Cleaning out the inbox

Time to clean the inbox with a few notes from the sports world and from outside of it.

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture that is simply dazzling and thought provoking.
This shot (Moon added for scale purposes) shows the Andromeda Galaxy (our nearest neighbor) and each tiny speck of light is a star.
The picture is an amalgam of 7,398 single exposures and then processed together to create the one picture.
Read the article for more detail on what you can see,but when you look at the size of the galaxy (slightly larger than our Milky Way) and then consider that there are hundreds of BILLIONS of galaxies,I'll never agree that there is not life somewhere in that vast space.
I just don't see that as a viable possibility......

I'm pretty excited about this upcoming year with planned trips (thank you falling gas prices!) and baseball season,but two things that have me excited as a science geek are the chances to see two dwarf planets up close for the first time.
The Dawn mission is getting closer to Ceres by the day and will go into orbit in March,while New Horizons will zip by Pluto in July.
I love stuff like this and really think that I would have loved a career in planetary science.
Try to stifle your laughter,please!!

Jayson Stark at ESPN looks at the pitchers that signed contracts of seven years and how they performed during their deals.
We discussed the Nationals contract with Max Scherzer earlier this week and expressed concerns about the agreement.
After reading the Stark article,I am even more entrenched in the camp of this being a mistake by Washington over the long term.
However,if Washington wins a title as did two of the teams that signed pitchers to this contract length,I'd bet they would look at it as a good deal....

A horribly ugly shark was dredged up by a trawler in Australia and showed why even though it might be seldomly seen because of scarcity,it's so ugly that few would want to see it!
The Frilled Shark has the body similar to an eel and the teeth of a shark-as in 300 teeth over 25 rows!
The shark is usually blind and is rarely caught by fishermen because it usually stays at deeper depths than fishermen fish at with the exception of lower scraping trawlers/
Click the links for more because I'm getting tired of looking at pictures of the thing!!

Grantland writes about the documentary Red Army,which is a film about the powerhouse hockey program of the Soviet Union and talks to the stars of the day.
The film is highly regarded and I cannot wait for it to come out on DVD,so that I can see it.
Three former Devils (Vlacheslav Fetisov,Alexei Kasatonov and Igor Larionov) are in the film and it looks really super........