Mission

While the Mars rover explores the Red Planet, a group of engineers submitted plans for a new out-of-this-world space mission: landing a boat on the Saturn moon Titan, which NASA, the European Space Agency, and Italian space agency ASI explored in depth over the last decade as part of the Cassini-Huygens mission.

Building on the successful 2005 landing of the Huygens probe on Titan, the new mission would aim to explore and collect data from the weird liquid methane makeup of the lakes found on the Saturn moon's surface. To explore these uncharted methane flows, engineers at the aerospace company Sener -- working in collaboration with Spain's Centro de Astrobiologia -- submitted a proposal last week to the European Planetary Science Congress for a Talise (Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer) boat probe. … Read more

A new setting added to OS X in Mountain Lion restores a classic Expose behavior for viewing all windows on the screen.

Apple's Missions Control feature in OS X is an evolution (or perhaps devolution, depending on your perspective) of the Expose and Spaces feature that was introduced in OS X 10.5 Leopard. While options for multiple desktops are great for organizing work, in some of Apple's decisions with the move to Mission Control it left out some of the simple approaches to Spaces that users became accustomed to.

One of these features is the ability to … Read more

Are we alone? That question has plagued scientists and space enthusiasts for generations. The release of Ridley Scott's "Prometheus," which opens nationwide today, may reignite questions about life beyond the boundaries of our galaxy.

The film marks the legendary director's return to the science fiction genre. Scott directed the 1979 film "Alien," which pit protagonist Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, against one of the most iconic extraterrestrial antagonists of all time, the titular alien.

In Scott's new film, the crew of Prometheus embarks on a mission to search for alien life, but is instead greeted with unexpected horrors. A series of mysteries unfold throughout the film, which is set in the future, with all of the advanced technology to be expected from the imagination of the legendary filmmaker.… Read more

Apple's multidesktop setup in OS X (called Spaces in OS X 10.6 and 10.5, and Mission Control in Lion) is a feature that allows you to place the windows of applications on different desktops for better workflow organization. Part of this feature is an assignment option where you can set a program to always open windows on a specific desktop, which can be an easy way to keep groups of applications organized. While this works for the most part, sometimes errors in this setup can occur, such as windows appearing off the side of a given desktop … Read more

SpaceX and NASA said today that May 19 is the new launch date for the first-ever attempt to send a private company's rocket to the International Space Station.

Intended as a demonstration flight, the mission is designed to give NASA and SpaceX information that will help them plan future missions to the space station. Weather scrapped the previous attempt at the launch, which had been scheduled for May 7.

Unless weather or other factors intervene, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft will launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on May 19. On May … Read more

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born the same week in 1958 that NASA was founded. Luck of the draw, perhaps, but the stars clearly have been aligned for a man who today is America's most famous astrophysicist (not to mention director of New York's prestigious Hayden Planetarium).

In recent years, Tyson has also taken on the role of popular educator -- if not public intellectual -- making the case for bigger national investment in space exploration and research. The thrust of his argument is that the pursuit of bold "space adventures" would have the salutary side effect … Read more

You can call it "Mission: Impossible 4" or Tom Cruise's comeback flick after a career that suddenly hit the skids. But whatever it's called, Paramount's done another stellar job with the video transfer and the Blu-ray version offers impressive fine detail along with an equally dynamic soundtrack to back up the picture quality.

As for the movie, well, it's also pretty good, so this one might very well be worth a purchase rather than a rental.

I know, I know, a lot of you don't buy discs anymore, you just stream everything or … Read more

Not surprisingly, Apple's very particular about just what it lets into its brick-and-mortar and online stores. Which is why Timbuk2 gave its limited edition Mission MacBook Messengers a little extra Apple flair.

The new bags, which cost $130 and are an Apple online exclusive for now (they're just about to hit Apple.com but aren't being sold quite yet), come in three "wicked" colors: Specialty White, Specialty Gunmetal Racing Stripe, and Specialty Black.

However, the white model and its supershiny vinyl and perforated faux leather finish is the most eye-catching and most closely mirrors Apple's trademark white products. … Read more

In the video game Re-Mission, players are tasked with piloting the microscopic robot Roxxi to blast away cancer cells as she navigates the bodies of fictional cancer patients.

A new study that took real-time functional MRI scans of 57 people randomly assigned to either play the game or watch it being played has found that those who played exhibited increased activity in the brain's positive motivation circuits, while those who merely observed exhibited no increase in activity.

"Identifying a direct connection between the stimulation of neural circuits and game play is a key step in unlocking the potential … Read more