Cutting Edge

Venture capitalists are drawing their purse strings tighter than ever in reaction to the economic downturn.

Money from VCs to start-ups and IPOs sunk to $3.7 billion in the second quarter, a drop of 51 percent from $7.5 billion in the year-ago quarter. This marks the lowest ongoing level of venture capital funding over the past 12 years, according to a MoneyTree report released Tuesday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The report was based on statistics from Thomson Reuters.

Although VC spending rose slightly from the first quarter's $3.2 billion, the ongoing … Read more

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back even further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment.

The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The project had been expected to start again in October.

To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as "floats," while the remainder of the surrounding sectors … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Astronauts David Wolf and Thomas Marshburn carried out a successful six-hour, 53-minute spacewalk Monday, moving critical spare parts to the International Space Station as a hedge against failures after the shuttle is retired next year.

Crewmates inside, meanwhile, repaired the toilet in the U.S. lab module after a malfunction Sunday.

The spacewalk got under way at 10:27 a.m. CDT and ended at 5:20 p.m. It was the 127th excursion devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began in 1998, the eighth so far this year and the second of five planned … Read more

Google Earth can now take you to the moon.

Timed with the 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, the Internet giant on Monday released an addition to its Google Earth mapping software to provide images of moon landscapes and traces of human exploration there.

Called the Moon in Google Earth and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the software allows you to see topographical features on our closest celestial neighbor with the lunar equivalent of Google Street View. People can also see a gallery of the Apollo space missions and get information on every robotic spacecraft that has visited … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--The new toilet in the U.S. Destiny laboratory module aboard the International Space Station broke down Sunday, forcing the combined 13-member shuttle-station crew to share a single Russian toilet and one aboard the shuttle Endeavour until the problem is resolved.

"When you get a second, if you could put an out-of-service note on the WHC (waste and hygiene compartment) and advise the crew members that station crew members will have to use the (Russian toilet) and shuttle crew members on the shuttle until further notice," Hal Getzelman radioed from mission control.

European Space Agency … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Combining robotics with a five-hour 32-minute spacewalk, the Endeavour astronauts accomplished the primary goal of their space station assembly mission Saturday, successfully attaching a sophisticated experiment platform to the Japanese Kibo laboratory module.

In the first of five planned spacewalks, astronauts Dave Wolf and Tim Kopra prepped the Japanese Exposed Facility, or JEF, for removal from the shuttle's cargo bay and then went on to other tasks, including the successful deployment of a jammed external storage system.

Koichi Wakata and Douglas Hurley, meanwhile, operating the space station's robot arm, pulled the JEF platform out of … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Manually flying the shuttle Endeavour from the aft flight deck, commander Mark Polansky guided the 120-ton orbiter to a gentle docking with the International Space Station Friday as the two spacecraft sailed 220 miles above northern Australia at five miles per second.

With Endeavour's arrival, the space station now boasts a record combined crew of 13--six full-time station crew members and seven shuttle astronauts. One of them, Timothy Kopra, officially joined the Expedition 20 crew a few hours later, replacing outgoing flight engineer Koichi Wakata.

"The crew is very happy to welcome Endeavour's crew … Read more

My CNET handler woke me early on Friday.

"It's those corpse-eating robot people," he barked down the phone. "They're after you."

"But I'm not dead yet," I replied. "I just look pretty rough first thing in the morning."

Still, he made me stagger to my laptop and the Robotic Technology site. There, I espied the words: "IMPORTANT MESSAGE CONCERNING EATR."

For those of you who have been asleep since Tuesday, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR, is a steam-powered robot being developed for military purposes. Its … Read more

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, perhaps, we'll all be as excited about people landing on Mars as we were 40 years ago about the first moon landing. But don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, mission-to-Mars dreamers and wannabes will have to make do with Earth-bound exercises such as the European Space Agency's Mars500 program. Earlier this week, a group of six Mars500 participants emerged from a mission-to-Moscow mock-up meant to simulate part of what will eventually be a very long journey to the Red Planet.

The Euro-sextet ended their simulated Mars mission on Tuesday, after 105 … Read more