Cape Canaveral (Florida): With astronauts hustling inside and out, the international space station got its biggest live-in addition yet, a Japanese lab stretching 37 feet that opens for business on Wednesday. Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide had the honor of installing the billion-dollar lab, named Kibo, which means "hope', just as two crewmates were winding up a spacewalk on Tuesday. He used the space station's robot arm to nudge the bus-size lab into place.

"Political appointees" in NASA's press office "marginalized, or mischaracterized" studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006, the space agency's inspector general said in a report released today. The IG called the deliberate distortions "inappropriate political interference," and "found no credible evidence suggesting that senior NASA or Administration officials directed the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs to minimize information relating to climate change."

infoholic Yup, I can dig into frozen ground as hard as concrete. The scoop has special blades and a powered "rasp' to scrape ice. Cool! Whoever thought a Nasa spacecraft could be so adept at social networking and internet? For users of Twitter, a web microblogging service, the Phoenix Mars lander has been sending pithy news "tweets' to the cellphones and computers of interested "followers.' As of Friday night, the Phoenix lander had 9,636 followers at Twitter. According to twitterholic.com, it ranks No. 30 among all Twitter feeds in the solar system.

As the long quest for alien life goes on and with the discovery of earth-like planets outside the solar system in distant galaxies, here is a surprising find in our own neighbourhood.

Until the second week of September, when both the ruling Congress and the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suddenly discovered that the affidavit filed by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in the Supreme Court on the Sethusamudram Ship Channel Project was controversial and hurt religious sentiments, the biggest political ripples created by

Science and rationality have taken a beating in the unfolding of the recent events surrounding the controversial mega marine project called the Sethusamudram Ship Channel Project (SSCP) of the Government of India.

The National Democratic Alliance government did it-undermining the autonomy of a scientific department called the Archaeological Survey of India. The United Progressive Alliance has compounded it by withdrawing a scientific body's opinion on a matter on which it is eminently competent, and statutorily obliged, to give its view.

In the third week of August, hurricane Dean battered America's mid-western and southern states, and raced through the Gulf of Mexico. Weathermen did not expect the hurricane to intensify sharply.

wireless charge:Your mobile phone may soon recharge itself in the same way it transfers information: wirelessly. Marin Soljacic and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the