On screen, the newest Capt. Kirk is a brash, headstrong, rebellious commander who gets in bar brawls, defies orders from his superiors, and temporarily loses command of the Enterprise. The real life Capt. Kirk is expected to have a much more sedate command. “No stories of him kissing green aliens or yelling ‘KAAHHHNNN!’ on the bridge of his ship,” said Mr. Servello. “No worry over him stealing his own ship to chase after Spock, although I am told he is looking for a chief engineer named Scotty.”

Like Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of body parts, the bionic man is an amalgam of the most advanced human prostheses — from robotic limbs to artificial organs to a blood-pumping circulatory system. The robot, which cost almost $1 million to build, was modeled in some physical aspects after Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, who wears one of the world's most advanced bionic hands. The bionic man has the same prosthetic hand as Meyer — the i-LIMB made by Touch Bionics — with a wrist that can fully rotate and motors in each finger. The hand's grasping abilities are impressive, but the bionic man still drops drinks sometimes. "He's not the world's best bartender," Walker said.

My first take was to itemize the errors. The vehicles are in impossible orbits—wrong altitudes, wrong inclinations. The backpack maneuvering unit has a nearly infinite amount of fuel and comes supercharged—but only until the plot requires it suddenly to run out. Space stations seem to retain pressure in their various modules despite coming apart at the seams. You can apparently close an outward opening hatch against exiting pressure with one hand.

Former Navy SEAL Cade Courtley says a poor or incomplete background check is to blame. "Most people when they get into that, they are given an interim clearance and that means that the background check hasn't been done but it's in the process of being done," Courtley said. "He may have started out with an interim clearance and a background check should have been done." The former SEAL says just running Alexis' fingerprints would have turned up his arrest record.

At least one Occupy St. Louis sympathizer wants to make sure Mayor Francis Slay is paying attention. The same day the mayor dispatched six aides to listen to concerns from the anti-Wall Street outfit camped out in Kiener Plaza, an online poster purporting to be a supporter of the group unveiled what appeared to be hacked information from Slay's website. "YOU CAN REMOVE US FROM KEINER [sic] PLAZA, BUT NOT FROM YOUR SYSTEMS!" the poster wrote on Tuesday. The poster claimed affiliation with the hacking network Anonymous

After four years sailing through space, the Dawn spacecraft was expected to slip into orbit late Friday around a giant asteroid to begin a yearlong investigation into the origins of the solar system. It is the first of two scheduled tour stops for the NASA probe that almost never made it to the launch pad. Because of its stunted growth, Vesta holds "a record of the earliest history of the solar system," said the mission's lead scientist Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Former University of New Mexico President F. Chris Garcia was arrested and jailed Thursday in connection with a multistate, online prostitution ring that authorities say was run by a physics professor from New Jersey. Garcia, 71, is professor emeritus of political science at the University of New Mexico. He served as president of the university from 2002-2003. A distinguished professor and well-known expert on New Mexico politics, Garcia served from 1987-90 as vice president of academic affairs, a position now called provost. He was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1980-86. Garcia is also and author whose 11 books include "Hispanics and the US Political System" and "Moving into the Mainstream. A specialist in elementary particle theory, Flory spent a decade in school administration where, according to his website, he worked on human resource database systems and measuring academic productivity. Roseman told The Associated Press that Flory's password-protected website, Southwest Companions, had been the subject of a vice investigation for six months after police received tips from prostitutes and johns.

the nearest star beyond our sun is 25 trillion miles away. The fastest rocket man has built would take more than 4,000 years to get there. This isn't just about thinking new rocket methods, Neyland said. It's also about coping with extended life in space, raising issues of medicine, agriculture, ethics and self-reliance, he said.