Word to the wise: If you’re invited over to a place called the Ice Physical Properties Laboratory for drinks, don’t get your own ice.

Post-doctoral researcher Mathieu Choukroun prepares an ice sample for study. The ice lab has special equipment and techniques for creating and working with ice. ( NASA/JPL).

That’s where scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are endeavoring to recreate the kinds of ice that have been discovered on frozen moons like Titan and Europa, according to an article posted Tuesday on the JPL web site.

Take, for example, Titan. Surface temperature? Oh, about minus 290 degrees. “Cryovolcanoes” belching a cocktail of “super-chilled liquids” onto the surface. The possibility of rich organic chemicals that might be “possible precursors to life.” To learn more about all this, JPL scientists are working to reproduce the kind of ice that would be found on that satellite of Saturn.

“We’re trying to shed light on processes that have occurred in the evolution of these bodies and understand what is happening on them now,” JPL planetary scientist Julie Castillo said in the article.

Sometimes it’s the elements that go into the ices — such as ammonia or various salts — that the scientists are looking to replicate. But there are also different types of ice, like “clathrate hydrates, water ices that form at low temperature and under high pressure and have molecules of different gases locked inside their ice crystals,” the article reports.

The goal of such experiments? Not to develop new novelty ices to flavor drinks down at the local bar, that’s for sure. Rather, it’s the continuing search for insight into where life might be found in our solar system and galaxy.

“Ice is found nearly everywhere in the universe and comes in many forms,” Castillo says in the article. “Where there is ice, there is often water, and where there is water, there is the possibility of life.”

Truthout.org is posting selected tweets and other updates that it’s tracking out of Iran. This is an exciting moment in activism and the history of the Internet. It may be the shape of things to come. Here is the stream. Thanks to Marc Ash, the editor of Truthout, for pulling this together.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Later today is the Cancer New Moon. The Sun is currently in an exact conjunction with Vesta in very early Cancer, this being just the second day of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. The Moon is currently in late Gemini, making a trine to the triple conjunction in Aquarius (Late Gemini to late Aquarius is a trine) and opposing the Galactic Core. Once again the Moon is getting a lot of energy run through it. In a little while from this writing, it will be void of course for most a while before entering CancerВ  at 1:11 pm ET.

Valencia, Spain. Photo by Eric.

The Cancer New Moon occurs just two hours and a few minutes after that, at 3:34 pm ET. This lunation is exactly conjunct Vesta, and opposite Pluto, placing four planets on the early cardinal cross that is described as the Aries Point. The conjunction of Venus and Mars is also sharing data with the Aries Point because it’s at the midpoint of Taurus: exactly semisquare the Aries Point and aspecting other points along the cardinal cross (very early Cancer, Libra or Capricorn, which all count.)

For those new to the Aries Point conversation, I would invite you to check out this link that explains the basics, called The Personal is Political. I summed it up in one basic idea: “We could call the Aries Point the One World Point, because it reminds us that we live in one world.” Hence, when events collect around the early degrees of the cardinal signs — Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn, the pace of the world picks up, and events feel like they have more impact. The astrology can be subtle — for example, today’s New Moon will have effects that last through the summer and which some astrologers may not think to associate with the Aries Point.

But the energetic connection is clear. I think that of many stories in recent years, the election outcry in Iran exemplifies this idea. But there is clearly more on the radar, whether the Iran story takes on a new dimension somehow, or there are unrelated developments in other areas on the world stage. But what we are looking at is a big enough to be impressive: the first very serious cracks in an Islamist regime’s ideology and its ability to control the public.

We’ve been watching this gradual uprising since the Iranian revolution in 1979, and now (as any astrology student knows, because it’s about 30 years later) we are at the Saturn Return of the revolution — and this means a big change. But a Saturn return (which will happen every turee decades or so) does not have to be a widescale event. What is granting this the ability to have global effects is specifically all the alignments in the early degrees of the Cardinal signs. And we might wonder what, exactly this portends: how the influence will spread to other Islamist governments and populations, for example.

Vis a vis Iran, I keep thinking one thing over and over: this was a country we nearly bombed two or three years ago. Do you remember? It was only public outcry, mostly on the Internet, and the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that prevented Dick Cheney and George Bush from going in with fighter planes and bombing the people who are having this uprising now. Strange to think many people would count bombing a country as business as usual, but take a look at who we would have hurt, and what process we would have stopped, had we gone in and done that.

We might wonder the same thing about Iraq.

NASA’s probably hoping the third time will be the charm, since the two space shuttle launches have been scrubbed in the past week, most recently Wednesday.

The Endeavour is on the launch site at Cape Canaveral, Fla., but a hydrogen leak caused NASA to scrub the early morning launch less than four hours before takeoff was scheduled, according to The Washington Post.

The leak — in a hydrogen vent line that is attached to the shuttle’s external fuel tank — is the same problem in the same place as the one that caused the first launch, set for last Saturday, to be scrubbed. According to the Post article, repairs had been made after that leak, including replacing the hookup and two seals. That did the trick back in March after a similar leak showed up, but not this time.

Endeavour’s mission will carry the Japanese contribution to the International Space Station, the module known as Kibo that includes a “front porch” that will be used — no, not for sitting in rocking chairs — for experiments in space. The Space.com website has a day-by-day schedule for Endeavour’s 17-day mission.

Dear Adorable Humanoid Earthling:

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“You need to use mythology, because it’s the only thing people believe,” my writing teacher said. “Also, astrology works, because human minds take the shape of the solar system they incarnate in. This is a property of nature anywhere there’s human life.”

So anyway, I incarnated, did journalism for a while, went to spiritual training camp in New Jersey, learned astrology and started Planet Waves. I can now offer it to you, advertising free, designed specifically to work with your particular model of mind — the kind with the planets built in.

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