A nearly two-decades old bit of space junk has been found in the Australian outback.

A solid rocket motor casing from a U.S. Delta 2 launch vehicle nearly 18 years after it reentered was found last July during a routine muster of cattle on a three-million-acre pastoral property.

First spotted by air from a Cessna aircraft flying over the property, the debris was later identified using a serial number - traced to the motor casing of a Delta 2 booster used on June 12, 1990 to deliver the Indian INSAT-1D into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

According to NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News, the object joins similar solid rocket motor casings found in Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Argentina during the past several years.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took some time to update their orbiting laboratory’s antivirus software to ensure their laptops are safeguarded against intrusions like one caught in July.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko spent some time today updating the antivirus protection software on laptop computers in the station’s Russian segment, said NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The activity is one that would be familiar to computer owners on Earth with machines that use constantly updated commercial antivirus software, he told me.

“It’s a continuing process,” said Humphries, who mentioned the upgrade during NASA’s daily mission commentary.

The updates are aimed at ensuring the space station’s computers continue to quarantine viruses like W32.Gammima.AG, a Windows-based worm detected and properly quarantined in the outpost’s computers in late July. The low-risk virus, which is designed to steal passwords for online computer games, was first reported on July 25 after being detected by the station’s protection software. It did not infect the station’s command and control computers and posed no threat to the orbiting lab, though NASA engineers were hoping to find out exactly how the virus reached the station.

The space station’s various international laboratories and modules rely on a network of more than 50 computers for daily operations.

• BLOG - Where’s Tech Support in Space
• Video - Life inside the Jules Verne Cargo Ship
• Video - Suborbital Rocket Test Explodes

LOL. That’s the first and hopefully last time I start a blog that way. But c’mon.

The claim of three guys that they had remains of Bigfoot was, we all knew, silly. So they did DNA testing and … get this: Bigfoot is either a human or opossum (which is about the size of a house cat). Or, as they now claim, the DNA testing wasn’t done right. Yeah, that’s it!

Let’s just put this story to bed right there, unless you want to read the real story behind the stunt.

Scientists plan to make “cybrids” by putting human DNA into cow eggs.

The British government gave the go-ahead this week for two separate groups to experiment with the process. Scientists will “inject human DNA into empty eggs from cows, to create embryos known as cytoplasmic hybrids that are 99.9 per cent human in genetic terms,” according to The Times of London.

The government had planned to ban such cybrid research, but scientists protested, leading to the reversal.

U.S. Senators Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) lashed out today. Last November, they introduced the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act, S. 2358, to prevent the crossing of humans and animals because they say it unethically “[blurs] the line between human and animal.”

The argument is an emotional and speculative one, scientists would say, conjuring images of lab freaks gone wild that no reputable researcher envisions. Nobody has suggested the cybrids be raised and let loose in London (or Manhattan, for that matter, where the movie will likely be set. I mean, whoever heard of London being taken over by cybrids?).

“Creating human-animal hybrids could irrevocably harm the basic human genetic makeup and intentionally or unintentional change what it means to be human,” Brownback said in a statement today. “What was once only science fiction is now becoming a reality, and we need to ensure that experimentation and subsequent ramifications do not outpace ethical discussion and societal decisions. History does not look kindly on those who violate the dignity of the human person. The UK’s decision to allow the creation of human-animal hybrids is short-sighted, and further underscores our need here at home to enact the common-sense Brownback-Landrieu Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act.”

If Brownback and Landrieu have their way, science might proceed quite differently on the two sides of the pond.

“Here in the United States, we simply cannot open the door to the unethical blending of humans and animals, which the British government seems intent on doing,” Landrieu said. “It creates an unnatural species and is a clear line we cannot cross. This unsound science also presents potential global health hazards due to increased risk of disease spreading to humans from animals.”

Meanwhile, U.S. scientists have produced embryos that are clones of two men, another possible step toward useful stem cells for research.

They used “ordinary cells from an adult human can be used to make cloned embryos mature enough to produce stem cells, the researchers said. But because they haven’t produced those stem cells yet, experts reacted coolly,” according to AP.

All this sort of work is intended to lead, eventually, to disease cures by creating alternatives to human embryonic stem cells that will assist in other research. Embryonic stem cells can become any cell in the body, so the idea is that tapping their potential could help build replacement organs or infuse a person with fresh brain or blood cells or simply provide vital information about how diseases work. Much of the potential remains unproven and cures for intractable ills could be years away. But scientists agree that embryonic stem cells are a crucial line of research to pursue in efforts to cure Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and others.

• Lab Freaks: Vote for Your Favorite

Lab freakology has reached a new level.

A fluorescent pig in China has reportedly given birth to “piglets that share their mother’s transgenic characteristic after she mated with an ordinary pig,” according to Reuters.

Liu Zhonghua, a professor at Northeast Agricultural University, is quoted in state media as saying, “The mouths, trotters and tongues of the two piglets glow green under ultraviolet light, which indicates the technology to breed transgenic pigs via cell nuclear transfer is mature.”

The offbeat breeding is not done so the pigs can be found at night, insofar as we know. Rather, it’s part of a larger effort to push the envelope of transgenic breeding and, ultimately, grow human organs in pigs for transplant.

• Vote: The Freakiest Lab Freaks

It isn’t exactly raining iguanas, but the chill in Florida is causing the tree-dwelling creatures to fall to the ground.

Though they lie on the ground looking dead, most aren’t, according to this Miami Herald article.

”We have found dozens on the bike path after a major cold snap,” said Robert Yero, park manager at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. “When they warm up in the sun, they come back to life.”

Perfect time to bring up the question: Can it rain fish?

The three astronauts living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are a long way from home this holiday season, but are apparently awash in digital cheer thanks to some electronic Christmas cards from the people of Earth.

Expedition 16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineers Dan Tani and Yuri Malenchenko have received more than 6,000 electronic cards bearing good wishes from around the globe via a free NASA portal. You can too by clicking here.

“If those greetings had been sent by Christmas cards, the postal sacks would have weighed about 200 pounds,” the agency said Friday. “Just the postage would have cost more than $1,500.”

The Expedition 16 astronauts are only the latest space crew to spend the holiday season in orbit.

According to NASA’s records, the first astronauts to spend Christmas in space were the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968, who beamed a special message back to Earth during their historic first flight around the moon.

NASA’s next batch of Christmas spaceflyers flew in 1973 during the fourth Skylab mission. The astronauts assembled an ad-hoc Christmas tree out of food cans to mark the holiday.

NASA’s first holiday astronaut of the space shuttle era was John Blaha, who spread yuletide cheer aboard Russia’s Space Station Mir in 1996. Shuttle astronauts marked the holiday in 1999 during the STS-103 mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, to date the only orbiter mission to spend Christmas in space.

The first ISS astronauts began spending the holidays in orbit in 2000 during Expedition 1. Three years later, the Expedition 6 crew would slather red and white frosting over Twinkies as an impromptu Christmas cake.

Click here to learn more about the history of Christmas in space.

Click here to send your own message to the Expedition 16 crew aboard the space station and view the astronaut’s holiday video.

For a sample of some of the thousands of messages already received by the station crew, click here.

New Zealand skipper Pete Bethune and his wife have mortgaged their house to finance a trip around the world. They’ll try to set a record by doing the trip really fast. The normalcy of this story stops there.

Their ship, which runs on biodiesel, will also be powered in part by human fat. It’s all a stunt to showcase alternative energy.

From the Daily Mail: “Demonstrating further commitment to the cause, Bethune underwent liposuction and donated enough to produce 100ml of biofuel, while two other, larger volunteers also had the procedure, making a total of 10 litres of human fat.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force pulled a green stunt of its own this week, marking the 104th anniversary of powered flight by completing the first transcontinental flight of an aircraft using a blend of regular aviation and synthetic fuel. Those wild and crazy military types!

If you have trouble finding your cat at night, perhaps a designer fluorescent cat would be the pet for you.

South Korean researchers say they’ve cloned cats by manipulating a certain gene that happens to deal with some otherwise inhibited fluorescence. The side effect: the cats “glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.”

Other than the novelty, why should we care?

“The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as human,” officials said in a statement.

See other glowing research results as you vote for the Freakiest Lab Animal.

Those weird features on Mars recently surveyed by NASA’s super-powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have uprooted Arthur C. Clarke’s view that vegetation might be at work on the red planet.

Back in 2001, I reported that Clarke saw in Mars Global Surveyor snapshots “extraordinary features” that couldn’t be explained. The noted science fact/fiction writer said signs of vegetation seem apparent. One image even showed what appeared to him looking like Banyan trees, he said.

In a bit of added humor, Clarke decided that Mars must be inhabited “by a race of demented landscape gardeners.”

Here are those stories:

http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/clarke_mars_010601.html

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/clarke_mars_banyon_010709-1.html

But now MRO imagery has found that channels carved out by escaping gas form a “starburst” pattern, radiating out into feathery extensions.

At this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Candice Hansen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory detailed new looks at Mars morphology, reporting on “lace” and “lizard skin” and branching patterns called “spiders”.

Check out: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003443_0980

Turns out that those Clarke Banyan tree-like features are similar channels carved into the ground, Hansen has advised me, adding: “Arthur C. Clarke writes great science fiction.”