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 ...

FOLK SINGING Anything called a hootenanny ought to be shot on sight, but the whole country is having one. A hootenanny is to folk singing what a jam session is to jazz and all over the U.S. there is a great reverberate twang. Guitars and banjos akimbo folk singers inhabit smoky metropolitan crawl space; they sprawl on the floors of college rooms; near the foot of ski trails they keep time to the wheeze and sputter of ...

To date, the Kepler space telescope has found more than 1,200 likely planets orbiting stars beyond the sun — quite a haul for a satellite that's been flying for just over two years. The true prize Kepler is hunting for, of course, is not just any planet, but one that's a twin of Earth — about the size of our world, orbiting in a zone where the temperature range is like ours. All that would make it ...

For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA's claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: "During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails "? If we hadn't spent tens of billions of ...

Bangkok's hottest hangout was actually born from "six months of despair and depression." After completing a course of curatorial studies and unable to renew her Rockefeller Foundation research funds, Somrak Sila wondered what she could do to "bring art closer to Thai people." Knowing that "another commercial gallery wasn't the answer," Somrak, 32, and three partners created WTF, tel: 662 6246. It's a hipster-filled, three-story bar, caf, exhibition space and screening room — with a dance floor. ...

In the boardroom at DC Comics, a life-size statue of Clark Kent sits in a chair reading the Daily Planet. Lately the talk is probably making him a little nervous. Superman is still the company's flagship icon, but Batman outsells him, and the original superhero hasn't starred in a movie for 17 years. But help may be on the way. DC is installing new creative talent on all three main monthly Superman comics, starting ...

You can think of NASA's Discovery program as a sort of outer-space American Idol: every few years the agency invites scientists to propose unmanned planetary missions. The projects have to address some sort of fundamental science question, and they have to be relatively cheap to pull off — say, half a billion dollars or so. Then the proposals go through a grueling competition before judges who aren't as nasty as Simon Cowell but who are every ...

Schoolchildren by the thousands wept when Pluto was officially banished from the ranks of the major planets back in 2006, but for the asteroids, demotion to the interplanetary minor leagues is very old news. When Ceres was discovered in 1801 during a search of the mysteriously empty space between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers were convinced they'd found a new planet. By the late 1800s, however, so many Ceres-like objects had been found that they were sometimes referred ...

Want a backstage pass to the gladiator games? Then join a behind-the-scenes tour of Rome's Colosseum, taking in the underground chambers where the ancient city's famous warriors prepared themselves for battle. The subterranean section is one of the best-preserved parts of the famous 1,931-year-old arena. Unlike other sections of the Colosseum, which have been lived in, mined for stone, used as fortifications and even planted with gardens, the now cleared rooms and passages beneath the amphitheater have ...