An anonymous reader writes "Designs and photos for Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic's new suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, have been released." Lots of specs and numbers if you're interested in that sort of thing although nothing hugely detailed.

The Fun Guy sent in a link to the American Society for Microbiology site, your leading news source for everything between nano and macro. The site is featuring a story about new research into the KT barrier extinction: the period in history where the dinosaurs went extinct, along with a number of other families of species. For a number of years scientists have theorized that an impact on the Yucatan peninsula was responsible for the species crash, but microbiological examination of marine organisms of the time indicate life persisted for another 300,000 years after the 'Chicxulub impact'. The researchers at Princeton who made this discovery theorize that global warming caused by a volcanic eruption in India is a more likely culprit for the world-wide devastation. The article generalizes that there is no 'smoking gun' for this event, and further research is required.

rrohbeck writes "The New York Times is running an article on what Blue Origin (Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' space company) is up to after his Texas land grab. A couple of Flash videos show a short successful test hop of the 'Goddard' test vehicle. From the article: 'The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness. Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound. In one view, one of the nine rocket nozzles jitters as it maintains the ship's attitude. Goddard resembles the DC-X, another vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft under development in the 1990s by McDonnell Douglas for the Defense Department and NASA until the government pulled the plug.' And in case you're an aerospace engineer, they're hiring."