Things change so quickly these days that backlashes to Next Big Thing occur before most of us even know about the Thing. I’m going to call them frontlashes.

Here’s one: Hypermilers fear a backlash as wannabies latch on to their most dangerous techniques such as drafting.

Huh?

Hypermilers are, as I learned today, people who try to squeeze every mile out of a gallon of gas. There are the sensible tricks: driving slower; coming off stop lights without laying rubber; and keeping your engine fit as a fiddle. Then there’s rolling through stop signs, driving way too slow, and drafting like Kyle Busch.

The classic hypermilers are worried that idiots picking up on their tactics (at sites like leanmpg.com, hypermiling.com and hypermilers.com) will take the dangerous ones to extreme, giving all hypermilers a bad name. “Now that the general public keeps hearing this falsehood that hypermiling is all about drafting, a lot of idiots are going to start trying it — and we’re going to get the blame.” Well, sure, now that we’ve exposed the frontlash, the backlash should go into high gear. I’m going to look for some of these idiots this afternoon when I hit the road, in fact.

I suspect the rapidly changing economy in America will set up all kinds of frontlashes (I don’t expect the term to catch on, however).

Another example: Hypermiling is to me today what stripping was a few weeks back. We learned of a backlash among local real estate agents to stripping, which we then learned is rampant in our town. People who are peeved that they’re losing their homes to foreclosure are taking everything with them, leaving the houses largely unsaleable. The backlash gained steam last week when a guy in Pennsylvania went to jail for stripping a $1.2 million home of everything AND the kitchen sink.

Stealing corpses is apparently old school. A new wave of cemetery thefts around the country, driven by the scrap value of bronze markers and flower vases, has prompted some lawmakers to stiffen penalties.

From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“In March, the Madison County Sheriff’s Department arrested three people for stealing 40 vases from two Metro East cemeteries. The owner of a Granite City scrap recycling center turned them in. … The scrap value of a bronze vase is about $10, according to cemetery operators; the replacement price often tops $300.”

Similar thefts have been reported in numerous locales this month, including Kansas City, Sweet Home, Oregon, and a spree in Cook County, Illinois that affected nearly 1,500 families.

Grave-digging isn’t always about cash. In Texas, a trio apparently dug up a corpse earlier this year only to smoke pot out of the skull. And as a total aside, scientists earlier this year announced advancements in sniffing out corpses to speed up the process of finding graves.

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Forget Maui, get hitched in space! That’s the message of one Japanese firm that is teaming up with an American private spaceflight group to offer suborbital weddings for just over $2 million a pop.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., are apparently planning to host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen), according to media reports and both firms’ Japanese Web sites.

An illustration advertising space weddings from Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: First Advantage/Rocketplane Global/http://www.spacewedding.jp.

A translation of First Advantage’s Space Wedding site suggests a four-day training regime that would culminate in a wedding ceremony that would start on the ground and be completed during a one-hour flight into suborbital space about 60 miles (100 km) above Earth, according to the AFP news service.

An artist’s illustration advertising space weddings by Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: （C）2008 eraliy/Misuzu Onuki/Rocketplane Global, Japan.

Such a ceremony could include a space wedding photo album, marriage certificate, as well as the capability to broadcast the cosmic union live in some way, read First Advantage’s site. Apparently, the couple could take up to three guests – assumedly a priest and two witnesses – along for the near-space nuptials, reported Russia’s RIA Novosti, adding that the first flight could be in 2011.

According to the AFP, First Advantage spokesperson Taro Katsura said his firm expects the main customers for its space weddings to come from China or the Arab gulf region.

This is a good point to note, by the way, that there is a precedent for space weddings. In 2003, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko wed his bride - then Ekaterina Dmitriev - while flying 240 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. His wife, of course, was on Earth with the rest of the wedding party next to a cardboard cutout of her groom.

Based in Oklahoma City, Okla., Rocketplane Global is developing the XP Spaceplane for private suborbital spaceflights. The four-seat spaceship is slated to be about the size of a fighter jet and designed to carry two jet engines and a rocket engine to reach space.

Initially, the spacecraft is expected to fly missions based out of the Oklahoma Spaceport and give passengers about four minutes of weightlessness during their short trip. Basic space tourism seats, not a full-up space wedding charter, carried ticket prices ranging from the base $200,000 to $250,000 for a premium view up front with the pilot, Rocketplane officials have said.

So that’s the lowdown on Rocketplane Global and Japan’s First Advantage space weddings of the future. If you’re counting down, another space tourism firm – Virgin Galactic – will roll out the WhiteKnightTwo mothership of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceliners on July 28.

The only problem I can think is: once you get married in space, where do you go for a honeymoon?

You know, Space Adventures in Virginia is offering $100 million trips around the moon aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. So, there’s an idea.

• Video: Rocketplane’s XP Spaceplane
• Future of Flight: Space Tourism, Investment and Technology
• Video: SpaceShipTwo Revealed

More space wedding information: http://spacewedding.jp/ (in Japanese)

More Rocketplane Global, Japan info: http://rocketplane.jp/index.html (in Japanese)

The country that brings you bullfighting is expected to pass a law that will guarantee Apes Rights.

In Spain, if the resolution passes, it’ll be illegal to experiment on apes or use them in circuses, commercials or movies.

“This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity,” said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

I have no idea exactly what the above quote means.

Separately, our Jeanna Bryner reported last month, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France has been asked to grant human rights to Matthew, a 26-year-old chimp. Not just any ol’ rights, but human rights. Hmm. Matthew does look like he’s pondering all this..

Call it NASA’s X files if you must, but investigative reporter, Leslie Kean, is hot on the trail of what in the world (or out of it) took place in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in December 1965.

It took the winning of a lawsuit against NASA in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, but now the investigator has her hands on a load of files that may — or may not — offer new clues about the Kecksburg incident.

For years, Kean has been seeking documents about the purported crash of an unknown object in that locale over forty years ago. Witnesses described seeing a fireball in the evening sky, some sort of a controlled landing, followed by a military recovery of a spacecraft-like object. As reported by local radio and newspapers, U.S. military personnel cordoned off the area, investigated the site, and left without ever providing a full report of the incident - other than to dismiss is as a meteor.

Since the settlement of the lawsuit in October, Kean has been following the steps laid out in the settlement agreement. Both sides needed extensions at various times due to the volume of work selecting which files to pull, and then for NASA to conduct the search, the investigative journalist explained to me.

Helping to open this case, Kean has been working with the Coalition for Freedom of Information.

In her on-going research campaign, Kean culled through 689 detailed pages of file-inventory lists.

The documents just arrived over last weekend, Kean told me, “so I haven’t yet had a chance to go through them…and don’t yet know what I’ll find.”

NASA searched 297 boxes of files, Kean said via email. A sampling of a few of the more interesting files from these boxes, which she requested — and which could shed light on one or more of the many facets of the Kecksburg event — gives a flavor of what the files contain.

The data haul includes files on Navy and NASA Recovery Operations - Trajectory and Orbits Panel; Russian Vehicle and Launch - 1962-1965; Department of Defense (DOD)-NASA relationships; Recovery Sites - NASA/DOD FY 65 Facilities; and a series of files on orbital debris and fragments.

“Even if not specific to Kecksburg, they will very likely inform us about interesting aspects of NASA’s space program related to the retrieval of unidentified objects during this time period,” Kean said.

Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide may flying in space, but his orbital menu can be found right here on Earth.

Hoshide took packages of curry noodles, veggie pancakes and skewered chicken as part of his daily menu aboard the shuttle Discovery and International Space Station. To give us an idea of his food, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency passed some out to the press pool here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Everybody likes the noodles,” JAXA spokesperson Kumiko Tanabe told me as we chowed down.

JAXA’s three dishes for Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide’s menu during the June 2008 flight of Discovery’s STS-124 mission. Credit: SPACE.com/T. Malik.

The food is provided by Nissin Food Products, Co., Ltd., in Japan under a collaboration with JAXA and its astronauts. Some of them also flew in March with Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, Tanabe said.

Each of the different meals come dehydrated, and need to be pumped up with hot water for about five minutes.

The Space Noodles come with a drippy curry sauce, while the Space Negima, the skewered chicken, comes complete with green onions and sauce. There’s also Space Okonomi, a sort of vegetable pancake soaked in a sweet fruit-based sauce.

Asking around, the Space Noodles were in fact a hit, especially among the Japanese reporters. Some of the space center folks, though, enjoyed the chicken most all. This space reporter, however, confesses that the Space Okonomi was the tastiest.

Versions of JAXA’s current food selection, plus others like green tea drinks and salmon rice balls, will accompany Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata when he launches to the station as Japan’s first long-duration astronaut next year during the Expedition 18 mission.

Click here for SPACE.com’s ongoing coverage of NASA’s STS-124 mission to deliver Japan’s $1 billion Kibo laboratory and NASA astroanut Greg Chamitoff to the International Space Station.

Click here for more images of JAXA’s Japanese space food.

And in case you want to see what eating space food on Earth looks like…

JAXA’s Space Negima in action. Credit: Robert Pearlman/collectSPACE.com.

He may be made of plastic and just 12 inches tall, but Disney’s Buzz Lightyear is really flying in space.

Buzz, a space ranger from the animated 1995 film “Toy Story,” launched to the International Space Station (ISS) last week aboard NASA’s shuttle Discovery as part of an educational campaign to encourage interest in science and math among schoolchildren. He’ll stay aboard the station for about six months alongside NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff.

Disney’s Buzz Lightyear takes a tour of the International Space Station in video beamed to Earth on June 5, 2008. Credit: NASA TV.

“Buzz! Welcome to dinner!” said astronaut Mike Fossum, a real flesh-and-blood spaceflyer, late Thursday as Buzz made an appearance in the space station’s Russian-built Zvezda service module where the 10-person crew of the shuttle Discovery and ISS gathered for a joint meal.

“Feed him some borscht,” joked shuttle commander Mark Kelly, who referred to Buzz earlier in the evening as the”green payload.”

Shuttle astronaut Mike Fossum (center) holds a 12-inch-tall Buzz Lightyear toy from Disney during a June 5, 2008 dinner aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA TV.

In video beamed down from Discovery, astronauts were shown playing with Buzz, popping out his extendable wings and giving him a weightless tour of the space station, where shuttle spaceflyers have delivered a new tour bus-sized Japanese laboratory called Kibo.

Buzz’s appearance in orbit is part of a joint project between Disney and NASA to develop the “Space Ranger Education Series” of educational games for students and materials for educators that can be downloaded and used in the classroom. It is also part of NASA’s ongoing Toys in Space program. You can see a video of Buzz on the station here.

Click here to see a video preview of the Space Ranger Education Series games.

In Texas, three pot smokers have taken grave digging to a new low.

Two men and a juvenile were said to dig up a corpse, decapitate it and make a bong of the head, reports the Houston Chronicle. One can only assume they were well into the brownies before grabbing their shovels.

We humans really do have an obsession with death. Offbeat post-life practices range from letting the vultures eat us to “plastination” for display. Add this new one we learned of today: dissolving a corpse with lye.

This New Scientist article has an interesting list of the books that have inspired some of the world’s most well-known scientists, such as Jane Goodall and Michio Kaku. Click on any scientist in the list and it goes to an explanation of why they found the book they picked so inspirational.

You can even add your story of literary inspiration in the comments.  I think I’d have to say that Carl Sagan’s “Contact” would have to be my pick. I devoured it in high school and was hooked on astronomy from that point on. It may be fiction, but it’s such an interesting portrayal of what might happen if we really did make contact with alien beings. (Sagan’s other, non-fiction, works are equally as fascinating.)

We’ve done some of our own polling of scientists at LiveScience, most notably with our “Greatest Mysteries” series, where we asked a bunch of scientists what they thought the greatest mystery in science was. We got answers from “How did the universe begin?” to “How many species are on Earth?”

If you’re heading out to the movie theater this weekend, I wouldn’t recommend spending your money on “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the latest attempt by the intelligent design movement to infiltrate science classrooms and labs with a decidedly unscientific idea.

The movie bills itself as a documentary, though as the New York Times review quite aptly put it, the film is more like “a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.”

LiveScience staff writer Dave Mosher covered a press screening of the movie and mentioned some of the “highlights” of the piece, as well as some of the parts that scientists have found most egregious. (Our Bad Science columnist, Benjamin Radford, also weighed in.)

I attended the same screening, and while my expectations weren’t high to begin with, the film didn’t even succeed in meeting them.

The basic premise of the movie is that unwillingness of scientists to consider intelligent design as an equally scientific alternative to evolution is an assault on free speech and evidence that the “scientific establishment” is trying to suppress ideas like the communists in East Germany or the Nazis (I wish I were kidding). Ben Stein and the movie’s producers, as they would have it, are just fighting the man.

Their evidence for this notion is a parade of scientists (and one journalist) who were supposedly fired from their jobs for even daring to mention intelligent design. Scientific American’s editor-in-chief John Rennie mentions that these examples are all less-than-complete pictures of the truth in his review of the movie, (as does the National Center for Science Education at the their Web site, www.expelledexposed.com). One glaring example is the movie’s martyr, Richard Sternberg, who says he was fired from his job at the Smithsonian after publishing an article on intelligent design in the journal he was editing. What they don’t say is that Sternberg wasn’t an employee, rather he was an unpaid research assistant. And one of the main objects to the piece was that Sternberg reviewed it, which isn’t really kosher within the peer-review process.

Possibly the most tacky and shameful part of the movie is its attempt to link Darwinism (as they insist on calling the broader idea of evolution) to the Holocaust. Seriously. They do this by blatantly ignoring the distinction between social Darwinism and evolution as applied to speciation and some strategic misquoting of Darwin himself, as Rennie and Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky point out in their excellent “Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…”

After this unbelievably intellectually dishonest exercise, what stood out to me was the utter lack of science in a movie purportedly about the oppression of a “scientific” idea. I kept waiting and waiting for an explanation of either evolution or intelligent design, but the movie made only the lamest attempt at defining either idea. Instead viewers are treated to a rapid succession of black-and-white clips of Nikita Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall being torn down, and Ben Stein walking around Seattle looking for the Discovery Institute (the ideological center of the ID movement), while muttering, “We’re sooo lost.” I’ll say.

We’ve explained the ideas in modern evolutionary theory (and the premise of intelligent design) on our site. For an explanation of evolution (and some of the varying ideas about it), you can read this article or this one. For a discussion of intelligent design, check out this piece.

In particular, the movie equates current evolutionary theory with Darwin’s original work, calling it not evolution, but Darwinism. The term is outdated at best, intentionally inflammatory at worst. As Rennie points out in his piece, “in modern biology almost no one relies solely on Darwin’s original ideas.” The science has advanced a little since then …

I could really go on and on, but frankly I don’t think this movie is worth it. Instead, you can check out Richard Dawkins’ review and biologist and blogger PZ Myers’ take on the film (both were interviewed for the movie, though under what they say were false pretenses).