Reporting from Washington and Cape Canaveral, Fla. - President Obama outlined a dramatic new mission for NASA on Monday, getting the agency out of the rocket-launching business in favor of an aggressive expansion of research and development that would steer the agency away from the launch pad and instead put its engineers in the laboratory, where they would design futuristic vehicles capable of going beyond the moon.

As expected, his budget plan would cancel NASA's Constellation program and its goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. The troubled rocket program, crippled by funding shortfalls and technical problems, ultimately would cost taxpayers at least $11.5 billion as it is, including $2.5 billion to terminate it.

Instead of pursuing Constellation, NASA would pay for commercial rocket companies to resupply the International Space Station over the next decade while its own workers develop new engines and rockets that NASA officials hope will enable a vast expansion of its future manned-space efforts.

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Earthquake science can be used in markets because of time fractals The earthquake science working for markets is an opinion as old as the butterfly effect and the study on Sun cycles influencing markets.

Xavier Gabaix, assistant professor of economics at MIT, did not say that earthquake causes market behaviour, but that large-scale events in the stock market adhere to distinct patterns which can be witnessed in seismic activity.

The MIT professor suggests that economists should borrow the earthquake math from scientists who model natural disasters, the power curve mathematics.

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Last year, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine asked whether the children of Alzheimer's patients should find out whether they were genetically predisposed to the same fate. Researchers concluded that people who learned their genetic status could take the information in stride as long as they received appropriate counseling.

The conclusion was based on an analysis of 162 volunteers who took a blood test to see whether they had the e4 variant of the apolipoprotein E gene, which has been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. Some volunteers got their results; others didn't. But members of both groups were equally likely to display signs of anxiety or depression.

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NASA says it will study the earthquake faults around Haiti using a jet equipped with an airborne radar system A NASA Gulfstream III jet with the radar equipment aboard left the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert on Monday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Tuesday.

The instrument, called the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, is intended to the installed on pilotless drone aircraft, but is being demonstrated on a conventional jet for this mission. The overflights of Hispaniola, the island where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located, were added to a previously scheduled three-week radar mission to Central America.

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NASA's Mars rover Spirit isn't dead yet, but it has reached its final resting place. After months of unsuccessful attempts at freeing the rover from a sandtrap.

NASA on Tuesday said it has decided to make the best of the situation and instruct it to conduct scientific experiments from its current location.

The rover became trapped last April when one of its wheels broke through a crusty Martian surface and dug into the fine, powdery soil beneath it.

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 At least three newly discovered genetic variants may contribute to pancreatic cancer risk, according to a new study. Researchers say it’s the largest study to date to identify potential genetic risk factors for the mysterious disease.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, with 200,000 new cases diagnosed each year worldwide, and nearly that many deaths caused by the disease each year. Statistics show that less than 5% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are alive more than five years after diagnosis.

Risk factors for pancreatic cancers include diabetes, obesity, smoking, and a family history of pancreatic cancer.
 Although genetics appears to play a major role in pancreatic cancer risk, researchers say only a small percentage of hereditary pancreatic cancer cases can be explained by currently known genes associated with the disease.

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For years, hype has built around personalized medicine - a tantalizing future in which insights gleaned from genetic tests will result in individualized treatment, guiding the drugs people take and at what doses. Now, moves by two large companies that focus on controlling drug costs are leading the way for the field to become a routine part of medicine.

CVS Caremark, the Woonsocket, R.I., company that is the largest provider of prescriptions in the United States, said late last year it expects to begin offering genetic testing services to clients of its pharmacy benefit management program this year. It also invested in Generation Health, a company with offices in Waltham that is focused on helping companies manage costs and improve health by using genetic information.

A CVS competitor, Medco Health Solutions, offers genetic tests to guide the use of two drugs and plans to add four more tests this year. Medco has 270 clients, representing 7 million people, participating in its personalized medicine program.

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NASA has exciting news! EarthKAM has just launched a new beta version of its Web site. Middle school educators are invited to join NASA for the International Space Station Winter 2010 Mission from Feb. 2-5, 2010, and be beta testers of the new site and software. Find out more about this exciting opportunity that allows students to take pictures of Earth from a digital camera aboard the International Space Station.

ISS EarthKAM is a NASA-sponsored project that provides stunning, high-quality photographs of Earth taken from the space shuttle and the space station. Since 1996, ISS EarthKAM students have taken thousands of photographs of Earth by using the World Wide Web to direct a digital camera on select spaceflights and, currently, on the International Space Station. 

Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful.

The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-affiliated body.

All the mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 - hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.

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NASA is to find out whether its Mars exploration spacecraft, the Phoenix Lander, is still working or not, according to news reports on Wednesday. The Phoenix Lander was landed on Mars on May 2008 in looking for possible lives. After almost half a year of searching, the spacecraft has presumably ended its own life.

To continue its researching, NASA has now begun to make new efforts to know whether the Phoenix Lander is still in effect. "We have no expectations that Phoenix has survived...but we certainly want to have a look," said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA started Mars exploration from early as 1964 and has 46 years of exploring experience until this year.