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The golden age of the American space program was all about beating Russia to important milestones. There's no longer that sense of competition based around our efforts in space. That's good, because we're about to get crushed. Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian government is putting $52 billion dollars into its space program and giving the program its own ministry. If you're curious, NASA's proposed budget for 2014 is only $17.7 billion.

The opening sequence to The Daily Show features a series of spinning globes, but there's a problem -- the globes in the opening are spinning the wrong way. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson called them on that fact, so for his appearance on the show last night, the graphics department "fixed" the opening of the show.

The particle discovered last year is largely believed to be the Higgs boson, but it seems like nobody wants to be the one to officially name it that for fear of being wrong, but this week physicists presented new evidence at the Rencontres de Moriond derived from data taken from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN that said the new particle discovered looks more like the Higgs boson than it did before, and they're one step closer to calling it.

As a popular astrophysicist and television personality, people turn to Neil deGrasse Tyson for facts about a wide range of topics. He fields a fair number of space-related questions, but Tyson is a great and wise man who knows many things beyond the realm of outer space. Yesterday, Christmas Eve, Tyson took his Twitter to teach his more than 900,000 followers a little about Santa Claus.

On Sunday morning, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted a picture of his milk carton which is set to expire on December 21, 2012. That's the same date that the Mayan calendar supposedly predicts the end of the world, but it's also over a month away. That's some strange, and long-lasting, milk.

Everybody loves Neil DeGrasse Tyson. So it's no surprise that when DC Comics decided that Superman would try to find Krypton in the night sky in an upcoming issue of ACTION COMICS, they thought Mr. Tyson should be the person to help the Man of Steel. (In such a vulnerable moment, it's important to have support from a friend, right?) What DC wasn't banking on, I'd wager, was how involved Mr. Tyson would become once he agreed to let them use his likeness: Tyson worked with the writers to find a real star that could serve as a plausible location for Krypton's sun based on the relatively fuzzy criteria about the planet's location.

At SDCC's annual Starship Smackdown, the final decision as to the best fictional starship came down to what is perhaps the toughest choice a nerd has to make: Star Trek's USS Enterprise NCC-1701 or the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A. That's, the spaceship from the Original Series versus the "refit" from the original movies. Thankfully, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was on hand to settle the dispute. See the video, after the break.

Everyone knows that sci-fi movies are going to fudge their science a bit, otherwise they wouldn't be sci-fi. That said, some fudges are just mistakes and they can be glaring if you know your stuff. Acclaimed astrophysicist and meme Neil deGrasse Tyson -- the man who called out Titanic for having "the wrong sky" -- is still out there doing what he does best: Busting chops. This time, he's got Prometheus in the sights.

When you manage to get Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson for an interview, there are plenty of directions you can take things. You could ask him about how excited he is to be the host of the upcoming reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. You could ask him his thoughts on the Onion and the Pulitzer Prize. Or, you could ask him what it's like to be a meme. That's what Joshua Topolsky did on a recent taping of On The Verge. Tyson's take on the whole thing? "It's a little weird and creepy, but I'm OK with it." Watch out, we've got a pretty chill astrophysicist over here!

Fox has given the greenlight for a reboot of Carl Sagan's iconic TV series Cosmos, to be hosted by famous and well-respected astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. The show will be produced by none other than Seth MacFarlane. Yes, Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy will be the mind behind a 13-part docu-series to air in primetime as a successor to Sagan's original Emmy and Peabody Award winning series. For Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey, MacFarlane will be working with Sagan's original collaborators from the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series that ran on PBS in 1980. These collaborators include Sagan's widow writer and producer Ann Druyan, and astrophysicist Steven Soter. The National Geographic Channel will co-produce Cosmos and will air a same-night encore of the episodes after they air on Fox. The program is expected to air in 2013, which is around the same time that Fox plans to launch MacFarlane's take on the Hanna-Barbera classic, The Flintstones.

Famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has come out with a video in support of The Onion news network. Tyson is particularly proud of the way The Onion handled that whole Pluto debacle, and feels the publication deserves the highest honor in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize. Of course, Tyson's video is as much a parody as The Onion itself.

(via Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Do we need to say more? Okay, they talk about science for more than an hour. And answer questions. You may not have an hour to spare, but we highly recommend putting this one while you do something else and just listening. For science! (via Geeks are Sexy.)

Stephen Hawking was quoted last week on the possibility of alien life in the universe:

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.

This Tuesday, CNN had Neil Degrasse Tyson on, to weigh in on Hawking's bold pronouncement. Professor Tyson's responses are befitting of an arguable spiritual successor to Carl Sagan.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and one of the Daily Show's favorite people (judging by the number of times he has been interviewed on the show). He's also one of our most favorite science geeks.

He will be appearing on the show again tonight, most likely to talk about this week's premiere of his NOVA documentary The Pluto Files, chronicling the declassification of Pluto as a planet.

His interviews always remind us to be excited about science. But don't take our word for it. We've embedded his last Daily Show interview after the jump.

For day three of our 150 Greatest Living Geeks series, it's all about madcap inventors, devoted researchers, quirky academics, and tireless practitioners: in a phrase, a Power Grid of 30 astounding science and tech geeks. From the Japanese inventor who triggers inspiration by nearly drowning himself to the lead engineer behind the mobile phone to the provocative astrophysicist who asked why we all care about Pluto so much, there's quite a variety: