Is all this space travel worthwhile? Will it really contribute to our civilization or our touchingly naive way of life? Will it even lift our spirits?

I cannot be sure about the first two, as I feel these might be permanently floating somewhere out there. But I have some space-sourced spirit lifting to share.

Japan's Sapporo Breweries, the entity that brings you those large silver tins of beer to complement your rainbow roll, announced this week that it is launching space beer.

According to Reuters, Sapporo "Space Barley", with its cute outer-space sparkling starred label, has been … Read more

First, 2,151 high school students registered to compete. Then 414 regional and semifinalists were chosen. Today, an elite group of just 20 finalists is gathering in New York for the highly prestigious--not to mention high stakes--Siemens Competition in Math, Science, & Technology.

The grand prize, at $100,000, could actually put one of these kids through about half of college, if they don't already have other scholarship offers flooding their mailboxes.

The 20 student presentations are scheduled for live broadcast on Sunday, December 6, at 1 p.m. EST, while the press conference announcing the winners will … Read more

Switzerland's Solar Impulse solar plane has finally taken flight.

The first plane designed to fly day and night without fuel, the Solar Impulse HB-SIA lifted off for the first time on Thursday at 13:11 Swiss time, reported its promoters and co-founders Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. The plane took to the air from its home at Dubendorf Airfield, near Zurich, Switzerland, traveling 1 meter (3.2 feet) off the ground and landing successfully after flying 350 meters (1,148 feet).

The first flight of the Solar Impulse prototype evoked a huge wave of applause from its team, who … Read more

For centuries, humans have looked for signs of diseased tissue and organs by tapping the outside of the body to measure stiffness. Obviously such a method is only so effective, especially when trying to evaluate someone's liver, say, or heart. And more modern biopsies, while highly effective, are invasive procedures that involve removing tissue for examination.

Since 2007, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., have been working with magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), a medical imaging technique developed to non-invasively diagnose and monitor disease.

The device they use, MR-Touch, uses low-frequency sound waves for just 15 seconds at … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Pushing several steps farther in the multicore direction, Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.

The 1.3-billion transistor processor, called Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is successor generation to the 80-core "Polaris" processor that Intel's Tera-scale research project produced in 2007. Unlike that precursor, though, the second-generation model is able to run the standard software of Intel's x86 chips such as its Pentium and Core models.

The cores themselves aren't terribly powerful--more like lower-end Atom processors than Intel's flagship Nehalem models, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said at a press event here. But collectively they pack a lot of power, he said, and Intel has ambitious goals in mind for the overall project.

"The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do," Rattner said. "They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability." … Read more

Osaka, Japan-based Eager Co. is developing recyclable cardboard robots to work as mannequins that show off clothing in retail display spaces.

Eager showed off the female D+ropop mannequins at the recent 2009 International Robot Exhibition (iRex) here in Tokyo. They're billed as the world's most environmentally friendly robots because they're made of corrugated cardboard.

The mannequin bots only have a few servomotors but can still move their arms and heads gracefully. Each weighs about 13 pounds and is nearly 6 feet tall. They can also be painted and printed with logos for other advertising purposes.

The … Read more

A new DARPA contest is using balloons to test our social-networking skills.

After kicking off the Internet 40 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again tapping into the Net for a new challenge. The DARPA Network Challenge will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the sky across the continental United States.

The 8-foot balloons are scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 7 a.m. PST and remain in their locations throughout the day, until sunset. The contest will … Read more

Outgoing space station commander Frank De Winne, cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk strapped into a Russian Soyuz capsule, undocked and fell back to Earth on Tuesday, braving icy weather in Kazakhstan to close out a 188-day stay in space.

Descending under a large orange-and-white parachute, Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft made a rocket-assisted touchdown about 50 miles northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, at 2:15:34 a.m. EST, about three hours and 20 minutes after undocking from the International Space Station.

Recovery forces, including U.S. and Russian flight surgeons, were near the landing site to help the returning … Read more

I can understand why people are so keen to find alien life. It isn't so much a scientific fascination with what might be out there. It's more a pained hope that what is out there might be more enjoyable than what is down here.

So I am wrestled to the ground by a certain sympathy for Brad Niesluchowski.

According to the Arizona Republic, Niesluchowski was asked to resign after allegedly using his position at the Higley Unified School District to exercise his own (and our) need for an alien encounter.

This was not a case of uploading pictures … Read more