Remember when we reported that NASA was planning on releasing an educational Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG)? After NASA revealed the details of the licensing agreement, there was some confusion on how the developers were supposed to make money on the venture. Well, this has all been clarified as of late, so check out the full article for more information.

Even celebrities make mistakes, apparently. A report written by Sense About Science talks about the many factual errors celebrities and artists have made during the past year while endorsing products of a scientific nature.

For more information, check out the full article!

There's a famous quote said by the folks at Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, and that's "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Well, Hollywood's been doing that for years, and someone at Neatorama's compiled a short list of real physical effects that have been rejected by Hollywood and substituted with something meant for effect.

There are a couple of notable ones, though. The one about shotgun blasts and karate kicks causing people to fly away isn't possible, for example, because every action should have an equal and opposite reaction; therefore, if you kick someone in the face, they'll only fly back as far away as you get thrown back by the awesomeness of your kick.

There's also the one about exploding artillery shells. In that case, artillery shells don't simply blow upwards: they scatter shrapnel all around. The only reason why people in movies survive artillery fire is because the explosions are set below ground, keeping anything that looks like killer metal away from actors' faces.

Oh, and on that final note... No one is really supposed to hear you scream in space. There's no air, remember?

If you ever auditioned for anything and you were rejected because you "lacked the star quality/x-factor" to make it into showbiz, then it may actually mean that you just simply have to be more vain.

Recently, Los Angeles psychologists Mark Young and Drew Pinsky have compiled proof that, yes, celebrities do think that they're better than the rest of us, and that it may just be that which has propelled them into stardom in the first place.

After having conducted a survey among 200 celebrities via Pinsky's radio show, they've come up with the results showing that what makes celebs different would be "their extreme levels of self love and their compulsive need for public attention".

According to the survey, dubbed as "Narcissism Personality Inventory", celebrity women tend to be "far more narcissistic than men and up to a third are more manipulative and vain about their appearance than the typical woman in the street", that they do believe that they deserve the compliments that they get, and that they do insist on being respected at all times.

However, he does point out that several of Hollywood's "fast set" such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears may be digging themselves into trouble. To quote:

They are going further and further. One of these Hollywood party girls is going to be dead in five years' time.

We are seeing a new type of celebrity who is famous just for being famous, without a foundation of skills, and this puts the pressure on them to perform ever more outrageously to feed their need for attention.

On the other hand, they have also pointed out that there is also a marked difference between various types of celebrities, since "the more real-life skills they have, such as musicians, the less narcissistic they are".

So. How about those guitar lessons?

Aside from the eighth grade social studies student who thought "Seti" was an ancient Egyptian deity, many people have strange ideas about just what the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence actually is, or what it does.

Some folks think its a "National Agency." This was promulgated by  a line in the movie Starman, in which a government official flashes a badge and announces "I'm from SETI."  Never let it be said that Hollywood lets facts stand in the way of a good movie.

The reality is that SETI is a field of research, carried on by a group of 30 scientists from several different countries. There is a SETI Institute - but no "National SETI Agency."

Another misconception is the idea that this is the primary purpose of radio telescopes. In fact, while SETI does make occasional use of these, these radio arrays spend 95% of the time observing quasars and other celestial phenomena.

The third misconception has to do with the length of time that SETI has been on the job. A common argument by politicians (not the best nor the brightest of people) wielding budget axes runs like this: "SETI has been listening for nearly fifty years and hasn’t discovered ET, so SETI is a failure."

As with many other issues, politicians making this statement demonstrate their ignorance about what SETI is and how it actually works. While SETI actually did go on-line in 1960, the search for alien intelligence has not been continuous over intervening decades. In fact, during the first twenty years, the twenty-three targeted SETI projects comprised a total of three months of actual search time.

It should also be noted that a "radio telescope" is not like your AM/FM Radio. It is an extremely precision, directionally-sensitive instrument, searching one ten-millionth of the sky at any given time, and over a very limited spectrum, running from 1GHz to 10 GHz containing about nine billion channels. Each sky position requires at least 90 observations to cover all of that "real estate."

One last point: not all SETI projects are given equal priority. To date, only two SETI projects have done any significant searching at all. (It's a big universe out there....)