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A six-passenger spaceship owned by an offshoot of Virgin Group fired its rocket engine in flight for the first time on Monday, a key step toward the start of commercial service in about a year, Virgin owner Richard Branson said. The powered test flight over California's Mojave Desert lasted 16 seconds and broke the sound barrier. "It was stunning," Branson told Reuters. "You could see it very, very clearly. Putting the rocket and the spaceship together and seeing it perform safely, it was a critical day." The spaceship and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at 7 a.m. PDT (10.00 a.m. EDT), heading to an altitude of about 46,000 feet, where SpaceShipTwo was released.   Two pilots then ignited the ship's rocket engine and climbed another 10,000 feet, reaching Mach 1.2 in the process. Additional test flights are planned before the spaceship will fly even faster, eventually reaching altitudes that exceed 62 mi

Nine years after he placed the first telephone call, Alexander Graham Bell tried another experiment: he recorded his voice on a wax-covered cardboard disc on April 15, 1885, and gave it an audio signature: "Hear my voice - Alexander Graham Bell." The flimsy disc was silent for 128 years as part of the Smithsonian Museum's collection of early recorded sound, until digital imaging, computer science, a hand-written transcript and a bit of archival detective work confirmed it as the only known recording of Bell's voice. Carlene Stephens, curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American history, first saw this disc and nearly 400 other audio artifacts donated by Bell when she joined the museum in 1974, but she didn't dare play them then. "Their experimental nature and fragile condition ... made them unsuitable for playback," Stephens said by email.   "We recognized these materials were significant to the early history of sound recordin

Is nanomedicine the next big thing? A growing number of top drug companies seem to think so. The ability to encapsulate potent drugs in tiny particles measuring billionths of a meter in diameter is opening up new options for super-accurate drug delivery, increasing precision hits at the site of disease with, hopefully, fewer side effects.   Three deals struck this year by privately held Bind Therapeutics, together worth nearly $1 billion if experiments are successful, highlight a new interest in using such tiny carriers to deliver drug payloads to specific locations in the body. U.S.-based Bind is one of several biotechnology firms that are luring large pharmaceutical makers with a range of smart drug nanotechnologies, notably against cancer. And nanomedicine is also being put to work in diagnosis, with tiny particles used to improve imaging in scanners, as well as rapidly detecting some serious infections. In future, researchers hope to combine both treatment and diagnostics i

A solar-powered airplane that developers hope to eventually pilot around the world took off early on Friday from San Francisco Bay on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States with no fuel but the sun's energy. The plane, dubbed the Solar Impulse, departed shortly after 6 a.m. local time from Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport near the south end of San Francisco, heading first to Phoenix on a slow-speed flight expected to take 15 to 20 hours.   The spindly looking plane barely hummed as it took flight in the still northern California morning as the sun was just beginning to peek out over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the east. After additional stops in Dallas, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., with pauses at each destination to wait for favorable weather, the flight team hopes to conclude the plane's cross-country voyage in about two months at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Swiss pilots and co-founders of the project, Bertrand

Boeing Co's X-51A Waverider made history this week when it achieved the longest hypersonic flight by a jet-fuel powered aircraft, flying for 3-1/2 minutes at five times the speed of sound, the U.S. Air Force said on Friday. The last of four unmanned experimental military aircraft built by Boeing flew for at a top speed of Mach 5.1 over the Pacific Ocean on May 1, the Air Force said. The total flight covered 230 nautical miles in just over six minutes before the hypersonic cruiser plunged into the ocean.   "It was a full mission success," said Charlie Brink, who runs the X-51A program for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate. The Air Force said it was the longest of the four X-51A test flights and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever. The technology opens the door to future practical uses for hypersonic jet-fueled aircraft. A hypersonic aircraft developed by NASA used hydrogen as a fuel to fly briefly at even higher speeds in 2

The flight from San Fransisco to Phoenix took 18 hours and 18 minutes on Saturday - and didn't use a drop of fuel. _0"> A solar-powered airplane that developers hope eventually to pilot around the world landed safely in Phoenix on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States using only the sun's energy, project organizers said.   The plane, dubbed the Solar Impulse, took 18 hours and 18 minutes to reach Phoenix on the slow-speed flight, completing the first of five legs with planned stops in Dallas, St. Louis and Washington on the way to a final stop in New York. The spindly-looking plane barely hummed as it took off Friday morning from Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport near San Francisco. It landed in predawn darkness at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, according to a statement on the Solar Impulse's website. The flight crew plans pauses at each stop to wait for favorable weather. It hopes to reach John F. Kennedy Inte

The flight from San Fransisco to Phoenix took 18 hours and 18 minutes on Saturday - and didn't use a drop of fuel. _0"> A solar-powered airplane that developers hope eventually to pilot around the world landed safely in Phoenix on the first leg of an attempt to fly across the United States using only the sun's energy, project organizers said.   The plane, dubbed the Solar Impulse, took 18 hours and 18 minutes to reach Phoenix on the slow-speed flight, completing the first of five legs with planned stops in Dallas, St. Louis and Washington on the way to a final stop in New York. The spindly-looking plane barely hummed as it took off Friday morning from Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport near San Francisco. It landed in predawn darkness at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, according to a statement on the Solar Impulse's website. The flight crew plans pauses at each stop to wait for favorable weather. It hopes to reach John F. Kennedy Inte

A 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton from the Gobi Desert that was smuggled to the United States in pieces and auctioned for more than $1 million was returned on Monday by the U.S. government to Mongolia. The huge Tyrannosaurus bataar's skull was on display at a repatriation ceremony near the United Nations in New York, where officials of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) formally turned over the nearly complete skeleton to Mongolian officials.   Mongolia demanded the return of the 8-foot-tall (2.4 meter), 24-foot-long (7.3 meter), mostly reconstructed cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex last year after commercial paleontologist Eric Prokopi sold it at a Manhattan auction last spring for $1.05 million. Prokopi, based in Gainesville, Florida, bought and sold whole and partial fossilized dinosaur skeletons. U.S. authorities filed charges against Prokopi in October and seized the skeleton, which is comprised of f

NASA plans to send two astronauts aboard the International Space Station out on a spacewalk on Saturday to try to fix an ammonia leak in a cooling system on one of the station's solar arrays, the U.S. space agency said on Friday. _0"> The crew spotted a steady stream of small, white frozen ammonia flakes floating away from a coolant line outside the orbital outpost on Thursday. Mission managers reviewed images and data gathered overnight and said on Friday they tentatively planned to send American astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn out on Saturday morning to try to stop the leak by replacing a pump on the cooling system. "The crew is not in danger, and the station continues to operate normally otherwise," NASA said in a news release.   Ammonia is used to cool the power systems that operate the solar arrays, which provide electricity to the station. Each of the eight solar arrays has its own independent cooling system. The leak is on the far left si

A pair of spacewalking astronauts wrapped up a hastily planned repair job on Saturday to replace a suspect coolant pump needed to keep the International Space Station at full power. NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn put on spacesuits and left the space station's airlock shortly before 9 a.m. EDT to attempt to stem an ammonia coolant leak that cropped up on Thursday.   Over the next four hours, they installed a spare pump, then positioned themselves to check for signs of escaping ammonia ice crystals when the system was turned back on. "No flakes," Cassidy reported to flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Engineers will monitor the system over the next several days and beyond to make sure the pump replacement fixed the problem. "We certainly have come a long way in identifying a potential source," said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias as the astronauts returned to the station's airlock. The entire spacewalk lasted

A melt of ice on Greenland and Antarctica is likely to be less severe than expected this century, limiting sea level rise to a maximum of 69 cm (27 inches), an international study said on Tuesday. Even so, such a rise could dramatically change coastal environments in the lifetimes of people born today with ever more severe storm surges and erosion, according to the ice2sea project by 24, mostly European, scientific institutions.   Some scientific studies have projected sea level rise of up to 2 meters by 2100, a figure that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a worst case that would swamp large tracts of land from Bangladesh to Florida. Ice2sea, a four-year project to narrow down uncertainties of how melting ice will pour water into the oceans, found that sea levels would rise by between 16.5 and 69 cm under a scenario of moderate global warming this century. "This is good news" for those who have feared sharper rises, David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic

The U.S. government believes a Chinese missile launch this week was the first test of a new interceptor that could be used to destroy a satellite in orbit, one U.S. defense official told Reuters on Wednesday. China launched a rocket into space on Monday but no objects were placed into orbit, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. The object re-entered Earth's atmosphere above the Indian Ocean.   "We tracked several objects during the flight but did not observe the insertion of any objects into orbit and no objects associated with this launch remain in space," said Lieutenant Colonel Monica Matoush, a Pentagon spokeswoman. The rocket reached 10,000 km (6,250 miles) above Earth, the highest suborbital launch seen worldwide since 1976, according to Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. China has said the rocket, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in western China, carried a science payload to study the earth's magnetosphere

After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed. The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person. The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.   Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs. Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost

President Barack Obama learned on Monday what can happen to presidents caught up in allegations of scandal: they have to address them instead of anything else. It happened when the president had to interrupt his news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain to answer questions about the widening investigation into the Benghazi attacks in Libya and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.   By the end of the day he was facing a third major problem when the Associated Press said the Department of Justice had secretly seized some of its reporters' phone records last year. It is all leading to comparisons with the second term of President Bill Clinton, in which his agenda was severely disrupted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Obama, unlike Clinton, has not been accused of personal misconduct. But his ability to steer the Washington "conversation" could be compromised. "I think the IRS scandal comes at

President Barack Obama will announce in the next few weeks how many combat troops the United States will leave in Afghanistan in 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday. _0"> Obama has set next year as the target for withdrawing most troops but the decision is a delicate one as sufficient forces must stay behind to train and support Afghan forces and carry out some operations.   "Very shortly, not too long from now, the president does intend to make public what his plans are for post-2014," Kerry told reporters. Kerry declined to discuss how many troops might remain but said: "He (Obama) is committed to supporting the Afghan military beyond 2014." U.S. lawmakers have been pressing military commanders and the Obama administration to release recommendations for the size of a force to remain in Afghanistan. U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States to root out al Qaeda and its Taliban

The Associated Press said on Monday the U.S. government secretly seized telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period in 2012, describing the acts as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations. AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency's website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the news agency and its reporters.   "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters," Pruitt said in the letter addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder. An AP story on the records seizure said the government would not say why it sought them. But it noted that U.S. officials have previously said the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia was conducting a criminal investigation into information contained i

The White House, under pressure from reports that the Justice Department seized Associated Press phone records, said on Tuesday that President Barack Obama is seeking to balance support for a free press with the need to investigate leaks of classified information. _0"> "The president believes that the press as a rule needs to have an unfettered ability to pursue investigative journalism," White House spokesman Jay Carney told a news briefing.   "He is also committed, as president and as a citizen, to the proposition that we cannot allow classified information, that can do harm to our national security interests or do harm to individuals, to be leaked," Carney said. Beyond that, he said the White House could not comment on the specific investigation that provoked the reported seizure of journalists' phone records. (Reporting By Laura MacInnis, Mark Felsenthal and Jeff Mason; Editing by Sandra Maler and Vicki Allen)

An outspoken freshman senator with a record of taking on Wall Street wants financial regulators and federal prosecutors to provide an economic justification for allowing big banks to settle investigations without admitting any wrongdoing. In a May 14 letter to the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren asks the agencies to provide her with details of how they weigh the costs and benefits of settling versus trying cases.   "If a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial - either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources - the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer," Warren wrote. Concerns about whether regulators are properly weighing the costs and benefits of their policies have typically bee

The top Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee said on Tuesday it was time for the acting head of the Internal Revenue Service, Steven Miller, to leave his post amid a growing controversy over IRS scrutiny of conservative groups. _0"> "He basically misled me. I really think it is time for him to leave," Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah told reporters.   The remarks came as the Senate Finance Committee and at least two U.S. House of Representatives panels are launching probes. The panels plan to look into the tax agency's use of search terms such as "Tea Party" in targeting tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups for closer scrutiny. (Reporting by Kim Dixon; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Paul Simao)

Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, who is considered crucial for the success of an immigration law overhaul, on Tuesday vowed to fight for a biometric system to track foreigners leaving the country after a Senate panel rejected the provision, in part because it was too costly. Rubio and seven other Republican and Democratic senators, known as the "gang of eight," have crafted a sweeping bill that would revamp the immigration system, increase work visas and put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.   In its second day of examining the legislation, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the Republican amendment that would have made it easier for the government to track illegal immigrants and other foreigners who have overstayed their visas. The amendment would have required a biometric system, which uses technology such as iris scans and fingerprinting, at every point of entry in the United States before illegal immigrants would be eligible for

The Senate Agriculture Committee approved a farm bill on Tuesday, costing $500 billion over a decade, that would expand the scope of the federally subsidized crop insurance program and modestly trim spending on food stamps for the poor. The 1,000-page bill now goes to the Senate floor, where a vote could be called as soon as this month.   The House Agriculture Committee was scheduled to draft its farm bill on Wednesday. The new five-year farm law is months overdue after an election-year deadlock in 2012. Expansion of crop insurance in the Senate bill would be part of a broad remodeling of farm subsidies. Most notably the $5 billion a year direct-payment subsidy to farmers, long a target of reformers, would end. Separate insurance programs to guarantee revenue to cotton and peanut growers would be created, as well as an insurance program to compensate growers if revenue from other crops drop by more than 10 percent. Agriculture Committee chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of M