(Southwest Research Institute) New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the moon’s northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute, uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions, making visible the invisible.

The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening Jan. 4 in the skies over the Houston area flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars. Image credit: NASA/Lauren Harnett

Posted by randfish

If you've been following my posts on Linkscape's index, you know that we've been trying to aim for fresher, better and larger indices over the past few months, but have been finding some very tough challenges. It turns out that indexing the web, canonicalizing millions of pages and calculating a link graph with quality metrics is super-hard; who knew?

As part of those efforts, we've been working toward an experimental index that leverages a more search-engine style crawler that crawls fresher pages/sites more often and less fresh stuff less frequently. That index, however, is taking its sweet time (and we're doing a lot of babysitting and monitoring to make sure it's smooth). Our tentative plan is to have that index launched in the next 2 weeks, but we felt that since our last index was at the very end of November, a new one with fresher data was warranted. Hence, last night, we launched an interim index with the following metrics:

• 36,660,519,013 (36 billion) URLs
• 427,626,242 (427 million) Subdomains
• 128,149,029 (128 million) Root Domains
• 387,656,119,262 (387 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.05% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 55.00% of nofollowed links are internal, 45.00% are external
• Rel Canonical – 10.57% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 69.12 links on it (negligible from last index)
  • 57.76 internal links on average
  • 11.36 external links on average

This index is smalller than our last few, but the numbers look reasonably solid and the data's from the first few weeks of December, so it should be helpful to all you link builders and analyzers. Do be aware, though, that this update is likely to only last a couple weeks before we replace it with our new version, for which we have high expectations (but don't want to promise the moon just yet).

Also noteworthy – last night, when the index first launched, we experienced some wackiness with Page and Domain Authority scores. Those should have largely settled down to normalcy now, but if you see anything odd, please let us know.

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• First Of NASA’S Two Grail Spacecraft Enters Orbit Around Moon
  The first of two NASA spacecraft to study the moon in unprecedented detail has entered lunar orbit.

(Geological Society of America) Where on Earth is it like Mars? How were the Apollo astronauts trained to be geologists on the Moon? Are volcanoes on Earth just like the ones on other planets? The exploration of our solar system begins in our own backyard. Discoveries on other planetary bodies cannot always be easily explained. Therefore, geologic sites on this planet are used to better understand the extraterrestrial worlds we explore with humans, robots, and satellites.

(Geological Society of America) Where on Earth is it like Mars? How were the Apollo astronauts trained to be geologists on the Moon? Are volcanoes on Earth just like the ones on other planets? The exploration of our solar system begins in our own backyard. Discoveries on other planetary bodies cannot always be easily explained. Therefore, geologic sites on this planet are used to better understand the extraterrestrial worlds we explore with humans, robots, and satellites.

(Imperial College London) If all the UK’s discarded wrapping paper and Christmas cards were collected and fermented, they could make enough biofuel to run a double-decker bus to the moon and back more than 20 times, according to the researchers behind a new scientific study.

• NASA Awards Historic Green Aviation Prize
  NASA has awarded the largest prize in aviation history, created to inspire the development of more fuel-efficient aircraft and spark the start of a new electric airplane industry.
• NASA Invites Students To Name Moon-Bound Spacecraft
  NASA has a class assignment for U.S. students: help the agency give the twin spacecraft headed to orbit around the moon new names.

• NASA Launches Mission To Study Moon From Crust To Core

(American Geophysical Union) Featured in this release are research papers on the following topics: “Was ocean acidification responsible for history’s greatest extinction?” “Reforesting northern farmland can have a cooling effect,” “Dikes provide insight into early history of Mars,” “Exploring the effects of climate change on carbon stored in northern soil,” “Magnetic field data suggest thin atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Dione,” “Ultraviolet and infrared observations of Saturn’s aurora.”