Virgin Galactic is on-track and doing very well; the WhiteKnightTwo is still slated to complete a test flight before Christmas. So why is George Whitesides, the Senior Advisor, taking a temp position? (more…)

Wall Street is in more than a slump–dare I say, it seems impotent. The question is, can the space industry fly while the market is crashing? The answer is…well, it’s debatable. (more…)

As many of you already know, a replica of the HMS Beagle is currently under construction in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. It will look like Darwin’s Beagle on the outside, but will be filled with the latest-and-greatest modern gadgets on the inside: diesel auxiliary engines, radars, and satellite communication devices– to name a few things. The Beagle Project team consists not only of a bunch of adventurous, tech savvy science geeks, though, they’re also savvy seafaring socialites shooting for the stars. After all, when it comes to a long voyage, it’s important to keep good company…so they’ve partnered up with NASA. It is indeed good to have friends in high places! (more…)

Today, two plaques inscribed with the nearly 60-year-old United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be launched into space from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The plaques, engraved in both French and English with the Declaration’s 30 articles, are sealed in “space-proof” packaging and are booked for permanent orbit around Earth from ESA’s Columbus multidisciplinary space laboratory in the European module International Space Station. (more…)

The Astronaut Farmer should have never taken off: the movie is a dud. Billy Bob Thorton plays the lead character, Charles Farmer, who was once an astronaut-in-training but never left Earth…instead, he was forced to leave his prestigious position after a mental break-down when his father committed suicide.

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Last week, the TalkingScience team trekked out to Staten Island to put on a Science Cabaret for students at I.S. 34. We were accompanied by a bee keeper, a biologist, a 3D artist from Hollywood, a few flamenco dancers, and our L’Oreal-UNESCO award-winning emcee (”Cindy the Scientist”). Cindy is a great story-teller, and while she was researching the history and science behind flamenco dancing, she came across some an interesting bit of information about the Rio Tinto, a river in Spain and a region that was once populated by flamenco-dancing miners.

Life near the Rio Tinto isn’t easy…in fact, it’s nearly non-existent when it comes to human life. The region is an isolated cavity that was abandoned hundreds of years ago. We’re not sure exactly what happened there since Rio Tinto was once the oldest known mining community, rich with legends about the wealthy King Soloman and tales about how Phoenician merchants arrived to set the foundations for the Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians who would later take over the area. It’s hardly a boom-town today, though.

Humans couldn’t possibly live sustainably in the region, but scientists believe that the conditions could be just right for a Martian since many of the region’s attributes are similar to those found on Mars. The Rio Tinto is located on top of an ancient hydrothermal system formed by sulfide minerals. Mars also has an abundance of sulfur, as well as iron, and these are the ingredients needed to form sulfide minerals. Because Mars also has volcanoes and ground ice, the conditions for a hydrothermal systems could exist….and maybe life could exist too. Not human life, of course– if we do discover life on Mars, it’s more likely to be in the form of extremophile microbes (microbes that can exist in extreme conditions). These microorganisms have already been identified in the Rio Tinto, which has a pH of 2.3 (it’s rare for living creatures to flourish in such acidic water).

In his article NASA Scientists to Drill for New, Exotic Life near Acidic Spanish River, author John Bluck notes that “scientists say evidence suggests the chemistry of the Rio Tinto and its biology may be a result of an underground biologically based chemical reactor fueled by organisms that do not need oxygen gas too survive.” So…alien life forms that don’t require oxygen or light? It sounds very science fiction to me, but you might need to head to the non-fiction area of the library to find out more about it soon. Once again, reality may prove itself stranger than fiction. I wonder if this new life form will be green or gooey, or have any super- powers? To be continued…