Rocket Plane
Here's a great article from MIT's Technology Review on the new interest in rocket propelled planes - vehicles that can start, take off, turn off their engines, restart their engines to continue moving. These vehicles would be rocket powered, as they would need the power and velocity to break from Earth's gravity. There are currently a number of small companies constructing prototypes to prove that such vehicles are possible and viable. In the wake of the Columbia accident, maybe there will be interest and focus on finding replacements for the shuttles again. I recall that last year, due to budget cuts, the search for a shuttle replacement was either shelved or cut back significantly.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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