The Mini Shuttle

Russia partners with Europe to build its own reusable spacecraft for flights to the International Space Station and beyond. With NASA's beleaguered shuttle still grounded over safety concerns—and given the unanswered questions about its replacement, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which won't be ready to fly until 2012—the European Space Agency is mulling an option to buy its own ride to space. This month ESA plans to request $60 million from its member states to help Russia prepare its new, reusable spaceship, the Clipper, for a crewless test flight by 2011 and a manned flight by 2012...

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Media Center PCs

The reason you own a personal computer has changed. These days, it’s far more likely to pump out music, photos and video than spreadsheets and text documents. Yet the way you interact with it hasn’t caught up: alone in an office, two feet from the screen, clicking away with a mouse and keyboard. There ought to be a better way. Companies have nibbled at the entertainment-focused PC interface before, but it took Microsoft to finally nail it, with the recently released Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005...

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Can We Stop Storms?

With brutal hurricanes on the rise, scientists turn to far-out technologies to fight them off. Back in the 1960s and '70s, legions of scientists explored technologies to zap strength from hurricanes. Those efforts were scrapped both because experiments were inconclusive and because the cost of deploying a full-scale system to regularly battle the cyclones would have been staggering. In light of Katrina and Rita's $200-billion-plus swath of destruction—and a forecast of even more violent and catastrophic hurricanes to come—that steep price tag now seems like a bargain, and scientists are once again entertaining schemes to mitigate monster storms...

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A Toast to the Bionic Man

The plotline is classic Marvel Comics fare: An electrician grabs a high-tension wire carrying 7,000 volts of electricity, loses both arms at the shoulder, undergoes an experimental surgery, and emerges bionic. Sci-fi as it sounds, this is the story of Jesse Sullivan, 58, a real-life retired linesman from Dayton, Tennessee. In July, Sullivan demonstrated the world's most advanced robotic arm, using his thoughts alone to maneuver it...

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Sunny Future for Nanocrystal Solar Cells

Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed the first ultra-thin solar cells comprised entirely of inorganic nanocrystals and spin-cast from solution. These dual nanocrystal solar cells are as cheap and easy to make as solar cells made from organic polymers and offer the added advantage of being stable in air because they contain no organic materials...

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Will Tourists Beat the Government Back to the Moon?

For $100 million, a U.S. company promises you the vacation of a lifetime: a week in lunar orbit. On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility, becoming the first humans to grace the moon. Shortly thereafter, the Soviets, plagued by system failures of their Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft, abandoned all hope of doing the same. Now the Russians may get to the moon after all...

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Wanted: Inventors to Build Space Elevator

Space travel is relatively cheap compared with the cost of leaving Earth. The space shuttle, for instance, burns more than half a million gallons of fuel blasting into orbit, making every pound of payload cost $10,000. Now the nonprofit Spaceward Foundation, with a $400,000 grant from NASA, hopes to fast-track the technology to reach space on the cheap, without rockets...

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