When the Beijing LGBT Center screened a prerecorded lecture on gay-themed movies last year, the venue was so packed that latecomers had to jostle for a spot on the windowsills of the rented classroom doubling as their makeshift theater. This year, however, a similar event attracted only a handful of people, leaving much of the same room empty. The organizers soon realized their online announcements never reached the community. Soon after, other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender ...

Like pretty much every other agency in the government, NASA is likely to be hurting for money over the next few years. The end of the Space Shuttle program, which comes with Atlantis' final flight next month, will free up some cash. But at best, NASA's budget will be flat in 2012, and given the mood in Congress, "at best" isn't something to count on. And thanks to the cost overruns plaguing the yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space ...

It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and a lot of people wanted a piece of it. Now, some 40 years after moon dust brought back from the Apollo 11 mission went missing, it was recovered at a St. Louis auction house and returned to the Johnson Space Center in Houston this week. "It's a speck — the size of a fingertip," said David Kols of Regency-Superior auction house, where the dust had ...

A newly released report on student achievement finds that members of the nation's second largest ethnic group are still woefully underperforming their white counterparts. The report, issued June 23 by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics shows that while scores have gone up for both groups, Hispanic students lag by the same amount today as they did in 1990, which means that the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students has been ...

People in Port-au-Prince call Junon Brutus "Soeur Junon" , describing her as a prophet and a messenger from God. Her crowning moment thus far came on Feb. 12, when Brutus, 42, stepped center stage to face thousands of arms waving in unison, reminiscent of the pulsating energy during Carnival performances. The gathering was not a celebration but a lamentation marking the one-month anniversary of Haiti's earthquake — a disaster that many in Haiti believe Brutus predicted. But ...

Millions of viewers have been transfixed by the parade of forensic experts presented by the prosecution over the last few weeks in the trial of Casey Anthony, a 25 year-old mother who stands accused of killing her two year-old daughter Caylee and dumping the child's body near their Orange County, Florida home in 2008. The ubiquitous broadcasts of the trial are as compelling as anything that fans of the fictional forensics drama, CSI: Miami, might encounter. But ...

Julie Cherie Rodriguez died in her sleep last week at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver. Only 2 years old, Julie made surgical history by living for a record 13 months after a liver transplant, the most difficult organ transfer yet attempted. Death resulted from a recurrence of the cancer that first made the transplant necessary. The postmortem showed the new liver, despite some cancerous invasion, worked well to the last.

I'm still not sure what I did to set it off. All I know is that I was blithely surfing the Web using Apple's Safari browser on my MacBook Air last week, and a page identifying itself as "Apple security center" popped up. It declared that my Mac had 75 viruses, then launched the installation routine for something called Mac Protector. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. I'm pretty smart for my age — and read my tech blogs — ...

Melinda Amedee was scheduled to have a tumor removed from her kidney at a New Orleans hospital on August 30. She lives far enough away from the city to have missed serious damage from Hurricane Katrina. But when the 17th Street Canal levee broke the day before, she knew she wouldn't be having an operation at the Ochsner Cancer Institute anytime soon. With a 25-year history of kidney problems, Amedee, 39, was worried about the delay, and ...

My wife and I haven't had many fights about child-rearing yet. This is mostly because all our son does so far is sleep, eat and poop at the precise moment I hand him over to Cassandra. However, we did have a major disagreement about vaccination. Unlike Cassandra, I feel it's important to overload our child with toxic levels of chemicals, risking permanent damage to his nervous system. At least that's how she saw it. Her concern about the safety of ...