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Pepsi-Cola is planning a contest with the winner getting a free ride aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The deal will cost them $35 million, including a payment to the Russians of $15 million. The rest of the money will go toward promotion, possibly including a game show of some kind. The promotion will run through 2003. The new plan comes just after Russia announced that rock star Lance Bass won’t become the 3rd tourist in space, because he can’t come up with the $20 million price tag.

This won?t be the first time the Russians have used capitalism to finance their spacecraft. PepsiCo paid Russia to float a can of its soft drink outside the now defunct Mir space station, and Russia also once put the Pizza Hut logo on one of its rockets.
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The following story is the latest in a continuing series of “Pravda” stories about UFOs: The collapse of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986 sent dangerous levels of radiation into Eastern Europe. But it could have been worse: there could have been a nuclear blast that wiped out much of Europe. There are persistent stories that the world was saved by UFOs. When the Chernobyl events started to occur, witnesses saw a UFO hovering above the fourth generating unit of the Chernobyl plant. Eyewitnesses say it was there for six hours and that hundreds of people saw it. Mikhail Varitsky says, “I and other people from my team went to the site of the blast at night. We saw a ball of fire, and it was slowly flying in the sky. I think the ball was six or eight meters in diameter.read more

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Tough, aggravating women are more likely to give birth to boys, a researcher has found. This type of woman has higher testosterone levels and is likely to produce more boys?and thus become a mother-in-law. Also, historical data shows that babies are more likely to die if their father’s mothers are around.
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Despite the fact that asteroid NT7 is scheduled to wipe out much of humanity and send us back to the Dark Ages when it hits us on February 1st, 2060, there is almost no money available for research on how to deflect it. NASA has identified and tracked 2,027 asteroids and comets that might come close to Earth.

The U.S. spends between $3.5 and $4 million each year tracking asteroids and comets that might hit Earth at some point, but once we’ve found one, there no money on hand to figure out what to do about it. NASA?s Don Yeomans says, “What if you do find one with our name on it, then whose responsibility is it? You assume it would be the military’s, but which one??NASA’s charter is to find them and track them. That’s it.”
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