This is the coolest thing you’ll see today.

Some stars are so far away that the light from them, even travelling at 670 million miles per hour, hasn’t yet reached Earth.

There is a star somewhere in the Universe called your Birthday Star: the light we see from it today is light that left the star at the same time you were born.

Find your Birthday Star.

The Drake Equation tries to estimate the number of number of alien civilisations that we could communicate with. By altering the numbers below you can calculate just how many aliens are out there, waiting to communicate.

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There are a huge number of fascinating documentaries available through Google Video. Here are some of my favourites:

• The Six Billion Dollar Experiment covers the search for the Higgs boson (the so-called ‘God Particle’) at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
• Time Travel discusses the scientific basis for different methods of time travel.
• The Death Star is an analysis of the most extreme objects in the Universe: so-called ‘hypernovae’.
• Fission is the New Fire is a talk given at Google HQ by Rod Adams about how totally awesome nuclear power is.
• Fermat’s Last Theorem is based on the book by Simon Singh and tells the story of how Andrew Wiles solved the “greatest mathematical problem of all time”.
• Prospects for Extending Healthy Life … A Lot is a talk by Dr Aubrey de Grey on the prospects for halting the aging process. (Worth watching just for de Grey’s amazing science beard.)
• Last Days on Earth describes seven scenarios in which life on Earth as we know it could be extinguished.
• The Enemies of Reason (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3) lets Richard Dawkins loose on those who choose to ignore the rigours of logic, observation and evidence.

The largest vehicle in the world is the Bagger 288 excavator:

The excavator can shift 240 million kilograms of coal every day and is so big that it is easily visible from the air and can quite easily chew up a bulldozer:

Before the Bagger 288 came along the world’s largest vehicle was the crawler-transporter used to move the Space Shuttle from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39.

With a maximum speed of one mile per hour it takes almost five hours to complete the four mile journey.

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