Fantastic Voyage of the Astroworms

 I found this amazing sentence sitting inconspicuously near the end of a news story about Iran's nuclear program:

"In a separate development, Iran said it had successfully launched a rocket carrying a mouse, turtle and worms into space for research purposes."

 And then this:

"The launch of the Kavoshgar-3 – which means Explorer-3 in Farsi – came after Iranian state television broadcast images of officials putting the creatures inside a capsule before the rocket took off."

I want to see these images.

Iran Facebook/Twitter Intimidation

This seems to me like a major story. As of now, only the Wall Street Journal seems to have it among the big news outlets, but hopefully we'll learn more as others pick it up.

The idea that a Facebook post or Tweet can have serious, real-world implications is at least dimly understood by most people, but the idea that these acts could, under extraordinary circumstances, involve real courage and physical risk is a little harder to wrap the mind around. As Sister Rosetta said, there are strange things happening every day...