A science fiction buff since a youngster reading Superman (only a few short years after the comic's creation) I still love Science Fiction and Fantasy today. I'd probably be a hard-core gamer if I had more than a GameCube, but thankfully writing keeps me from that.

Which leads me to the topic of this missal; I scan the science news as much as I can because what I see in development in science predicates what is coming around the bend. When the first science fiction authors hit the typewriters back in the forties, they came up with all kinds of neat stuff.

They wrote about atom bombs, geosynchronous orbits for satellites, small mobile hand held communication devices and were even investigated by a younger version of the National Security agency on how they knew about the a-bomb (it was secretly being constructed) in the first place. Quite frankly, science fiction becomes science fact. So I like to see what's happening in science that will change our world.

On that bent, a NASA orbiter just sent back pictures of an avalanche on Mars. Taken on February 19, 2008 by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, the robotic orbiter sent back pictures of the debris fall from several avalanches.

While the pictures are falsely colored for the purpose of seeing them, I find them fascinating, not only for what we will discover about them, but for the deeper meaning of it all.

As you know ice is nothing more than frozen water, H₂O. One molecule of water is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Oxygen - now there's a key word.

Where there's ice, there's water and where there's water - there is air. We currently have the technology to pull air from water. Submarines use this technology. They use systems that generate oxygen from water by chemically separating oxygen from hydrogen by performing electrolysis.

I wouldn't be booking your trip just yet, but I know that my grandchildren 12, 10 and 4 will be able to!

And on that note, remember that what you think about comes about!