President Obama told us that we have no money and Steve Jobs told us how to spend it. The State of the Union address and the announcement and presentation of Apple’s iPad seem to have blotted out the rest of the world’s news this week. But other stuff happened. Really.

Close Encounter with Mars
For the next week or so, Mars will be the closest to Earth it has been for years, making the Red Planet an excellent target for all backyard telescopes right now.

On Wednesday, Mars was only 99 million kilometers away and looked bigger through a telescope than it will have at any time between 2008 and 2014. The planet’s 14-arcsecond diameter will remain essentially unchanged for roughly a week, setting the stage for some good planet-watching. For visual observers, the best display comes today, as the full Moon and Mars converge for a flood-lamp-bright conjunction.

Watch for an unblinking, pumpkin-orange star, even if you don’t have a telescope.

Just don’t expect to see dust kicked up from the planet by the Mars Rover. It will rove no more.

Get Pieces of NASA History for Free (S&H Not Included)
Apparently, NASA has expanded its gift shop to include actual Space Shuttles and their engines.

Under current plans, NASA’s shuttle fleet is expected to retire by fall 2010. After that, there will be no more shuttle launches.

In the meantime, the U.S. space agency is giving away spaceship engines and other things from the soon-to-be discontinued space shuttle program. NASA is also selling its Space Shuttles. Although Discovery has already been promised to the Smithsonian, Atlantis and Endeavour are still up for grabs. The shuttle itself will be free, but whoever gets one will be expected to cough up about $29 million to prepare and transport it.

Other goodies are up on a Web site so that educational institutions like museums and universities can browse through them. A second Web-based screening began this month (the first round ended in November) and includes approximately 2,500 potential artifacts from NASA programs, such as the space shuttle, Hubble Space Telescope, Apollo, Mercury and Gemini.

ICN: 800HSA91700203, Cover Layer Assembly, Extravehicular Mobility Unit Suit, Apollo
Credit: NASA

ICN: 800HSA91700115, Model 1/10th Scale, Gemini
Credit: NASA

Coworkers’ Crazy Antics
Whenever you isolate many different types of people into one workspace, chances are you’ll have some personality clashes and behaviors that come across as inappropriate, or maybe even crazy.

In a new CareerBuilder.com survey, workers shared some of the craziest things their coworkers have done on the job. Among them:

• Eating the cheese off the pizza box at a company meeting.
• Sitting in the next cubicle wearing 3-D glasses with the lenses removed.
• Repeatedly banging a mallet on the table for no apparent reason.
• Former boss drinking out of a baby’s sippy cup during a meeting.

Many business meetings are already uncomfortable, but there’s nothing quite like the boss drinking from a sippy cup to make a meeting that much more awkward.

Breeding Giant Cattle Back from Extinction
A team of Italian scientists hopes to use genetic expertise and selective breeding of modern-day wild cattle to recreate an extinct species called the aurochs, which resembled a giant cow weighing 2,200 pounds and stood 6.5 feet high at the shoulder, the U.K.’s Telegraph reports.

Depicted in cave paintings, the aurochs was declared extinct in the 1600s, although a pair of German zoologists working with the support of the Nazi regime managed to create a smaller variation of the huge bovine in the years leading up to World War II.

“We were able to [analyze] auroch DNA from preserved bone material and create a rough map of its genome that should allow us to breed animals nearly identical to aurochs,” according to the group’s team leader. We’re going to assume he has never seen Jurassic Park.

Barefoot Biology
New research indicates that people who run long distances sans shoes cushion the ground’s impact with their gait. Evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman‘s research shows that barefoot runners, who tend to land on their forefoot, generate less impact shock than runners in sports shoes, who land heel first.

Lieberman was on the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered why pregnant women don’t tip over.

The Harvard professor and his team’s new findings, published in the journal Nature this week, propose that features of the human body such as longer legs, shorter toes and a highly arched foot are linked to long-distance running and enabled early hominins to chase and eventually exhaust prey.

Cheers.