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For sale: NASA launchpad, gently used

January 7, 2013 On July 20, 2011, at 5:57 a.m. EDT, the space shuttle Atlantis made its final touchdown on the runway of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA's storied shuttle program wasn't the only thing that came to its official end that day; the intervening year-and-a-half has also seen ...

Why the Internet makes it hard to procrastinate

December 21, 2012 This morning, the save-for-later service Pocket (formerly Read It Later) posted some highlights from a year's worth of user data. Among the stats: Users -- who now number at 7.4 million -- saved 240 million pieces of digital content over the year (compared to 170 million in the span between ...

Video: Boeing used 20,000 lbs of potatoes to test its in-flight Wi-Fi

December 21, 2012 How do you ensure an even distribution of Wi-Fi throughout an airplane's cabin as that cabin moves through the air at 35,000 feet and 500 mph? When engineers at Boeing attempted to test different Wi-Fi system designs, they needed to either stock the plane full of warm human bodies or ...

The trash we've left on the moon

December 20, 2012 Earlier this week, two probes that had spent the past year orbiting the moon for NASA's GRAIL missionslammed into the lunar surface, destroying themselves and their communications connection to Earth. None of this was an accident: Crash-landings like this are a typical method of bringing unmanned lunar missions -- and ...

Video: An astronaut-guided tour of the most amazing house ever built

December 17, 2012 You no doubt have seen images taken from the International Space Station. You likely have seen images taken of the International Space Station, too. But do you know what the ISS looks like, wall to wall and "room" to "room"? Do you know what it would be like to call ...

from govexec

Why Taking Breaks Will Help You Get More Work Done

December 14, 2012 The most elite musicians in the world don't necessarily spend more time practicing their craft than their less-accomplished peers. Instead, they spend more time practicing smartly. "They focus their energy in packets," ASAPScience notes in the video above. "Instead of diluting their energy over the entire day, they have periods ...

What big space data looked like in 1962

December 14, 2012 Throughout most of human history, humans knew Venus as "the brightest star in the sky." Fifty years ago, however -- December 14, 1962 -- humanity got to know our neighbor planet in a wonderfully new way: up close and personal. On that day, NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft sailed by Venus, ...

How the UN's 'game-changing' Internet treaty failed

December 14, 2012 Did you know that, for the past two weeks, the future of the Internet has been at stake? Yes, it has. Those two weeks hosted the World Conference on International Telecommunications(also hosted, technically, by Dubai). And they hosted, as well, a fairly dramatic face-off -- often between blocs led by ...

The Pope has tweeted

December 12, 2012 Earlier this month, the Vatican revealed the Pope's official Twitter account, @pontifex -- an attempt to engage with, among other people, some of the more than a billion Catholics around the world. Early this morning, that account began tweeting. This was the pope's first tweet, which doubled as a digital ...

from govexec

The state of intellectual property around the world

December 12, 2012 Economies are slowing across the globe. But inventors across the globe apparently didn't get that memo. Patent filings and grants have exploded in the past few years -- fueled, in particular, by innovations coming out of, and into, China. And fueled, as well, by new fields -- computer technologies, communications ...