To take my mind off of the litany of ills that beset humanity right now, I look to the stars. Here are some juicy astronomical tidbits to help you through trying times.
One big mystery right now is the giant hexagon on Saturn's north pole. From Wikipedia:
The pattern's origin is a matter of much speculation. Most astronomers seem to think some sort of standing-wave pattern in the atmosphere; but the hexagon might be a novel sort of aurora. Polygon shapes have been replicated in spinning buckets of fluid in a laboratory
If Saturn is too parochial for you, recently astronomers were able to "observe" a planet outside our solar system. According to the article on the BBC website:
Advances in optics and image processing have allowed astronomers to effectively subtract the bright light from stars, leaving behind light from the planets. That light can either come in the infrared, caused by the planets' heat, or be reflected starlight.
And if you're wondering where your retirement savings vanished to, you might be interested in reading about the recently observed enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The discovery of far-off celestial objects such as exoplanets and black holes represents science at its best, and gives me a certain amount of hope for humanity. Much the same way that the existence of atoms was inferred from Brownian motion a quarter of a century before the first electron microscope was built, scientists were able to conclude that black holes existed before they were observed. (Analogously, Alpher and Gamow were able to deduce the Big Bang model a good thirty years before it was "observed").
I could go on, but I won't. The universe is a pretty @#$%ing amazing place, and while I'd describe myself as an atheist, I have to confess that things like this sometimes do shake my non-faith. I can hardly do better than to conclude with the last verse of one of my favorite ditties from Monty Python:
The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on earth