FleaPlus writes "Apollo 11 astronaut (and MIT Astronautics Sc.D.) Buzz Aldrin suggests a bolder plan for NASA (while still remaining within its budget), which he will present to the White House's Augustine Commission; he sees NASA heading down the wrong path with a 'rehash of what we did 40 years ago' which could derail future exploration and settlement. For the short-term, Aldrin suggests canceling NASA's troubled and increasingly costly Ares I, instead launching manned capsules on commercial Delta IV, Atlas V, and/or SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. In the medium-term, NASA should return to the moon with an international consortium, with the ultimate goal of commercial lunar exploitation in mind. Aldrin's long term plan includes a 2018 comet flyby, a 2019 manned trip to a near-earth asteroid, a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos, and one-way trips to colonize Mars."

Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."

stylemessiah writes "The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world's poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10..."

longacre writes "Following in the footsteps of DARPA's Urban Challenge, in which robotic vehicles had to navigate a complex obstacle course without human intervention, the UK upped the ante with its own Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge: within a mock enemy village, robots were instructed to find potential targets and make distinctions between armed troops, roadside bombs and snipers. The winning entry, Team Stellar's SATURN system, actually consists of three vehicles: a low level drone and a tracked ground vehicle transmit reconnaissance data to a high-altitude robotic relay aircraft, which proceeds to phone that data home to a central processing center. Upon announcing the winner yesterday, MoD said they are 'carefully considering if technologies demonstrated in the final can be incorporated into future frontline kit for the Armed Forces. It is possible that the winning team will have invented a product that can be developed rapidly for the front line.'"