My home town is the setting for the latest in the Gawker media empire, Valleywag. It’s a gossip rag for the Silicon Valley, because there’s nothing more exciting than the social lives of geeks. [boingboing]

Michael Belfiore writes about the Rocket Racing League in Wired.

Russian space company Energia annouces a new reusable shuttle craft to replace the ageing Soyuz design, to be operational by 2015. It is hoped it will take up the duties of delivering crew and supplies to the ISS. [PhysOrg.com]

There are plenty of bird-brained bloggers out there, but San Jose in California is about to take the crown. University of California scientists are planning to equip a number of birds with a GPS receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic cellphone rig so that they can text pollution information to be collated by computer in a public blog. [NewScientist.com]

A pair of radiation biologists have amassed evidence that protons, the most abundant particles in outer space, may be up to twice as damaging to DNA than was previously thought. This suggests that astronauts may be at higher risk from cancers and other side-effects. [NewScientistSpace]