Sex was about more than making babies even for prehistoric humans, according to an article in the Sunday Times:

Practices ranging from bondage to group sex, transvestism and the use of sex toys were widespread in primitive societies as a way of building up cultural ties.

The idea, based on a 30,000-year-old statue of a naked woman and an old stone phallus, is that early humans used sex to communicate. �Even back then, talk was cheap.

Discussions are underway about future uses of the now in orbit Orbital Express - a program led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Word is that NASA is interested in Orbital Express — actually two spacecraft: the robotic armed Astro vehicle and NextSat — for studying Mars return sample technologies and techniques and other return sample ideas.

On April 17, the Orbital Express system used its robotic right stuff to transfer propellant and a battery from one spacecraft to another.

The plan right now is to shut down Orbital Express mid-June, still loaded with lots of leftover fuel, and then deorbit the hardware.

Insiders tell me that NASA is pondering the idea of asking DARPA about taking the effort over, not only for practicing Mars return sample procedures, but other types of sample handling and in-space servicing concepts.

So stay-tuned for possible extended use of taxpayer dollars.

Las Cruces, New Mexico - The private rocket company, UP Aerospace, launched their suborbital booster April 28th from New Mexico’s Spaceport America. All indications suggest a highly successful flight and payload recovery - although severe bad weather in the area delayed retrieval operations until Monday.

The SpaceLoft XL was packed with experiments, including the cremated remains of Star Trek’s “Scotty” - actor James Doohan. Also onboard were the ashes of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper - as well as the cremated remains of more than 200 other people from all walks of life.

The SpaceLoft XL is built to carry scientific, educational, and entrepreneurial payloads up to 140 miles (225 kilometers) above Earth.

UP Aerospace is mounting its launch campaign from New Mexico’s Spaceport America north of Las Cruces.

As onlookers watched from a special eye witness locale nearly 4 miles away, the firm’s rocket shot quickly into the sky on its suborbital trajectory and nosed its way into space.

Spaceport America officials were delighted with Saturday’s liftoff - another step toward fully completing the sprawling facility intended to handle future passenger space travel operations too.

Going back decades, various projects have been devised to make rain, thwart hurricanes or otherwise control the weather. This week, China announced it will seed clouds in an effort to make rain before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, thereby resulting in sunshine during the summer games.

But controlling the weather remains a tall task and most efforts have failed. Or have they?

By accident, we humans—control freaks by nature—have actually managed weather-control on a truly grand scale, though the results of our efforts are a little beyond our immediate control. Global warming is dramatically affecting the climate, most experts agree, and climate in turn affects the weather. More rain here, less there, rising seas, all that.

Oh, and it’s been shown that jet contrails cause increased cloud cover and affect temperatures. To me, that’s weather. So there are two ways in which we’ve done it.

In recent years, scientists have been reflecting on how to reverse global warming. Among the crazy ideas: Put a bunch of microsatellites in space to reflect sunlight back to space; or inject tons of sulfur into the air , also to shade the globe from sunlight.

Humans have a habit of letting things run amok, however, and so even if these ideas could work, are they good ideas?

An article this week in the Wall Street Journal points out why such projects might be even crazier than they sound. Says James R. Fleming, a professor of science, technology and society at Colby College: “It is virtually impossible to imagine governments resisting the temptation to explore military uses of any potentially climate-altering technology.”

Oh, boy.

The Orbital Sciences-built Pegasus XL rocket that will launch a NASA satellite spaceward later today carries a special emblem to honor the victims of last week’s Virginia Tech shootings, according to mission managers.

NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite will head for orbit at about 4:23 p.m. EDT (2023 GMT, or 1:23 p.m. Local Time) with the emblem of Blacksburg, Virginia’s Virginia Tech university affixed to its air-launched Pegasus booster.

“We will be flying the Virginia Tech logo on the side of the Pegasus rocket in honor and memory of those who lost their lives there,” said James Russell, AIM principal investigator at Virginia’s Hampton University, Tuesday.

Thirty-two people were shot and killed, and others wounded, at Virginia Tech on April 16 by student Seung-Hui Cho, who then killed himself.

The AIM mission’s deputy principal investigator, Scott Bailey, is an assistant professor with the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech.

“We wanted to honor their contribution to this particular mission,” Bryan Baldwin, Pegasus launch vehicle program director for Orbital Science, said Tuesday.

NASA’s AIM mission will be air-launched from Orbital Science’s Stargazer L-1011 carrier aircraft in a space shot to be staged from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The piano-sized spacecraft is designed to spend two years studying the origins and behavior of odd noctilucent - or ‘night shining’ - clouds, which form at the very edge of space over Earth’s poles and can only be seen by ground observers after sunset.

Click here for live launch coverage of NASA’s AIM mission.

Due to the speed in which the news cycle changes, it’s often very difficult for us here at LiveScience to gauge just how inspiring, how interesting, how controversial the topics we cover actually are.

Every now and then, we seem to touch on a sore point. A topic that really gets stuck in the collective maw.

Case in point: Last week’s revelation that chimps, our long-distant relation in the evolutionary chain, had the gall to be more evolved than us!

Yes, not content to sit around grooming each other and grasping things with their feet, these simian self-starters decided that if anyone was going to get the upper hand on face-gurning and poo-throwing, it was going to be them.

Not so fast, responded many an irate reader: “When you figure out that we as humans rule the world,” e-mailed one, “maybe you will stop wasting your time trying to make your chimps out to be more than they are.”

Wrote another, “you refer to a “chimp/human” split 6 million years ago. If you read the Holy Bible, you will know that God created man in His own image and I can guarantee you that God is NOT a chimp!”

Or my personal favorite: “I believe you meant: ‘Chimps more evolved than journalists,’” sent by the oh-so-clever Lancelot Link.

I just don’t know what it is about the whole “man descended from apes” thing that causes such apoplexy. It’s not just that it’s heresy, it’s as if it’s personal, like we’ve ruined the family reunion, dredged up the family secret and shone a kleiglight on the red-headed kid stuck in a sea of brunettes.

Still, just when the righteous indignation reached its crescendo, Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report chimed in, telling his audience that when he’s driving home late at night he likes “to read LiveScience.com on my laptop computer because I know I won’t fall asleep at the wheel if I’m enraged.”

I mean, it’s not as if we’re a bunch of bible-bashing, secular humanists foisting our reason-driven political and ideological agendas on the public. Though I think maybe that’s how Stephen sees us …

Not at all, we’re just servants to empirically derived facts, that’s all. A motley crew of ink-stained wretches parsing the often byzantine intellectual landscapes that are scientific press releases and coaxing out news that you, our dear readers, can consume.

Despite the name-calling, the condemnation, the innumerable prayers being offered up for our souls, it’s nice to get the feedback. The statistics tell us we have oodles of visitors, but it’s nice to know they’re actually reading; that we’ve hit a nerve. That ideas cause people to question their beliefs is, we think, a good thing. It show us that people care, that they’re engaged.

Or in Stephen’s case, enraged.

Remember Snuppy, the first cloned dog? He’s two years old now, which in dog years is what, fourteen? Anyway, he’s to mate with Bona, another clone created last year, according to an Australian report.

You might remember Snuppy as the product of now-disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Su. Despite some of his other work being debunked, Snuppy remains a clone, other scientists have said.

The mating is intended to show whether clones can viably produce offspring. Copy Cat, the first cloned, um, cat, had kittens last year.

One of the world’s top experts in gravity is set to shuck off Earth’s one-G pull and experience microgravity for the first time.

Stephen Hawking, the renowned British cosmologist, will fly aboard the Zero Gravity Corporation’s (ZERO-G) aircraft on April 26, departing out of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A practice run of the flight is slated the day before, including use of a person that will double as Hawking.

On flight day, Hawking is to be taken out of his wheelchair and placed flat on the floor of the aircraft. “We’ll have four physicians onboard…close members of his team that normally take care of him,” said Peter Diamandis, CEO and co-founder of ZERO-G.

Diamandis said the plan is for Hawking to float free during a single microgravity-generating maneuver by the aircraft. “We will first see how he does,” he told SPACE.com, and then decide on a second and probably third parabola.

Spurred by a content with a $10,000 prize, a hacker broke into a Mac at the CanSecWest security conference in Canada. We Mac users have long bragged about how we don’t need virus software, but experts have been warning more and more that even a Mac needs protection.

The hacker got in via a wireless connection.

“You see a lot of people running OS X saying it’s so secure and frankly Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has,” said conference organizer Dragos Ruiu.

The BBC has an overview of Mac vulnerabilities. Also see this list of virus protection programs for the Mac.