Taking a vacation in space is an idea that just won’t go away. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, has branched out into selling a great many things other than books. Now he has plans to develop commercial spacecraft that will launch into orbit from a spaceport in the little town of Van Horn in West Texas.

Andrew Buncombe writes in the Independent that, unlike the shuttle-style vehicles being planned by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the amazon craft will launch and land vertically. Bezos hope to send his first group of tourists into space in 2010, two years after the projected start of the Virgin Galactic trips.

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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To combat global warming, some Kyoto participants have agreed to plant more trees. But the KIND of trees you plant makes a big difference: Landowners in the South are turning stands of hardwood and natural pine trees into pine plantations because pine is a more lucrative source of lumber. But it turns out that pine trees give off more carbon dioxide than deciduous forests (trees that drop their leaves in the fall).
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As the summer of 2006 rages on, with heatwaves stretching from the American Pacific coast all the way across the North Atlantic to Europe and virtually around the world, we now discover that the great Amazonian rain forest has perhaps a year to live.

If there is no rain in the Amazon basin soon, and that forest is destroyed, mankind could die with it. This is because the Amazonian forest is, in effect, the heart of the world’s ecosystem. It is a vast, unimaginably important carbon dioxide sink and oxygen producer. Without it, the planet’s climate will likely become untenable for human life.

It appears that we are well on our way to another large-animal extinction, and, if so, we will be among the large animals who go.
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If it takes generations to travel to other galaxies, this is something we’ll have to deal with in the future, since one generation will leave the earth and another generation will arrive at the destination. One problem is?weightlessness.

NASA space physician Dr. James Logan says, “Sex in micro-g might be a little underwhelming. That is, the fantasy might be vastly superior to the reality. It?s a pretty messy environment?for every action there?s an equal and opposite reaction.” (We thought sex was always that way). He says that sex in a zero gravity spacecraft will have to be “choreographed”?in other words, planned instead of spontaneous.
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