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Study Urges U.S. Return to the Moon
NASA needs to get ready as soon as possible to return to the moon, if for no other reason than to understand how life evolved here on Earth, the National Research Council has urged. Link
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Lensmen Sequels Now Available
Red Jacket Press is pleased to announce new editions of three fully-authorized sequels to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s LENSMEN series: The Dragon Lensman, Lensman From Rigel and Z-Lensman, written by David A. Kyle. Originally published in paperback by Bantam Books in the early 1980s and long since out of print, each book is a complete and…
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World’s First Female Space Tourist Blasts Off
A Russian-made Soyuz rocket left the Russian base in Kazakhstan Monday at 0408 GMT carrying a Soyuz TMA-9 capsule and its three passengers: Iranian-born US citizen and millionaire tourist Anousheh Ansari, NASA’s Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin.Link
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Google Books Promotes Banned Books for Banned Books Week
Google Book Search and the American Library Association have teamed up to offer searchable indices and library links to banned books, in celebration of Banned Books Week (Sept 23-30). Included in the catalog are 1984, Brave New World, Invisible Man, Cats Cradle, and many other titles.Link (via BoingBoing)
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Earthlike Planets May be Common
Earthlike planets covered with deep oceans that could harbor life may be found in as many as a third of solar systems discovered outside of our own, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.Link
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Boldly going… nowhere!
Burn the land and boil the sea, but you can’t bring the sky to James T. In this amusing little nugget in the Daily Mail, William Shatner reveals he turned down an offer by Richard Branson to reach the final frontier aboard Virgin Galactic. His reason: Shatner is scared by the prospect of space travel.…
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Volunteer to be a Mars Explorer
The Mars Society is looking for a few good men (and women) to spend four months holed up in an artificial igloo or tromping around the Canadian Arctic in bulky faux spacesuits. This won’t be an extended vacation, or a reality-TV plotline. For rocket scientist Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, next year’s exercise…
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A Mildly Creepy Use of Biometrics
Rome City Schools in Rome, GA is switching to a scanning system that lets students use their fingerprints to access their lunch money accounts. In the past, students had to punch in a PIN numbers.* Students like it because they don’t have to, y’know, remember a number or anything hard like that. Some parents are…
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A Politician Who Gets It
For those unfamiliar with it, Second Life is an online community rather reminiscent of the virtual world in Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Yesterday former governor of Virginia and undeclared presidential condidate Mark Warner made a whistle stop speech in avatar form there. I’m impressed with this, because it’s the first example I’ve seen of a pol…
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Supernova Caught Exploding
Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA’s Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova. It is the second-closest gamma-ray burst ever detected and the first view of a supernova in the act of exploding, according to the astronomers. Link