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Thanks from Orbit

NASA has sent a brief statement which it says was written by astronaut Dan Tani, who is on board the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 210 miles. Tani's mother, Rose, was killed in an auto...

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December 21, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (22)

Would You Want to Know?

Dan Tani may feel like the loneliest man in the solar system right now. He's the astronaut, now orbiting on the space station, whose mother died in an auto accident near Chicago Wednesday. His wife and a flight surgeon got...

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December 20, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

Save the Shuttles!

For years now, the conventional wisdom about the nation's space shuttles has been that while they were magnificent, multipurpose ships, they were too complicated for their own good. They also ate up something like $4 billion a year, even if...

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December 18, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (24)

Guitar Anti-Hero III

In case you've not heard of "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock," stop the nearest teenage guy--but make sure you have a half hour so you can listen to him rave about how cool it is. It's a video game--selling...

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December 17, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (46)

Godzone Blankie

A hazard of the approaching new year is that dictionaries come out with their lists of new words for 2007, the truthiness of which is sometimes, er, thank you, Stephen Colbert. The Oxford English Dictionary tries to be a bit...

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December 14, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

'Tranquility Base Here, the Altair has Landed'

The winning name for NASA's new lunar lander is...Altair. The agency confirms it. This is the four-legged landing ship that would land astronauts on the lunar surface, starting, the agency hopes, in about a decade, as part of President Bush's...

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December 13, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (10)

Oil From Space

South Korean crews are having a tough time with the 2.7 million gallons of oil that spilled from a supertanker last week. The PICTURES, if you haven't seen them, show a mix of filth, despair, and damage that scientists say...

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December 13, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (9)

Glow-in-the-Dark Cats

Please click on the picture to the left and bask in its warm (or cool) glow while you read the rest. We're not entirely sure what to make of this story, but a team in South Korea says it has...

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December 12, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (36)

Memos Show NASA Managers Debated Astronauts' Safety

This weekend's shuttle scrub over those balky ECO sensors may seem arcane, but internal NASA e-mails show that NASA managers "struggled with the potential risk to astronauts' lives" in deciding what to do about them. Today, NASA's working on a...

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December 11, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

After Comments on Africans, James Watson's Own Genes Found 16% African

James Watson has long been a renegade. Watson, who shared a Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, made quite a mess back in October when he was quoted in the Times of London talking about the intelligence of many...

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December 10, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (31)