Lockheed Martin to Build Spacecraft for Insight
Mars Lander

post from Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News on 22 August 2012 10:17:01 PM. © Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News

Denver CO (SPX) Aug 23, 2012
An exciting and novel mission to Mars has been selected as NASA's next Discovery mission. The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission, led by principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and managed by JPL, will make the first ever measurements of the interior of Mars, providing insight into the evolution of t

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Mars_Lander_999.html

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First Words of Safe Landing on Mars - Tango Delta
Nominal

post from Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News on 22 August 2012 10:17:01 PM. © Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News

Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 23, 2012
10:32 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 5 was turning out to be one long minute for Steve Sell. Of course, the previous six had been significantly protracted as well. When added together, the entry, descent and landing of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover had been touted as "Seven Minutes of Terror," and as far as Sell was concerned things were trending in that direction. What the 42-year-old engineer from

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Nominal_999.html

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China unveils ambitious space projects

post from Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News on 22 August 2012 10:17:01 PM. © Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News

Beijing (XNA) Aug 23, 2012
China will launch several space projects, including a hard X-ray telescope for black hole studies, between 2014 and 2016, according to a senior Chinese astronomer. Su Dingqiang, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former president of the Chinese Astronomical Society, revealed some details regarding the hard x-ray modulation telescope (HXMT), China's first space telescope, on Tuesd

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ASTRA 2F touches down in French Guiana for
Arianespace's next Ariane 5 dual-passenger mission

post from Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News on 22 August 2012 10:17:01 PM. © Space Tourism, Space Transport and Space Exploration News

Kourou, French Guiana (ESA) Aug 23, 2012
The second passenger for Arianespace's upcoming Ariane 5 mission has arrived in French Guiana with today's delivery of the Astrium-built ASTRA 2F satellite, which will be operated by Luxembourg-based SES. ASTRA 2F was transported by a chartered An-124 cargo jetliner that landed at Felix Eboue International Airport near the capital city of Cayenne, and was unloaded for transfer by road to the Spa

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ianespaces_next_Ariane_5_dual_passenger_mission_999.html

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Self-awareness is more complex than previously
thought

post from Top stories on 22 August 2012 09:58:33 PM. © Top stories

Story Source

Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ability to "know thyself" as the pinnacle of humanity. Now, thousands of years later, neuroscientists are trying to decipher precisely how the human brain constructs our sense of self.

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Sanctuary chimps show high rates of
drug-resistant staph

post from Top stories on 22 August 2012 09:56:17 PM. © Top stories

Story Source

Chimpanzees from African sanctuaries carry drug-resistant, human-associated strains of the bacteria Staphlyococcus aureus, a pathogen that the infected chimpanzees could spread to endangered wild ape populations if they were reintroduced to their natural habitat, a new study shows.

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aph

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Personal genomics: where science fiction meets
reality

post from Top stories on 22 August 2012 09:51:03 PM. © Top stories

Story Source

Imagine a future where doctors take a strand of your hair or a drop of your blood and tell you your DNA predicts a 78% risk of developing heart disease.

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Sampling Mars, Part 4: Commissioning the Rover
and Sampling System

Completing a multi-part guest blog series by Curiosity systems engineering team lead for the Surface Sampling and Science system. Part 4 explains the lengthy process of testing and using the system for the first time.

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http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/20120822-limonadi-sampling-mars-4-comm
issioning.html

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NCBI ROFL: Measuring the distribution of
spitefulness.

“Spiteful, antisocial behavior may undermine the moral and institutional fabric of society, producing disorder, fear, and mistrust. Previous research demonstrates the willingness of individuals to harm others, but little is understood about how far people are willing to go in being spiteful (relative to how far they could have gone) or their consistency in spitefulness across repeated trials. Our experiment is the first to provide individuals with repeated opportunities to spitefully harm anonymous others when the decision entails zero cost to the spiter and cannot be observed as such by the object of spite. This method reveals that the majority of individuals exhibit consistent (non-)spitefulness over time and that the distribution of spitefulness is bipolar: when choosing whether to be spiteful, most individuals either avoid spite altogether or impose the maximum possible harm on their unwitting victims.”

Bonus figure from the main text:

Figure 2. Histogram of measured spitefulness (Sit), pooled over all subjects and trials. The height of each bar represents the relative frequency of observing spitefulness in each of 50 intervals of length 0.02. Nearly 70% of ...