For cosmic tire-kickers, NASA's Mars rovers were always special. Then, Curiosity came along: twice as long and five times heavier. The mission was like shot-putting a Mini Cooper 352 million miles, then perfectly hitting an entry window to the planet -- a zone measuring about 3 by 19 kilometers, a microscopic target after that long a distance.
You hit the thin atmosphere at 13,200 miles an hour -- 3-point-7 miles per second -- a real need to slow down, fast: enter friction and deployed heat shield, then 'chute, slowing from 900 miles an hour to 180 in just two minutes, then sky crane, to surface.
Alex Baer: Space: Measuring Bangs and Bucks
Dozens of Dead Birds Fall From the Sky in NJ
Residents in a Cumberland County community were left wondering Tuesday morning what caused dozens of birds to drop dead from the sky.
Residents along Peach Drive in Millville found at least 80 birds -- mostly red-winged blackbirds -- on the ground dead having fallen from trees and the sky.
Cumberland County Public Information Officer Troy Ferus said Tuesday claiming that it wasn't something environmental that killed the birds but rather something they ate -- a granular pesticide put down legally by nearby Ingraldi Farms.
Eli Lilly admits to more than $200 million dollars worth of doctor payoffs
Prozac. Cialis. Cymbalta. If you have a television or read magazines, you've heard of their drugs. Eli Lilly, out of Indiana, makes billions of dollars every year off the sale of their patented chemicals, which are used to suppress the symptoms of disease in the human body. Founded by a chemist in the late 19th century; today the pharmaceutical giant has offices in 18 countries, and its products are sold in 125 countries, with revenues exceeding $20 billion annually.
Mach 6 aircraft reaches 3,600 mph for 5 minutes
Engineers hoped the X-51 would sustain its top speed for five minutes, twice as long as it's gone before. The B-52 took to the skies, but no other information about the test flight was available, John Haire, a spokesman for Edwards Air Force Base in California, said in an email.
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Australia cigarette plain packaging law upheld by court
The [Australian] federal government has secured a big win over big tobacco with the High Court ruling Labor's world-first plain packaging laws are constitutionally valid.
The legal victory means all cigarettes and tobacco products will have to be sold in drab olive-brown packs from December.
Alex Baer: The Most Expensive Space There Is
There's nothing like a spectacular success to bring out the hordes of troglodyte critics in droves. The very second NASA's car-sized rover, Curiosity, was safely set down on Mars last week, the drumbeats of money agony were begun by umpteen tribes of assorted knuckle draggers.
Leave it to the myopic to miss this: NASA's budget is less than 1% of the federal budget. The most expensive "space program" we all pay for in this country is the vacuum between the ears of confused and ignorant people.
FBI raids homes of Occupy activists: US newspaper
A US newspaper has revealed that the FBI has been raiding the houses of anti-Wall Street protesters in Oregon and Washington in what the agency describes an “ongoing violent crime investigation.”
The Oregonian newspaper reported that heavily-armed domestic terrorism units of the FBI have been raiding the homes of activists in Seattle and Olympia, Washington and Portland, Oregon over the last month.
Catholic Church Makes A Fortune In The German Porn Business
"Weltbild," Germany’s largest media company, sells books, DVDs, music and more -- and also happens to belong 100% to the Catholic Church. Few people knew about this connection until this month when Buchreport, a German industry newsletter, reported that the Catholic company also sells porn.
Well, it's prevention efforts have apparently not been so successful. For more than 10 years, a group of committed Catholics has been trying to point out what is going on to Church authorities, and they are outraged at the hypocrisy of the spokesman's statement. In 2008, the group sent a 70-page document to all the bishops whose dioceses have shared ownership of Weltbild for 30 years, detailing evidence of the sale of questionable material.
JFK security is breached by man who swam ashore
In an era when airline passengers can't get past a checkpoint with a bottle of shampoo, security experts were shocked Monday by the case of a man who swam ashore, scaled a fence and walked dripping wet into Kennedy Airport despite a $100 million system of surveillance cameras and motion detectors.
Authorities said the trouble began Friday evening when 31-year-old Daniel Casillo's jet ski ran out of fuel in Jamaica Bay. Casillo swam toward the bright lights of Kennedy's runway 4L, which juts out into the bay, then climbed an 8-foot fence that is part of the airport's state-of-the-art Perimeter Intrusion Detection System, authorities said.
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