HorsePerson and the ShoeMan

NASA is moving ahead with plans to put a long-armed lander on Mars' icy north pole to search for clues for water and possible signs of life, the space agency said Thursday.
...
Scientists hope the Phoenix mission will yield clues to the geologic history of water on the Red Planet and determine whether microbes existed in the ice.
...
Phoenix will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in August 2007 and land on the planet nine months later. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena.

Link


First Solar Sail Flight

The solar sail-propelled Cosmos 1 vehicle, hailed as the world’s first solar sail spacecraft, has left its Moscow testing center and now bound to Severomorsk, Russia, where it will be loaded into a modified intercontinental ballistic missile and readied for a June 21 launch, mission planners announced Monday.

Put these two things together - a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity - and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. The questions are, do such genes exist, and what are they if they do? Dr Cochran thinks they do exist, and that they are exactly the genes that cause the inherited diseases which afflict Ashkenazi society.

// posted by Melly @ 9:02 AM