"Virgin Galactic, the company behind the development of SpaceShipTwo and private space tourism, says yesterday?s flight marked the first time SpaceShipTwo flew with a crew on board. Peter Siebold, test pilot and director of flight tests at Scaled, joined fellow test pilot Michael Alsbury aboard the VSS Enterprise as it remained mated with WhiteKnightTwo throughout the flight. It was the third captive flight for the craft and the 33rd flight for the mother ship. The craft spent six hours and 12 minutes aloft testing SpaceShipTwo?s systems. Virgin says all went well."

Tags: science

"The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) would like to announce that we have confirmed the successful acceleration of the Small Solar Power Sail Demonstrator "IKAROS" by photon (*1) in the course of determining its precise orbit after its sail deployment. The IKAROS was launched by JAXA on May 21, 2010 (Japan Standard time, and all the following time and dates are JST unless noted otherwise,) and has been under operation since then. The thrust by solar light pressure is 1.12 mili-Newton (*2,) which is the expected value. With this confirmation, the IKAROS was proved to generate the biggest acceleration through photon during interplanetary flight in history. "

Tags: science

"'365' is a knitting clock created by german designer siren elise wilhelmsen. according to

wilhelmsen, time is a concept which unites us all, making it the lowest common denominator. on the one hand, time appears to be a as physical phenomenon, logical and easily divided into the past, present and future. on the other hand, time can be viewed very subjectively. how long a minute, an hour or a year takes can depend on how time is experienced in different situations. however, this does not alter the fact that a day has 24 hours, one hour has 60 minutes and one minute has 60 seconds."

Tags: cool

"One government poll shows that although 44% of Japanese use the internet at least once or twice a month, the rest responded that they use it "hardly at all" or "not at all". Considering Japan's top heavy society of over 50s, many of whom have not got to grips with the internet, and who make up 30% of the population and that figure begins to make sense."

Tags: geeky

"The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. [ps there were many other law firms feeding at the trough too; these were just the ones listed among the top 5 independent contractors.]"

Tags: geeky

"The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it?s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga?s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn?t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal?s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant."

Tags: games