On their show last night, MythBusters sought to debunk one of the biggest myths of all, that NASA's "moon landings" were shot on a Hollywood backlot. And, spoiler alert, it looks like all that space exploration actually happened. So I guess that's it. Everyone can now remove their tinfoil hats and crack open a bag of freeze dried ice cream. Unless...of course...MythBusters is in on the whole thing...

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The ISS is full of laptops, used for experiments, email, or just watching movie rips on VCDs in 2001. But this time, someone's laptop has managed to make it all the way up into Earth orbit carrying the Gammima.AG worm--one that leeches login data for Asian MMORPGs. We're doomed!

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Jason Wells got to toy around with a few blocks of Aerogel, the fantastically light (and fantastically expensive) material made famous by its use as insulation in NASA spacecraft like the Mars Rover. Using just everyday materials from his house, he managed to test the futuristic product's strength, optical properties, reaction to different liquids and temperatures, and electrical conductivity. He concludes from the experiments that it should work really well as a fire retardant or insulation, as well as pulling moisture out of pretty much anything (including his finger!). Aerogel weighs only three times as much as air, but is even more effective than your everyday pink insulation. It may only be the world's coolest insulation material, but are you the world's coolest anything? Didn't think so. [Jason Wells via Crunchgear]

According to the NASA International Space Station status report, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko used a digital camera with 800mm telephoto lenses and a video camera to take images of the "after-effects of border conflict operations in the Caucasus." In theory, this seems to have violated the non-military use clause of the station, but Russia has claimed "humanitarian motives."

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Looking for a space shuttle to convert into a funky dwelling? Believe it or not, there are quite a few pieces of once cutting edge space technology that have been left to rot. For example: there is a Russian Buran space shuttle lying abandoned in the Arabian desert, a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab sitting in a dusty lot, and the infamous launch pad 34 where the three astronauts aboard Apollo 1 died in a fire that broke out during a test exercise. The folks at OObject have put together a list of these relics along with 9 others that you may find surprising. [OObject]

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Bill Daley is the food critic for the Chicago Tribune, accustomed to differentiating the finer points of the expensive, aged steaks of Rush Street, not the freeze dried packets of astronaut cuisine. So when NASA sent him a few packets to test out (most of them cooked through injection with hot water) we were pretty keen on hearing just how well our men and women of the cosmos were eating (with no access to real Cosmos, of course). His verdict? Sometimes the food was quite good, other times, not so much.

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Usually the venerable web cam is used for modest, local tasks, like taking deep-in-thought Facebook profile pics, making me-too webcasts, or undercover girl's locker room documentaries. But did you know there's also a web cam circling the Red Planet right now? Called the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), the cam is attached to the European Space Agency's Mars Express, and was last used to visually confirm the Beagle lander's separation from the main spacecraft. It was then put into sleep mode, and has been in that state for the past three years. Bo-ring. The ESA folks thought so too, and on a whim they gave the command to wake up back in 2007. It did, and now they want your help processing a year's worth of images.

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the last of the space agency's Great Observatories satellites to launch, celebrated its fifth birthday recently... giving me the opportunity to post this amazing multigenerational picture of star-forming region in the constellation Cassiopeia, 6,500 light-years from Earth. The photo takes in an area equivalent to four full moons and puts on show how one generation of massive stars can give birth to the next.

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A week from today the Mythbusters say they're going to tackle "one of the biggest myths of all": that the moon landing was a hoax. Um, isn't it the other way around? Waaay more people seem to think we took a tin can, loaded it up with rocket fuel and successfully shot ourselves to the moon and back. I'm not sure how showing how crappy your own fake moon landing looks proves anything, nor does going to NASA centres (the hoaxers themselves!) for "evidence." Verdict: They're totally in on it. I mean, just look at Buzz Aldrin. [Wired via Dirty Laundry - Thanks Richard!]

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Filed under the "good thing we tried it out first" department is this recent test of Shuttle-replacement Orion's parachute re-entry system. Based on the same system used for Apollo, the group of eight parachutes deploys after re-entry, ensuring the Orion capsule glides down back to terra firma for a pillow-soft landing. That's what's supposed to happen, anyway.

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