we survive a journey of several months in total weighlessness from Earth to Enceladus?

This is pretty much like daydreaming then. Oh well, the scientists get paid for doing that.

The other “moon story” I have here is the report that came out Thursday, March 27, 2008, saying that a company called Celestis Inc. will soon start commercial service that will send human ashes to the Earth’s moon aboard robotic landers.

A person wishing to send the ashes of his dearly beloved to the Moon will have to pay the company at least $10,000.

“For many people, it would be a romantic notion to look up into the sky and see the moon and know that your mom or dad or loved one is up there memorialized,” said Celestis president Charles Chafer, adding that half dozen people had already signed up for the service.

This is simply lunacy (no pun intended). And how would the people who would be foolish enough to subscribe to this service be assured that the ashes of their loved ones have actually been scattered on the lunar surface? On the company’s say-so?

Well, anybody can do that. I can start an ash-delivery service to whatever planet or star you want in the Universe. I can even “produce” photos of the ashes of your dog Pluto scattered on the surface of the former planet turned asteroid Pluto, if that’s what you want.

Photo captions:

(Above) The surface of the Saturn moon Enceladus as viewed from the Cassini spacecraft. (Nasa photo)

(Middle) A view of Earth’s waxing moon.

The next president of the United States could either be a relative of Brad Pitt or that of Pitt’s girlfriend Angelina Jolie.

But of course it’s not true that the next president will stay in Hollywood instead of Washington D.C. – although the presidency would surely be a star-studded one.

In an odd finding, researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society discovered that the two Democrat presidential bets – Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton – are actually relatives, although distant, of one of the hottest couples in Tinseltown.

Obama is a distant cousin of actor Brad Pitt, while Clinton is related to Angelina Jolie.

So, okay, all those who are fans of Brad Pitt, raise your hands for Obama. For Angelina Jolie fans, raise your hands for Clinton. Okay, there goes the result of the US presidential election.

Unfortunately for the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain has apparently no showbiz ties.

The researchers also found out that Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother’s side, is a distant cousin of singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette.

No wonder Clinton won a Grammy in 1997 for best spoken word for her recorded speech “It Takes A Village.”

Clinton’s other distant cousins include beatnik author Jack Kerouac and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wife of Prince Charles of England.

Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, on the other hand, is related to six U.S. presidents — both Democrats and Republicans – one vice president, one prime minister and a general.

His distant cousins include President George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. Other Obama cousins include Vice President Dick Cheney, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and Civil War General Robert E. Lee.

But although his relatives are mostly White House tenants, Obama could also challenge Clinton to a singing contest since he also won a Grammy this year for the audio version of his book, “The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream.”

On the Republican side, McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush. McCain’s ancestry was more difficult to trace because records on his relatives were not as complete as records for the families of Obama and Clinton.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, is the oldest and largest nonprofit genealogical organization in the United States.

So even if Clinton and Obama are emphasizing the difference between them during the election campaign, they are actually more alike than they think, genealogist Christopher Child said.

“It shows that lots of different people can be related, people you wouldn’t necessarily expect,” Child said.

Photo credit:
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (left) and actor Brad Pitt. (AP Photo)

It happened long, long before the Sun and the Earth were born, and yet its spectacular sign only became visible to us Earthlings last Wednesday, March 19, 2008.

In another reminder of how helluva big the Universe is and how infinitesimally small we all are, US scientists announced the explosion of a star that happened 7.5 billion light years away from Earth. For the record, one light year is equivalent to 5.9 trillion miles. Just try to do the math, if you can, to translate 7.5 billion light years to miles or kilometers.

Since the universe is some 14 billion years old, this means that the picture of this super-gargantuan cataclysm has been on its way to us for half the age of the universe — which means that the planets and other bodies orbiting this star were blown to smithereens long before our Sun and our Earth came into being.

The explosion led to a gamma ray burst which was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite last Wednesday at precisely 2:12 a.m.

NASA scientist Neil Gehrels, chief of NASA’s astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the visible glow from this burst was 10 million times as bright as a supernova at that same distance. No chance for a human eye to see such brightness though since we would have all been annihilated by even a millisecond fraction of that heat.

Gehrels said the gamma ray burst was bright enough “to be seen with the naked eye.” Unfortunately, no stargazer has yet reported having developed a stiff neck from trying to see the tell-tale sign from the nighttime sky.

But according to Penn State University astronomer David Burrows, the starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation. But other astronomers said it appeared in the constellation Boötes.

Whatever or wherever, the 7.5 billion light years away phenomenon far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years.

Burrows said the distance is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe.

Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.

Gamma ray bursts are some of the most violent and enigmatic events in nature. Astronomers surmise that they might mark the implosion of a massive star into a black hole, or the collision of a pair of dense neutron stars.

Note on photo:
The extremely luminous afterglow of GRB 080319B was imaged by Swift’s X-ray Telescope (left) and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope (right). This was by far the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, et al.

Did you know that Pinocchio is real, and that he, in fact, lives in the White House? Yes, his real name is actually George Bush.

Actually, a study by two nonprofit organizations found that President Bush has a nose much, much longer than that of the fictional version of Pinocchio. Bush’s nose, which grows for every lie he tells, extends across the White House lawns, across Washington DC., across the United States – actually across the world! Just imagine a nose wrapping the globe – that’s Bush’s lying nose!

The study, as reported by wire agencies yesterday, Jan. 23, said Bush was found to have issued 935 false statements about US security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and his gang of other liars stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaeda or both.

“It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaeda,” according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism, writing an overview of the study. “In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Thank God, there will be a new US President this November. Enough of George Pinocchio!