First Ladies Are Just Like Us of the Day: Associated Press Assistant Chief of Bureau for photos J. David Ake says:

Attention shoppers!

First Lady Michelle Obama has said in the past she likes to go shopping incognito. AP photographer Charles Dharapak found her doing just that in a suburban Washington retailer today wearing sunglasses and a ball cap.

[paid2see / @annaholmes.]

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Neil Armstrong NASA Criticism of the Day: Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, thinks NASA’s decision to end the Space Shuttle Program and rely on Russian Soyuz rockets for transport to and from the Internation Space Station is “embarrassing.”

Addressing the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology on Thursday, Armstrong said:

We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future.

For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable.

Armstrong was part of a four-member panel that urged NASA to return Americans to the moon and the ISS. Along with fellow astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, he argued that the U.S. has lost its lead over Russia in the space race, and it may now be “impossible to regain.”

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Unintended Facebook Feature of the Day: Facebook’s new Timeline view shows the significant things you’ve put on Facebook over the years, but, as it turns out, that’s not all it shows: Timeline can also be used to figure out who has defriended you on the ‘book.

People who have gained early access to Timeline by signing up as developers have noticed that it includes a list of the new friends you made each year. By going down that list and looking for the “Add Friend” button next to people’s names, you can see which of those friends you’ve lost along the way.

There’s no possible way this “feature” will cause any unnecessary drama.

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Protein-Folding Gamers of the Day: Gamers have helped decipher the structure of a monomeric protease enzyme, found in retroviruses like HIV, by playing an online game called Foldit.

Foldit, created in 2008 by the University of Washington, asks players in competing groups to unfold chains of amino acids using in-game tools. In this case, those virtual amino acids corresponded to a real-life enzyme that scientists had been trying to decipher for a decade. The gamers created a model in just three weeks.

A new paper based on the Foldit findings lists players as co-authors, and says the discovery “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.”

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Astronomy Photo of the Day: Photographer Anton Jankovoy captured this stellar shot of the Milky Way in the skies over the Annapurna section of the Himalayas — a massif with a peak elevation of over 8,000 meters.

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Facebook Timeline Trick of the Day: Facebook’s fancy new Timeline profile view, unveiled today at the f8 developer conference, isn’t available to the general public yet. If you must have it right now, though, there’s a way to get early access: sign up as a Facebook Open Graph developer.

TechCrunch has posted the messy details of registering as a developer, creating a basic app, and jumping through the other hoops required to get Timeline.

You could just wait until it launches publicly, but this way you can start complaining about Facebook changes before everyone else does.

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Facebook Announcements of the Day: After getting SNL’s Andy Samberg to open for him — just because he could — Mark Zuckerberg got down to business at Facebook’s f8 developer conference and announced several new features.

A new “Timeline” profile view “tells the story of your life” through Facebook photos, events and apps. Media apps (from partners including Hulu, Netflix, Blockbuster, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Rdio) let users watch movies and listen to music from within Facebook. Even the “like” button is getting a makeover.

The new version of Facebook’s Open Graph will replace the one-dimensional “like” with more detailed verbs. Now you can “read” a book, “listen to” a song, and so on. Apps will have the ability to let users do any verb to any noun.

These announcements make the updated News Feed and Ticker everyone’s been complaining about seem like tiny changes.

Check out a video showing off Timeline after the jump.

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Debunked Dinosaur Extinction Hypothesis of the Day: The Baptistina asteroids, suspected of causing the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, may not be guilty after all.

New NASA research shows that the original parent asteroid, Baptistina, split up much too late to cause the extinction. NASA’s NEOWISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) team measured the reflectivity of 120,000 asteroids, including over 1,000 from the Baptisina family, and they now think the asteroid broke up 80 million years ago, not 160 million.

That 80 million year difference places Baptistina’s split at around 15 million years before the dinosaurs died out, which wouldn’t be long enough to “move into a resonance spot … where gravity nudges from Jupiter and Saturn can act like a pinball machine to fling asteroids out of the main belt and into the region near Earth.”

NASA says that “the asteroid family that produced the dinosaur-killing asteroid remains at large,” but the mystery might be solved with more NEOWISE measurements.

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Apple Event News of the Day: AllThingsD says sources have pinned down the date of Apple’s iPhone 5 launch event: Tuesday, October 4. They expect the new phone will be available for purchase “within a few weeks” after it’s announced.

This will be the first product launch for Tim Cook since his appointment as CEO, and he’s “certain” to take charge of the presentation. Of course, he could have help from experienced Apple presenters like head of marketing Phil Schiller, who stood in for Steve Jobs at two keynotes in 2009.

Although there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to back it up, AllThingsD also mentions the tantalizing possibility that Jobs himself will make an appearance at the iPhone 5 event, maybe to deliver one of his famous “one more things.”

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