NASA announced Friday that the private company, formally named Space Exploration Technologies Corp., will aim to launch its 18-story Falcon 9 rocket Feb. 7, pending completion of final safety reviews, testing and verification.

In a statement, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the mission "will mark a historic milestone in the future of spaceflight.”

It’s also a mission that takes the company one step closer to cashing in on a $1.6-billion contract with NASA. The contract is to haul cargo in 12 flights to the space station for NASA.

At least 5.5 million people have been tortured and murdered within the Congo since 1998. The Congo is the most dangerous place to be a woman or girl in the World. Men and boys are also targeted and terrorized.

The most effective tactics used are rape and murder. Using rape as tactic of war is not only physically terrorizing, it is physiologically so damaging that the communities break apart into a form of social chaos, leaving no one to resist or challenge these armed groups.

This method of war is recognized by the UN as a strategic tactic, Amnesty International has stated that rape is cheaper and more effective than bullets

Armed groups Ransack villages for men and boys forcing them to kill their mothers and rape their sisters, so they have no one to returned home to. Many of the armed groups are controlled by fear and are occupied by men who have been forced to enlist. The men within these armed groups are unpaid and are often starving – essentially they are armed slaves. in order to survive they loot villages for money and food.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them."

The New America Foundation's Open Network Initiative, a US State Department-funded project to build an "Internet in a suitcase" that can be dropped into repressive zones where protesters need network access and the state is trying to take it away. The project -- a very complex piece of technology -- has gotten to the point where it needs a live test, and lucky for the Open Network engineers, Occupy DC is just down the street, and that's a great testbed.

A team consisting of researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, Los Angeles, took the fruit fly ( (Drosophila melanogaster) and tweaked a gene in their intestinal stem cells known as dPGC-1, which is also found in human DNA and known as PGC-1. This resulted in the aging of the fruit flies' intestines being delayed and their lifespan being extended by as much as 50 percent.

In flies and mammals, the PGC-1 gene regulates the number of mitochondria within an animal's cells. Mitochondria are often referred to as "cellular power plants" because they convert sugars and fats from food into the energy for cellular functions. Since previous studies had shown that calorie-restricted animals have greater numbers of mitochondria in their cells, the researchers set about investigating what would happen when the PGC-1 is forced into overdrive.

Using genetic engineering techniques to boost the fruit fly equivalent of the PGC-1 gene resulted in the same kind of effects seen in organisms on calorie restricted diets - namely, greater numbers of mitochondria and more energy production. When the activity of the gene was accelerated in stem and progenitor cells of the flies' intestine, which serve to replenish intestinal tissues, these cellular changes corresponded with better health and longer lifespan.

Depending on the method and extent to which the activity of the gene was altered, the flies lived between 20 and 50 percent longer than normal.

Artist Andy Gracie is attempting to breed a strain of fruit fly that could survive on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The first stage of his work, The Quest for Drosophila Titanus, is part of an exhibition currently touring the UK.

North Korea has announced that the country’s supreme leader Kim Jong Il died on a train trip on Saturday. State TV reports Kim died of physical and mental over-work on his way to give “field guidance.”

1. Nobody found Mayan ruins in the U.S. state of Georgia. An article posted on The Examiner claimed this was the case. That article is full of it. So full of it that even the scientist cited in the article is (in a more polite way) publicly calling out The Examiner for being full of it. Mark Williams of the University of Georgia does do research on North American archaeology. He has spent 20 years excavating sites in Georgia's Oconee River valley. But these sites are not Mayan. Instead, they're part of what are broadly known as "Mississippian cultures," a conglomeration of ancient North American peoples who built a lot of earth mound structures and whose cultures are distinct from those of the Mayans and other Central Americans.

2. Do not automatically trust anything you read on The Examiner website. The Examiner is a content farm that allows anybody to write whatever they want about anything with absolutely zero oversight or fact-checking. The guy who wrote the bogus story on Mayan artifacts in Georgia appears to have just made up the entire Mississippian/Mayan connection out of his own imagination. As archaeologist Mark Williams told ArtInfo, "No archaeologist would defend this flight of fancy." (Again, this is polite scientist speak for, "Oh, my god. That guy is full of it.")

Give young people accurate information, and they will use it to make better decisions that result in less harm to themselves, because teens, like everybody else, do not actually want to get hurt or become addicts.

A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together".

It was made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

"When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them. He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between," Mr Priest said.

Toys manufactured in various countries and later imported to the US have to be taxed. And the taxes for each kind of toy vary, depending on the description. Specifically, "dolls" are toys that represent some sort of human, and "toys" are representations that are non-human, such as robots or animals. And it turns out, the non-human toys are taxed at a much lower rate than the human ones, 6.8 percent versus 12 percent. Hence, two Marvel lawyers are arguing that Mutant action figures are not actually human — and therefor shouldn't be taxed as much. And thus unknowingly unleashing the age-old Mutant debate that has long been a part of the X-Men's world.