NASA Garage Sale Includes Shuttles, Engines, Space Suits

Looking for a good deal during the recession? Space geeks don’t have to look any further than NASA, where they can pick up a retired space shuttle for the bargain-basement price of $28.8 million.

That’s the cost NASA estimates for shipping and handling on a space shuttle. The Space Shuttle Discovery has already been spoken for by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, but Atlantis and Endeavour are still available.

Sunflower DNA map could produce plants for fuel

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – A $10.5 million research project aimed at mapping the DNA sequence of sunflowers could one day yield a towering new variety for both food and fuel.

Researchers envision crossbreeding a standard sunflower with the Silverleaf species out of Texas to produce a hybrid with bright yellow flowers bursting with tasty seeds and thick stalks filled with complex sugars that can be turned into ethanol.

YAHOO NEWS

50 Years Ago: Trieste Goes To The Bottom of the Ocean

On January 23, 1960, the Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard, son of the bathyscaphe's inventor Auguste Piccard, and US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh, took the bathyscaphe Trieste to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, 35,797 feet down.

TREEHUGGER