Who needs planet Earth when we’ve got Mars?? That’s what I’m saying. The Mars Society, a group of scientists who share a goal of colonizing Mars, believes that humans can colonize the red planet in little more than 1000 years, in stark competition with other scientist’s who say it would be 20,000-100,000 years. According to the society, Mars could be colonized in 3 steps, the first of which is occurring now, exploration. Though many human landings would need to take place, the following steps would involve sketchy actions, such as giant mirrors directing the sun to the planet in an attempt to warm it, freeing gasses and eventually creating a global warming type effect. One of the options would be to build several chemical plants on the surface, pumping out 1,000 tons of fluoromethane an hour, which would raise the temperature on the red planet by 50°F over 30 years. See the complete PopSci walkthrough for a complete walkthrough of scenarios for terraforming planet Mars.

Read more: Mars habitable in 1000 years

It’s now 5 minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock, which is maintained by the Board of Directors of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. The clock, which was created in 1947 as a tangible means of communicating how close humanity is to being annihilated, with midnight representing total destruction by nuclear war. The last time the clock moved was in 2002, thanks to the hawkish turn the American government took, stalling disarmament and backing out of the Anti-Ballistic missile Treaty, effectively granting permission to the rest of the world to being stockpiling arms. Thanks be to the United States’ horrid leadership over the past 5 years, the board decided to advance the clock by 2 minutes, citing concerns over Iran and North Korea’s nuclear weapon intentions and the rapidly decreasing environmental stability thanks to global warming. In honor of, sit back and enjoy R.E.M.’s epic track, dedicated to just this topic…

Read the Board’s statement after the jump..

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In a new paper published on Sunday and delivered at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society a scientist is stating his theory that two NASA space probes (Vikings) may have found alien microbes on Mars 30 years ago but inadvertently killed them. The theory presented is that Voyager was looking for life forms specific to Earth-life, where salt water is the internal liquid of living cells, rather than hydrogen peroxide, a liquid which could more realistically survive the cold and dry climate of Mars. As the Viking probes performed their experiments on the Mars surface any hydrogen peroxide-based life would have been killed by experiments consisting of water poured onto the planet surface and another which heated the soil to see if something would occur, essentially baking and Martian microbes.

Read more: Scientist: NASA found life on Mars — then killed it

So you want to piss off your friends or shut up the loud yapper next to you on the subway? Well, get your Radio Shack catalog out of the bathroom and your soldering iron warmed up and ready to go. The wonderfully hacky Ladyada has put together a detailed process for creating the Wave Bubble and published it under a Creative Commons license. What is the Wave Bubble you ask? It’s a self-tuning, wide bandwidth portable RF jammer (cell, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc) that fits snugly in your pocket (though I’d recommend you not keep it in there too long). Using an internal lithium-ion battery, you can jam dual band frequencies (like mobile phones) for up to 2 hours within a 20 foot radius, then recharge via a mini-USB connector. If you’re actually skilled enough to take on such a highly technical project, you should still be aware that this technically is against FCC regulations (therefor don’t even think of selling pre-made jammers). Did I mention that you shouldn’t even think of building this?

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Dow (booo) and Popsci have put together a really slick and interactive periodic tables list created using Flash. Users are able to scroll over the various table entries, read short (and sometimes snarky) descriptions of the elements and link to even more useful information on the one table you wouldn’t want to eat anything off of.

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Whoa I don’t even know where to start with this. Wayne’s word (not world - duh) is a giant, giant collection of texts and articles covering natural history, making Wayne’s word one of the largest (if not THE largest) virtual text book. Covering everything from blood types and Crassulacean Acid Metabolism to morse code conversions in JavaScript and the Zigadenus, you can spend hours browsing through all of the online texts and quite possibly write a report or 10 for your kids’ science class.

Read more: Wayne’s word - The online textbook of natural history

Doesn’t get any more self-explanatory than that. Over the decades, kids of all ages wondered what would happen to their toys if they somehow went 2 minutes on high in their GE microwave, some have even given it a try. For those of us that were always stopped by our over-cautious parents before pressing the start button, there’s MicrowaveCam.com. Via MicrowaveCam, a few young at hearts take on the task of nuking pretty much everything you can think of in America’s favorite kitchen appliance, the microwave. From CDs to Easter candy, these people have nuked it all and recorded it for us to see and enjoy, via their custom-built microwave featuring a damn strong camera built-in.

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CERN is close to launching their latest experiment, a 27km-long circular particle accelerator, which will be used to (hopefully) replicate a miniture version of the Big Bang. The experiment will run for over 10 years, with the first useful bits of information being returned within the first year. Don’t worry, the probability of the Earth being destroyed during the experiment is only 10 to the minus 40th power.

Read more: Baby bang experiment has small chance of destroying Earth