Join the fight. Ban the bulb. Bruce Sterling has been on this kick for a while now.

Bless those people at NASA – no matter how much of a kicking their budgets take, they keep on dreaming real big. And they’re science fiction fans, too. How else would they have entertained the idea of building an antimatter engine to propel a manned mission to Mars? Apparently it would cost $250 million to manufacture enough antimatter to power the thing, but balanced against the hidden costs of normal rocketry solutions, that’s a pretty good deal. (Hat-tip to False Positives.)

We have a fairly good idea of how life on Earth evolved, whatever the creationists think. But is that the only way it could have possibly worked? The rapidly growing field of synthetic biology is working hard at trying to answer that very question, and to push the envelope of a technology whose ‘only limits…in a sense, were established 3.8 billion years ago when the first one-celled life came into being’. We’re a long way off from creating life from scratch, but the theorists are busy looking at ways we might someday be able to.

I hope you brought your party threads – it’s the Hubble Telescope’s sixteenth birthday! And to celebrate, those lovely people at NASA and the European Space Agency have released a new mosaic image of the M82 galaxy. If you like a bit of that action, they have plenty more great space images from the past sixteen years to download too. These guys have kept me in fresh desktop wallpaper for ages.

China has announced that September 2008, right after the Beijing Olympic Games, will see the next manned spaceflight by the Chinese space program. This will also feature their first attempt at a space walk.