The State of Private Space Flight—Good Luck Elon Musk

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Good news—private, corporate space flight company Orbital ATK successfully docked their spacecraft with the international space station last month. Good news—Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard spacecraft managed to land itself on a launch pad in recent weeks.

Not so great? Elon Musk’s SpaceX craft has been grounded since it exploded during what Musk called a ‘rapid, unscheduled disassembly’ while attempting a landing earlier this year. But the Falcon 9 rocket has been updated, and now sits on a Cape Canaveral pad awaiting launch tomorrow night.

So maybe NASA’s not up to as much as it once was. But, given the strides countries like China and India have made in the last year—and the progress made by private interests…it may be that our dreams of a future in space are more realistic than ever before.

That’s all good news to me.

For more, check out: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/spacex-scheduled-to-return-to-flight-sunday-and-attempt-another-dramatic-landing-this-time-on-land

Former Microsoft CTO Says Paleontologists are Wrong

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Former Microsoft CTO Says Paleontologists are Wrong

The gloves are off!
Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, mathematician, physicist, amateur fossil hunter and former chief technology officer at Microsoft says research on dinosaur growth and lifespans done more than ten years ago was flawed. He reviewed and applied new statistical methods to the original data used by Dr. Gregory Erickson professor of anatomy and paleobiology at Florida State University. And Myhrvold says, Erickson’s work contains major mistakes. To Myhrvold the data shows that dinosaurs grew much slower than Erickson suggested, and they lived a lot longer.
Check out the article here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/18/5226082/nathan-mythvold-says-dinosaur-researchers-made-serious-errors

Heddy Lamar–The Bombshell Beauty with an Inventor’s Mind

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Heddy Lamar--The Bombshell Beauty with an Inventor's Mind

In THE TIME EATER, Foster Raymond’s neighbour and fellow fossil hunter, Ashanti, is a fiery Swahili inventor. The inspiration for this strong, brilliant girl was—surprisingly—1930’s MGM movie star, Heddy Lamar. Beautiful, brainy, successful—Heddy was a take-no-prisoners woman in a time when that was rare.

She was a awarded a patent in 1942 for a super-secret communications system that made today’s cellphones and WIFI possible, as well as inventing tons of unusual products in a variety of fields.

And she wasn’t the only celebrity inventor—check out this article for some surprising revelations.

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2011/dec/04/hedy-lamarr-wifi