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An unmanned space plane on top of an Atlas V Launcher successfully blasted off at 7:52 pm Thursday, April 22, 2010 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The rocket caries the classified X-37B robot space plane. With the end of the Space Shuttle launches, this plane will soon be the only orbital craft able to land on a runway.

The X-37B’s mission is classified. The Air Force comments only that it is using the plane to test “concepts of operations” for re-usable spacecraft.

The X-37B differs from the space shuttle in many ways: it is unmanned, it uses a deployable solar array versus fuel cells, and it is designed to stay in space for up to 270 days at a time. The X-37B also is propelled into space by a rocket which differs from the shuttles design.

The landing site for the plane will be the Vandenberg Air Force Base

The Stealth bomber, or the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, is shown in the pictures below: The B-2 flew at the California Capital Airshow over Mather Airport on September 12th, 2009.

About the B-2

The Stealth bomber is know for its state of the art technology to avoid detection by radar and for a design that buries it’s engines in  its wings to reduce exhaust. The design is called a with “low observable” stealth technology aimed at fooling anti-aircraft defenses of  other countries. The plane is a “heavy bomber” built to deploy both conventional and nuclear weapons. The B-2s, amoung other missions, were used to drop bomps in Serbia in the late 90s and deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom early 2003. You can see them at air shows like the California Capital Show in Sacramento.  The B-2 is the only stealth plane capable of carrying air to surface standoff weapons. It has been controversial since the beginning for its’ high cost of operation which has been estimated at over 2 billion dollars per  plane. Each plane costs well over 700 million dollars to make. There were initial plans to make over 132 bombers, but the funding was cut down and 21 have been made.

Statistics:

• Size: The B-2 is 17 feet tall, has a length of 659 feet, and a wingspan of 172 feet. 
• Capacity:  It can carry a payload of 40,000 lbs and has a maximum take off weight of 336,000 lbs.
• Altitude: It can obtain an altitude of up to 50,000 feet.
• Crew:  The B-2 has 2 crew membvers
• Manufacturer: Northrup Gumman
• Engine:  The B-2 has four General Electric F118-GE-100 turbofan engines. 
• Number built:  There are 21 of these planes.

John D. Sutherland, a prebiotic chemist at the University of Manchester has soved a problem long troubling scientists studying how natural chemicals could have created the building blocks for life.

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Professor Muhammad Yunas shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Price with Grameen Bank, an organization in Bangladesh, India which he founded and directs.  The Grameen Bank provides microfinance programs that enable poor to lift themselves out of poverty.

Now Professor Yunas is announcing an independent collaboration of Grameen Health with Pfizer, GE HealthCare, and Mayo Clinic to create a sustainable Healthcare delivery model for the developing world.  He is looking to help the 4 billion people in the world who make less than $3000 a year.  Grameen Health currently has 38 Kalyan clinics.

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Meet Winnie Barron, the co-founder of the Makindu Children’s Centre along with Dianah Nzomoo, in Makindu, Kenya.  The Centre is in rural Eastern Kenya, in a town of 20,000 people between Nairobi and Mombasa.

Winnie Barron, is a physician assistant at Good Samaritan urgent care clinic in Albany, Oregon.  Roughly twice a year she takes unpaid leave to work a month in Makindu. She first volunteered in 1994 to help survivors of the Rwandan genocide.  She came back to Africa after that and helped at a hospital in Makindu.  The orphans she saw living in run-down huts and old cars made her want to help more.

The Makindu Children’s Centre provides nutritional, medical and emotional support, access to basic education, and opportunities for vocational training for over 400 destitute orphan children.

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After almost 50 years, a husband and wife team, devoted to educating and teaching universal brotherhood to children, have created world’s largest school in one city. The City Montessori School (CMS) in Lucknow, India has 20 branch campuses in the city of Lucknow and over 35,000 students. CMS was founded in 1959 by  Mr. Jagdish Gandhi and his wife Dr. (Mrs.) Bharti Gandhi, M.Ed. Dr. Bharti Gandhi was a child psychologist. The couple were inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. 

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Li Quan and her husband have spent millions in the creation of a private reserve to save the South Chinese Tiger. Li has founded  “Save China’s Tigers”. Her reserve is based in South Africa in the Karoo region where she is now and breeding the tigers. Because all captive tigers today are linked to six tigers who were captured back in 1956, there is a large problem with inbreading.

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When Ulysses S. Grant became the 18th president of the United States of America, he was a war hero. He had not only fought in, but won, some of the bloodiest battles in United States history.  When we Americans voted for him, we thought we were getting a president who was bold, brave and brash, but here are some facts about this famous president that might surprise you.

West Point

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Xu Xing, who USA Today has called “China’s real-life Indiana Jones”, uncovered specimens of this most unusal dinosaur in the fossil beds of Liaoning Province in northeastern China. Xu Xing works at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China.  In the January 23rd issue of the journal Nature,  Xu and his colleagues discuss the possibility that this dinosaur is an early ancestor of birds.

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 A Holy Insect  Read the rest of this entry »