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On its 40th anniversary, we reassess 1986's SpaceCamp
Forty years ago, the future seemed just around the cornerβand the vehicle that was going to take us there was NASA's Space Shuttle. Originally envisioned as part of a larger integrated space transportation system, the shuttle was billed as a fully reusable vehicle, totally unlike the one-and-done capsules of the fading Apollo era, capable of making monthly (and perhaps even weekly) ferry flights to low Earth orbit.
The shuttle, it was hoped, would transform human space flight from extraordinary to mundane. Brands like Coke and Pepsi were quick to hop aboard and expand the Cola Wars into space, and there were even plans to blast Sesame Street's Big Bird into orbit.
The loss of Challenger in January 1986βcarrying educator Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first private citizen in spaceβput the kibosh on all of that. The shuttle, while fantastically advanced, would never be the vehicle to help humankind slip all of our surly bonds, so to speak. Even operating at its most frantic peak in 1985 just before Challenger's loss, the shuttle hardware managed a maximum of nine flights in one calendar year; for most of the 1990s, it performed at five or six flights per year. Civilians in spaceβto say nothing of Big Birdβwould have to wait.


Β© 20th Century Fox
Grifters, cynics, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents
Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that heβs βbeginning to regret having lived so longβbecause weβre going downhill.β How could we possibly have gotten here?
Maybe weβve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the Internet have been around for as long as vaccines have. In his new book A Pox on Fools, Thomas Levenson breaks them down into three categories, as made clear in the bookβs subtitle: βThe True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.β The accusations these people levy against vaccines can just as easily be used to categorize the arguments themselves: They are wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable.
Wrong
As Levenson tells it, in the early 18th century, a couple of forward-thinking Westerners learned about inoculations against smallpox from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that point, infectious disease was by far the leading cause of death, as it had been forever. In the 19th century, roughly 40 percent of babies died of infection before they turned 5.


Β© Penguin Randomhouse
How NextEra Energy Wielded Political Power in Florida

Β© Ulysse Bellier/Agence France-Presse β Getty Images
Cows Can Recognize Familiar Human Faces, New Study Finds

New research led by scientists from the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) suggests cows (Bos taurus taurus) can distinguish between known and unknown people, and even match a familiar voice to the correct face.
The post Cows Can Recognize Familiar Human Faces, New Study Finds appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
83-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Lizard Fossil Unearthed in France

Paleontologists have identified a new genus and species of pan-shinisaur lizard from a partial upper jaw discovered in southern France, pushing the presence of its lineage in Europe back by at least 30 million years.
The post 83-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Lizard Fossil Unearthed in France appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
INTERVIEW: Talking telescopes with the Director of new IMAX movie βDeep Skyβ
Deep Sky is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn: a new film which uses the scale of giant IMAX screens to take audiences on a journey to the beginning of time and space,...
The post INTERVIEW: Talking telescopes with the Director of new IMAX movie βDeep Skyβ first appeared on Science Illustrated.