The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is home to the most powerful laser on the planet. It was intended to be developed into humanity's first break-even fusion generator, but it hasn't happened yet, and the new plan is to slow down the pace of fusion research. Again.

While we'll never really be happy about the retirement of the space shuttle, NASA is completely over it and looking towards the future of space transportation, which is going to be commercial. The agency announced today its selection of three companies which it hopes to certify to take its astronauts up to the ISS and back within the next five years.

Not all of us are clever enough to jump into a fridge when we see a nuke heading our way. Post-nuke, then, we're left with two options: succumbing to radiation sickness, or morphing into radiation zombies. A new medication called Ex-RAD now presents a third option, which is to take it and then be just fine afterwards.

Space buffs can be hard to buy for. I mean, it's not like you can just run out to space and pick something up: getting stuff into space, and then back again, is very difficult and frequently very expensive. We're not talking about "space gifts" like telescopes and model rockets and that sort of thing, but rather, actual gifts that have spent time out in the cosmos. And some of them, remarkably, are even affordable.