On the Record

“He's attractive. And my son loves the fact he was an astronaut.”

A deep-thinking Canadian voter describes why she might vote for Liberal parliamentary candidate Marc Garneau.

“The Americans are going to be last on the list, I can tell you.”

A group of researchers at Britain's Mill Hill lab discuss how they will share their samples after US news coverage played down the fact that they were the ones to isolate and grow the Turkish bird-flu virus.

Sources: Montreal Gazette, The Independent

Scorecard

Extreme tourism

For just US$334 a person, Ukrainian travel agents offer an all-inclusive holiday to Chernobyl to mark the 20th anniversary of what they call the “worst environmental disaster in history”.

Scientific vanity

Go one better than Googling yourself: new features on Elsevier's Scopus service make it easier to get daily updates on who is citing your work — and that of your competitors.

Plant patents

Local farmers are calling on the University of Hawaii to give up its patents on three kinds of taro, the root that forms the basis of much Hawaiian native cuisine and culture.

Number Crunch

NASA's Stardust mission returned to Earth last weekend bringing with it samples snared from a comet (see Researchers reach out for a little bit of stardust). It was quite a trip:

4.6 billion kilometres were travelled by Stardust on its journey to Comet Wild 2 and back.

7 years is the time it took the probe to do the round trip.

Less than 0.1 gram is the estimated amount of cometary particles collected by Stardust.