As a voracious reader, I’m always on the look out for new books. My last literary victim was a fictionalized memoir about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, by a Quebecois journalist who witnessed it all. It’s time for something lighter. Ironic, then, that a book examining obesity and the food chain would catch my eye.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, by Michael Pollan, hits bookstores on April 11th. The question in the title (or title in question?) refers to the overwhelming array of choices today’s Americans are faced with every day, at least three times a day, when they ask themselves “what should I have to eat?” As the answers, and implications, are rarely simple in this food-obsessed society, so too does Pollan avoid the easy socio-cultural explanations for why and how we eat the way we do. Rather, he goes back and examines the intricate network of producers, distributors, and consumers of food in America, using four different meals as examples of its complexity. In unravelling the web, he finds himself inspecting everything from McDonald’s infamous chicken nuggets to a small, uber-organic farm in Virginia.

While this premise might vaguely resemble some other books to hit the scene in recent years, it sounds like Pollan’s approach weighs the scientific and environmental factors influencing our diet more heavily than others have done in the past. Consider this bite released by Amazon:

Pollan has divided The Omnivore’s Dilemma into three parts, one for each of the food chains that sustain us: industrialized food, alternative or “organic” food, and food people obtain by dint of their own hunting, gathering, or gardening. Pollan follows each food chain literally from the ground up to the table, emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the species we depend on.

It sounds like food for thought I’ll be chewing on come April 11th.

Might NASA’s recanting of its decision to kill the Dawn asteroid mission be a forerunner of things to come? The giant budgetary sucking sound of human spaceflight has also crippled astrobiology as well as put off a mission to Europa. Turnabout on these verdicts, too, could well occur.

One project some space scientists pointed to at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston that’s worthy of killing outright is the James Webb Space Telescope – the follow-on to the Hubble. It’s waaaay out of control budget wise – some say in the $2 billion over-budget range.

Meanwhile, getting the Dawn mission on track is welcome news to the mission’s principal investigator, Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Turns out, however, he was one of the last to know as the scientist was in transit to Turkey to see the recent solar eclipse.

“I am very pleased by the granting of our appeal of the cancellation,” Russell told me. “Dawn returns critical data on the formation of the solar system in a most cost effective way. We see no technical obstacles to a successful launch and a successful mission.”

The very first thing the Dawn team wants to do, Russell said, is to test the power propulsion units. “These were the last to be delivered and the stand-down explicitly told us not to perform tests such as these.”

Computers always stink. There was the TRS-80 from Radio Shack. You could write your own Pong game in Basic and save it on a cassette tape! How quickly ! became when you tried to do much more. Later, Macs were far more useful, but they got agonizingly slower with each new release of Freehand. In time, they too stunk. I tried PCs and found endless frustration and virus fear to go with the “not enough” problem; they really stunk.

I’m back to a Mac. It’s pretty good, but it still never knows what I’m thinking. And that’s what I’m waiting for, what we should all expect from computers. A second brain, one that remembers what we can’t, that organizes  projects, saves wild ideas effortlessly, and never has to be searched by the perfect string (or stare up and to the left) to find stored data.

Hope arrived this week in the form of the first serious melding of silicon with synapses. Just think!

Wherever you stand on the issue of illegal immigration and what the U.S. should or shouldn’t do about it, here’s some relief from the rhetoric. The Pew Research Center did a little digging and today published some relevant numbers. So just how many unauthorized people live in the United States?

They number between 11.5 and 12 million.

And where do they come from?

More than three quarters (78%) migrated here from Mexico or some other Latin American country.

That means 22 percent come from somewhere else, of course. That’s a fact you hear little about. But they are mostly men seeking day jobs, right?

Men make up only about half (49%) of the unauthorized population, with women (35%) and children (16%) comprising the rest. … Some 5% of all the jobs in the U.S. civilian in labor force are held by unauthorized immigrants.

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. While officials there averted a full-scale meltdown, the plant did leak some radioactive material into the air. Plant workers were the most affected, with no one outside of the reactor exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.

Frightening, to be sure. But what’s even scarier is just how much that one incident may have affected the public’s attitude towards nuclear energy, which the U.S. government has repeatedly encouraged as an alternative to dwindling fossil fuels . 

In the ten year span leading up to the accident, fifty-four nuclear reactor licenses were commissioned. Fifty were ordered in the nearly thirty years after, with zero permits requested in the past ten.

I don’t claim to be an expert in nuclear science. What I do support is the exploration of any avenue for safe, renewable energy sources and want to know this: did the accident at Three Mile Island unfairly harm nuclear’s chances?

After a lot of hemming and hawing, it looks like space science has a mission to rally around after NASA’s announcement today that its asteroid-visiting Dawn mission is not canceled after all.

The announcement seems a victory of sorts for scientists, at least one of which has confided to me that she felt overlooked in the face of NASA’s human space exploration effort. Of course, that comes after a whole gaggle of researchers publicly expressed their displeasure to NASA at the 37th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, Texas earlier this month.

The balance between NASA’s human space exploration ambitions and its robotic probes has been tipped financially towards the ubiquitous Vision for Space Exploration, which aims at returning humans to the Moon and maybe heading outward to Mars.

The 1.5 percent budget increase for science programs in 2007 pales in comparison to the 30 percent boost for human space exploration programs, but science at least wins out in numbers – totaling $5.33 billion where exploration nets $3.978 billion next year, which admittedly is small comfort since it’s spread out over many more projects.

Granted, Dawn’s 20% cost overrun is nothing to shake a stick at, and taken on its own – without the subsequent data that its technical challenges weren’t insurmountable given the funds available – canceling the mission may have been the more favorable course.

But things worked out for the Dawn mission, which will hopefully follow in the footsteps of its successful Discovery program cousins.

NASA’s Deep Impact probe wowed onlookers last year when it slammed a probe into the comet Tempel 1, and the successful Stardust sample container is already reshaping how researchers view the formation of comets in the solar system. Even Genesis, which plummeted to Earth after its parachute failed to deploy in September 2004, shattering its solar wind-laden collector has churned out some retrievable science.

What will be interesting to see is whether Dawn’s mission will set a precedent leading every scrapped mission to be exhaustedly investigated and double-checked, even if the writing is clearly on the wall of cancellation.

Anybody that’s seen a space shuttle takeoff - well you know it is big and powerful. But take a look at the height of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) atop that shuttle solid rocket booster (SRB) motor.

Word has it that vector control of the SRB is sure to be a challenge. Also, how best to handle high-altitude wind conditions on the CEV/SRB “stick” as it’s termed.   

What to do with the existing shuttle launch pad infrastructure is another issue - scrap it, build on it, or consider a new pad to handle the lengthy stick and a way to insert crew members into the CEV.

The latest viral video gem that has finally made it’s way out onto the net is the oft-talked about but rarely seen 1999 pilot for Heat Vision and Jack.  The 30 minute pilot featured Jack Black as Astronaut Jack Austin (get it?), his wacky talking motorcycle sidekick voiced by Owen Wilson (not a typo) and a number of celebrity cameos including Ben Stiller (who also directed), Christine Taylor, Ron Silver and the incomparable Vincent Shiavelli in his most EVIL role ever.

The series is pure camp, played out almost as an extended gag on his famously cancelled Fox series The Ben Stiller Show.  Jack Black gets his groove on as the ‘World’s Smartest Man’ turned renegade astronaut on the run. 

So deeply rooted in the world of camp tv, you’ll either love it or completely hate it.