The spider who became the star of an Egyptian teenager's outer-space experiment has settled into the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History after returning from a three-month stint aboard the International Space Station.
Tour outer space on Space Mountain.
"JOURNEY TO OUTER SPACE" features hands-on experiments similar to those first attempted in space, lessons in space travel and an imaginary trip to Mars.
And the first third of the book deftly reconstructs (though not for the first time) the life of Lacks, a poor black mother of five who died of cervical cancer but whose robust malignant cells, collected by the physicians who treated her, have been used to defeat polio and to run experiments in outer space.
For now, though, building a temple in outer space is a Moonshot an interplanetary thought experiment pondering how far humanity must travel to establish a utopian society, free from national boundaries and ideological differences.
The US Defense Department has asked Congress for $108 million to fund a new facility in Colorado dedicated to drawing up plans and running experiments for war in outer space, as anxiety grows about the possibility of extraterrestrial conflict with China or Russia.
But the territory exists only in the realm of abstraction, as arrangements of data in two experiments that have nothing to do with outer space.
It's fun: solar experiments including black holes, spinning planets and Einstein feeling "some G-force in outer space", with text and video providing deeper context to the fun.
Canisters containing microscopic nematode worms from an experiment were recovered from the wreckage and the worms were still alive, suggesting that life from outer space could survive a fall to Earth.
Experiments to detect neutrinos need to be well shielded, because high-velocity cosmic rays from outer space produce spurious signals.
"Every cue was a big experiment," says composer Steven Price of his gigantic, aurally astonishing score for "Gravity," director Alfonso Cuarón's 3-D outer space disaster film.
