UPDATE

Heeeeello dear English reading-speaking-thinking visitors! How are you? It's been a while since our last appearance as manifestations of funny and accurate science tales! "Why?" you're asking yourselves (or not, maybe you're just here as the unfortunate consequence of a spasm of your fingers due to the extremely abundant dose of caffeine you drank this morning from a ginseng-coated mug to overcome a massive Friday/Saturday night/s hangover/s)? Weeell, we could say we've been very busy lately, or that we were on the run 'cause a mysterious force that called itself "Gnagnamantus Krosfazt" and looked exactly like a Barbary ape in pink shorts with a questionable taste for vests has been chasing us for months while screaming "I'm gonna catch y'all and bake your virtual asses!" for apparently no reasons but an irrepressible acid reflux induced delirium, oooor that a giant squid broke into our url and ate all the candy so we have been so sad ever since that we couldn't even remotely think to fight our collective lack of brains once again and try to render a science paper into a post/podcast episode...
But it's just that we're lazy.
Ciaz!
SM & the gang


PS
Gnagnamantus Krosfazt and the giant squid now are engaged and happily live in a cozy hyper-looped dimension of the third universe on the left of this multiverse of yours (and maybe ours). Just to give you some gossip... Ok, ok, it's not science, but it's something anyway, no? No? No eh?! Right, lame try...

HAPPY B-DAY LEMAITRE!

Happy B-day Father Georges! (by @sciencemug)

Lemaitre's pic is a Public Domain img adapted by @sciencemug

(Source Wikimedia Commons)]

Happy birthday to Georges Henri-Joseph-Edouard Lemaître (aka Abbé Lemaître, since, after serving, as a volunteer, in the belgian artillery during the 1st World War and gaining a Military Cross, the man enters the seminary and becomes a priest), dad of the Big-Bang Theory (the 1927 science stuff*, not the 2007-still-on-air tv-show stuff... C'mon dude!)

By the way, do you know that the term "Big-Bang" comes up as a mockery of Lemaitre's theory in a 1950 radio broadcast? Yup, English astronomy dude Sir. Fred Hoyle (who is all into the concept of a static homogeneous universe that never started and will never end) that year does a thing where he explains science to common people. The thing is a series of five lectures, by Hoyle himself, about stars and the universe. The lectures air on the Third Programme (the present Radio 3) of the English BBC network, aaaand during the last of these radio lessons, well, our guy Hoyle spits his "Big-Bang"ing disdain on his colleague's cosmological idea... Sic!


* See "Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques" published in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles in 1927.

16 JANUARY 1969: SOYUZ 4 FRENCH KISSES SOYUZ 5

Soyuz 4 docks onto Soyuz 5 (by @sciencemug)

[Pictures of the soviet cosmonauts are adapted by @sciencemug from a Public Doamin image; Earth pic is a Public Domain one. (Source Wikimedia Commons)]

 Here you can have a better look of the two docked spaceships:

Soyuz 4 docks onto Soyuz 5

In blue, the path of the two cosmonauts, the red circles indicate the handrails the cosmonauts grasp to make their space stroll.

So, on this day, January the 16th, of 1969, just a few months before the US bring their men to/on the Moon, the former Soviet Union (aka USSR, aka CCCP) gets to be the first to dock two manned spaceships and to transfer crew members (Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov) from one (Soyuz 5, which commander is Boris Volynov) to the other one (Souyuz 4, which commander and only -before the docking- crew member, is  Vladimir Shatalov).

In other words, two soviet spaceships make out and, after the french kiss, one gets two humans (well, I guess two humans are better than mononucleosis...)