In the seaside town of Shirahama, in Japan, one man thinks he knows what holds the key to everlasting life: jellyfish. Shin Kubota is a professor at Kyoto University's Seto Marine Biological Laboratory. He began studying the gelatinous sea creatures in 1979, and there's one type with which he's particularly preoccupied: the scarlet jellyfish.

we may see flying cars hovering over our skies. The first model for mass production and use may then be available in the market, according to a report.

A flying car called the Transition, of the Massachusetts-based firm Terrafugia, is designed to be driven both on the road and in the skies. It will go on sale in 2015, the same report said.It’s designed for pilots who want to be able to drive their planes home instead of parking them at the airport.

Google has just put some really neat 3D images, which you can explore, of the Moon and Mars in their Maps software.  This coincides with the 2nd anniversary of the NASA Curiosity rover  touching down on Martian soil.

In real life it would be quite some feat to be able to navigate to the Moon and the red planet and take a look around.  But doing so in Google Maps is pretty easy, as long as you know whereabouts to click.

First of all navigate to Google Maps. Now look down in the bottom left and you should see an icon, which lets you put the map in “Google Earth” mode. Enable that mode. Wait for the map to load in 3D and then begin zooming out. In fact you need to zoom out as far as you can possible do.

Once you have zoomed all the way out, wait a second and you should see options for “Moon” and “Mars” that should appear at the bottom of your screen. If nothing shows up, you will have to adjust your settings as you may have the “Explore” tab closed. To remedy this, just click the pair of upward arrows in the bottom right to expand the Explore drawer.  That’s it and I must say I love it!

Now we can view not just our planet, but the Moon and Mars too.  If you want to check out some cool things on Google Maps just navigate to Google Maps and check out whatever you like.  Now I’m sure I spotted a TARDIS around here somewhere.

As always, if you would like to leave a sensible comment, then please do so in the comments section below.

Nasa's next Martian rover will attempt to make oxygen on the surface of the red planet when it lands there in 2021. The rover will carry seven scientific projects, aimed at paving the way for future manned missions, seeking evidence of life and storing samples to be brought back in the future.

Among them is a device for turning the CO2 that dominates the thin Martian air into oxygen, this could support human life or make rocket fuel for return missions.
The rover will also carry two cameras and an experimental weather station among its 88lb (40kg) of instruments.

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong insisted he said, although the message back to Earth was slightly garbled.

It was an astounding achievement - coming less than 66 years after the Wright Brothers had made their first powered flight and less than a decade after President Kennedy had made his famous declaration at Rice University that the US would put a man on the Moon. It was such an achievement that even now some refuse to believe it took place.

Buzz Aldrin takes a hands-on approach to a Moon hoax moron.

If truth be told the Apollo 11 crew took risks that would probably not even be allowed by NASA today. On its way to the landing site Eagle missed its target, the guidance computer overloaded, and landed just within the allowable limits for fuel. Even getting out of the module was a squeeze, since the engineers hadn't taken into account the width of a redesigned spacesuit.

The Apollo missions took men further from Earth than they'd ever traveled before. Only men mind you – despite female pilots like Jerrie Cobb showing just as much proficiency in tests as the male astronauts NASA insisted that only military pilots could become astronauts back then. We've not sent humans of any gender any further since.

At the time of the Apollo 11 landing science fictions authors like Arthur C. Clarke were predicting lunar colonies by the 1980s and manned missions to Mars at the turn of the millennium. But these failed to come off thanks to a mixture of budget cuts, politics and advances in robotics.

One of the things NASA learned from the Apollo program was how difficult and costly it is to put humans into space and get them back safely. At the same time advances in computer technology and robotics made it cheaper than ever to replace fleshy explorers with digital ones, and that has been the path NASA has taken ever since for exploration.

Sure we had the space shuttle, and astronauts have been orbiting the Earth in low orbit on the International Space Station for nearly 14 years, and on US and Russian space stations before that. But that's been it for humans in space, now the machines have taken over.

There's a certain amount of sense in this approach. You can get a lot more science for your buck using machinery to do your exploring and there have been some notable successes, most recently the Curiosity rover that is currently meandering across Mars. Sending manned missions means less time on the surface than a robot, and a hell of a lot more risk.

It's unlikely that NASA will be putting men back on the Moon any time soon. It would be massively expensive to set up and even more so to supply, and there's not a lot of support for spending a few billion dollars on the project when we could be having foreign wars or banking bailouts delivering vital infrastructure on Earth instead.

That could change if China is serious about setting up a moon base. It's possible that's just chest puffing, but if it is true US politicians are likely to stump up the funding in the spirit of geopolitical competition. The same is true for Mars, particularly with players like Elon Musk getting in the game.

Musk said recently that SpaceX wouldn't exist without NASA and isn’t in competition with the agency. He wants to walk on the sands of Mars himself, and looks likely to do so. But he'll be relying on data from NASA to both land safely and stay alive once there.

The big advantage private operators like Musk have is that they can take a more relaxed view of human life. NASA will not countenance one-way missions, but the private sector will and there's a long list of people willing to make the trip already, not least former Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

You'd think that 45 years after the Moon landings humanity would have taken further strides into space, but 45 years from now it is perfectly possible that mankind will have established a colony on another planet or planetoid. It's certainly needed - you can't have a long-term civilization that stays on one planet after all – but it looks likely that the driving force behind such exploration won’t come from NASA. ®

NASA, which is scheduled to plummet a flying saucer-like test vehicle towards Hawaii in a bid to assist future human expeditions to Mars, has unveiled a "faster than light," Star Trek-like spaceship that could make interstellar travel a reality.

The space agency's "warp ship" was cleverly crafted by NASA engineer and physicist Harold White, and "Star Trek" graphic artist Mark Rademaker. Images of the prototype design were revealed at a SpaceVision 2013 conference, and have been posted on Rademaker's Flickr page and Facebook account. Titled as "NASA's New Design for a Warp Drive Ship," it's no surprise that the images almost immediately went viral.

"The Flickr views went from 119 yesterday to 2 million today," Rademaker told NBC News.

Rademaker based his creation off the concept known as Alcubierre warp drive, an idea first put forth by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, which suggests that faster-than-light travel might be achieved by manipulating spacetime both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

What was supposed to be a contribution to the Star Trek Ships of the Line 2014 calendar has now been altered to a ring-ship design that could provide means for manned missions to Mars or other worlds.

"I could have walked away, but I wanted this to be really good, so I put in an extra three months of spare time, with the new images as the result," Rademaker said.

The hypothetical design, dubbed IXS Enterprise, includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble. According to White, iO9 reports, space vehicles equipped with warp drives could attain such remarkable speeds by making the empty space behind a starship expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction - passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

White speculates that the innovative concept could take a spacecraft to the star Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks - even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

These ambitions have yet to be considered realistic, as scientists still haven't found a way to warp spacetime. However, according to The Space Reporter, NASA officials at Johnson Space Center said last year that White and his team could soon create a warp-drive interferometer capable of finding tiny warp bubbles in spacetime.

NASA will test out new space exploration technology – including some used for asteroid landings – by having its teams live on the ocean floor off Florida coast for extended periods of time in two upcoming summer missions.

The so-called ‘aquanauts’ will only get down to about 19 meters below, but that is enough to perform the crucial task of assessing new gear that will help the agency’s astronauts live in orbit more comfortably and even assist future asteroid landings and explorations.

The missions will include extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), simulated spacewalks and other activities – all performed underwater, about 10km off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

Aside from the primary objectives, the assignments will also test for health and behavioral issues, as well as evaluate the usefulness of ‘telementoring’, in which the astronaut is given instructions by voice or video.

The Extreme Environment Mission Operations program (NEEMO) has taken charge of organizing the upcoming missions. Its project Manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Bill Todd, has admitted to journalists in a statement that, “It is both challenging and exciting for our astronaut crews to participate in these undersea missions in preparation for spaceflight.”

Todd explained that only the closest-matching conditions that accurately replicate the conditions astronauts are to face in space are good enough for the task, as “the extreme environment of life undersea is as close to being in space as possible.”

The EVAs, according to NASA officials commenting on the NEEMO 18 and NEEMO 19 missions, will“focus on evaluating man-machine work systems and EVA tools and techniques for exploration tasks in varying levels of gravity ranging from that of asteroids to the gravity of Martian moons and Mars itself.”

The NASA missions will actually be an international effort comprising Japanese, European and Canadian astronauts from their respective space agencies – all professionals and occupying key positions in their scientific fields.