I am damn excited about this. Yesterday (Sept. 12, 2013), NASA announced that Voyager 1 has officially left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. The crossover occurred August 25th, but it took this long for NASA to verify the finding, and make the announcement. The crossover occurs when the influence of sun is basically over, and so the probe is experiencing space as it exists between stars.
This is historic. This is the first human made object to enter interstellar space, and what’s even more exciting is that this 36 year old probe is still work, sending back data to Earth. We are actually exploring interstellar space. Below is a link to the NASA announcement.
I can’t express how amazing this is for us as a species. We are explorers, and this is a huge step in our accomplishments as explorers. It’s beyond words.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-277
Okay, what’s up with teens nowadays? Hot on the heels of the home spectrograph, I now find that another teen has been able to achieve nuclear fusion at his home. Using spare parts he bought from eBay, from hardware stores, and from just scrounging around he built his aparatus in his basement and actually achieved nuclear fusion. Nothing dangerous or commercially valuable, but quite an achievement.
This is just a cool story. Mary Masterman is 17 years old and wins the Intel Science Talent Search for building an inexpensive spectrograph, which is a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment. For beating out 1700 other high school seniors in the 66th annual event, she wins a $100,000 scholarship. The design is pretty cool, and you can read more at 
Here’s an image I came across that’s pretty amazing. The New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to Pluto, but recently used Jupiter for a gravity assist along its way. While passing by, it got this amazing photo of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Io is one of the most active places in the solar system, geologically speaking. This picture was taken March 1, 2007, and shows the plume of a volcano that’s approximately 200 miles (330 kilometers) high. Just amazing. You can read more at the