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Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Cape Canaveral for STS-135, the final mission of the program. Mission Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot, Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be the final United States astronauts to take off under the power of United States crafts, for the foreseeable future. Their destination will be the International Space Station, where they will deliver vital components to the orbiting platform, returning to Earth 12 days later. Once on the ground, Atlantis will join the remaining space shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and the Enterprise, in their new lives as museum pieces around the United States. More »
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Pop culture fans may be slightly perplexed by the new even-more-extra-long Avatar collector's edition DVD, but political protesters are getting more into James Cameron's tale of the blue people's eco-revolt. Is cosplay the future of political protest? More »
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8 out of 17 snake species across the globe have gone into a death spiral - some species have shrunk nearly 90 percent in the past decade. Scientists are scrambling to understand why. More »
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The co-founder of PayPal just launched a rocket, the Falcon 9, which hopes to put a space capsule, the Dragon, into orbit. We're all hoping Elon Musk's rocket works better than PayPal, because NASA wants to use it for missions. More »
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Yves Saint-Laurent was more than just a groundbreaking fashion designer — he was a robot visionary whose weird, angular designs and bold colors will be copied by the artificial intelligences of the distant future, a new retrospective shows. More »
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A specially designed rocket soars over Wallops Island, VA, on its way to test a new astronaut escape system for NASA's Orion spacecraft, due to start launching in 2015. Want to see the fancy new escape system? There are parachutes... More »
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Now that cloned animals are having babies, as well as spawning second and third generation clones, there's no telling when the cloning madness will stop. More »
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A pond of fly ash sludge at a Tennessee coal plant was breached earlier this week, and the toxic ash flooded out over 2.6 million cubic yards of the local landscape. This makes it officially larger than the Exxon Valez spill in terms of sheer size, though there's a big difference between the effects of this fly ash slurry and those of liquid oil in the ocean. The levels of toxins in fly ash and liquid oil are comparable. More »
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AP photographer Sergei Grits caught a mutant in the act of mind control earlier this year at a cat exhibition in Minsk, Belarus. These exhibitions are a perfect cover for hyper-evolved cats planning revolution. More »
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NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite just shot this image of rippling, evenly-spaced steps leading down into four craters in the Arabia Terra region of Mars. What causes such regularity in the shapes of these rocks? More »
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