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Forbes: NASA may be going to the same old moon with a ship that looks a lot like a 1960s Apollo capsule, but the space agency said Monday that it’s going to do something dramatically different this time: Stay there.

Unveiling the agency’s bold plan for a return to the moon, NASA said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon’s poles, permanently staffing it by 2024, four years after astronauts land there.

It is a sweeping departure from the Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and represents a new phase of space exploration after space shuttles are retired in 2010.

NASA chose a “lunar outpost” over the short expeditions of the ’60s. Apollo flights were all around the middle area of the moon, but NASA decided to go to the moon’s poles because they are best for longer-term settlements. And this time NASA is welcoming other nations on its journey.

Science Daily: An ancient curse aimed at a thief is one of a number of treasures to be unveiled to the public for the first time, following the largest archaeological excavation the city of Leicester has ever seen.

Over the past three years, a team of up to 60 archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services has been working on a number of sites in the city. Almost 9% of Leicester’s historic core has been subject to investigation in some form, giving new insights into the appearance and development of the Roman and medieval towns.

One of the most interesting finds from a site on Vine Street was a ‘curse’ tablet — a sheet of lead inscribed in the second or third century AD and intended to invoke the assistance of a chosen god. It has been translated by a specialist at Oxford University, and reads:

‘To the god Maglus, I give the wrongdoer who stole the cloak of Servandus. Silvester, Riomandus (etc.) … that he destroy him before the ninth day, the person who stole the cloak of Servandus…’ Then follows a list of the names of 18 or 19 suspects. What happened to them is not recorded.

KishKish, makers of SAM (Simple Answering Machine) for Skype, have now added a lie detector feature to the mix, claiming to detect stress in the voice of your Skype caller, alerting you to any bending of the truth.

It’s your $49.95 a year, but we’re thinking it’ll be another decade or two before voice stress analysis can absolutely detect if someone is lying to you. This thing could cause more problems than it solves. There’s good reason why this technology is not admissible in court. The video on the company’s website is quite entertaining, though, catching old Slick Willie in a lie about Monica Lewinsky.

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Oct. 9, 2006 — Teenage boys and computer games go hand-in-hand.

Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis.

The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.

Getting subjects to move objects using only their brains has implications toward someday building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it.

Read the full story here

Source: Cnn

Elmo was 10. That’s like 90 muppet years. His sensors were failing. He ran through batteries four times a day. His once hearty laugh was little more than a half-hearted chuckle. Fisher Price had the technology. So after 18 months of advanced surgery and rehabilitation, they cybernetically retooled Elmo into the most Ticklish Muppet Ever. And just in time for Christmas.

Read on to discover the three stages of coochie coochie coo.

Tickle Me Elmo Extreme edition went on sale yesterday and the little hairy beast is already on ebay for 2-10 times its $40 MSRP. The upgraded AI and robotics give Elmo T.M.X. the technology to laugh harder, faster, better. Tickle sensors reside on the foot, side, and chin. The Three Stages of Extreme Tickling are…

Tickle #1: Elmo laughs, slaps his knee twice, falls down, and stands back up.

Tickle #2: Elmo repeats step one, sits down again and falls backwards onto his back and starts kicking his feet while laughing even harder.

Tickle #3: Repeats steps 1 and 2, then rolls over onto his tummy where he starts hitting the floor with his fists, stands back up again, and takes a deep sigh.

Pray to god that your nephew does NOT want one of these soon to be $600 dollar toys.

Cousin Paulie knows I drive a Mini Cooper, as well as a scooter, that is why he posted this story about Mini getting the iDrive system. But I bet he did not know about this new version of the Mini:

A British engineering firm has put together a high-performance hybrid version of BMW’s Mini Cooper. The PML Mini QED has a top speed of 150 mph, a 0-60 mph time of 4.5 seconds. The car uses a small gasoline engine with four 160 horsepower electric motors — one on each wheel. The car has been designed to run for four hours of combined urban/extra urban driving, powered only by a battery and bank of ultra capacitors. The QED supports an all-electric range of 200-250 miles and has a total range of about 932 miles (1,500 km). For longer journeys at higher speeds, a small conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) is used to re-charge the battery. In this hybrid mode, fuel economies of up to 80mpg can be achieved.

Read the rest of the article at Treehugger

From Science Daily: Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new type of mobile robot that balances on a ball instead of legs or wheels. “Ballbot” is a self-contained, battery-operated, omnidirectional robot that balances dynamically on a single urethane-coated metal sphere. It weighs 95 pounds and is the approximate height and width of a person. Because of its long, thin shape and ability to maneuver in tight spaces, it has the potential to function better than current robots can in environments with people.

LOS ANGELES — A hotel tycoon’s dream of building an inflatable commercial space station is taking a step toward reality _ or a reality check _ with the launch of a satellite that will test the technology behind the orbital outpost.

The fact-finding mission scheduled for this week will explore the feasibility of Robert Bigelow’s planned commercial space complex. When finished by 2015, he said, it will consist of balloon-like modules strung together like sausage links and serve as a hotel, laboratory, college or entertainment venue.

The planned liftoff from Russia of Bigelow Aerospace’s privately funded Genesis I spacecraft will mark the beginning of the startup’s attempt to break into the fledging manned commercial spaceflight business.

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The seven crew members of the space shuttle Discovery arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday to begin training for a spaceflight next month in which each will have a 1-in-100 chance of dying.

Those are the official odds that NASA has long given.

Exactly what the real odds are is a question that looms larger than normal this time.

Full CNN Story

WASHINGTON - Everyone has known New Orleans is a sinking city. Now new research suggests parts of the city are sinking even faster than many scientists imagined — more than an inch a year.

That may explain some of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and it raises more worries about the future.

The research, reported in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.

“My concern is the very low-lying areas,” said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. “I think those areas are death traps. I don’t think those areas should be rebuilt.”

The blame for this phenomenon, called subsidence, includes overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts.

Read the full Yahoo News article