For those who like to wander through someone else's picks of the week, here's two can't misses:

Dynamics of Cats has the Space Pick of the Best for the week - Carnival of Space #36

There's been all sorts of strange astronomy news this week, some of which was announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting this past week. In about 20 - 40 million years a giant gas cloud will crash into our galaxy. And the risk of an asteroid vs. Mars collision is dropped to nearly zero. Black holes are in the news: Middleweight Black Holes roam the Galaxy Undetected. No, while this article may sound like a tabloid headline, it comes from New Scientist reporting of the AAS meeting. And they may be an amazing number of planet in the universe if the news in the article Wherever a Planet can form, it will  That's good news for science fiction writers! And the article, Biggest Black Hole in the Universe Discovered just about makes my head explode - is 3.5 million LY away, is part of a binary with a smaller black hole and has a mass equivalent to 18 billion times of our sun (the smaller black hole has a mass of only 100 million suns).  And the strange heat in a distant planet may be due to a collision between it and another planet.

Back to Earth, and things I can wrap my mind around. Other Things Amanzi hosted last week's Online Ground Rounds. He's a doc in South Africa and has beautiful pictures of wildlife to go along with the introductions to the various blogs highlighted this week. The picture of the lionesses drinking at a pond is really beautiful.

This week's Grand Rounds is hosted by Path Talk. Yes, us medical types like to talk about pathology - but also in this week's line up are the usual blogs about medical articles of interest, medicine from medical staff point of view as well as the perceptions of the people receiving care.