Interesting Stuff: Late June 2010

I don’t have a lot for you this time around.

The 3QD Prize in Science winners have been announced, but frankly, meh. Previous judges wrote a few words to go with the announcement — for example here is what Stephen Pinker said in 2009 — but Richard Dawkins has chosen not to do this, which makes the prize announcement a lot less interesting than I expected. If you’ve already looked at the finalists, there’s nothing really new here.

There has been some interesting news in astronomy. One recent development concerns the origin of the Oort Cloud, and another concerns an ancient Martian ocean (I like the big dog’s-head peninsula). [Update: the Martian ocean thing has been criticised, but let’s face it, the idea that you can draw a map of such an ocean is most alluring.]

In other science, Ed Yong published an interesting article about a battle between two viruses.