Dennis Tito, an American engineer, and multimillionaire was the first space tourist to fund his own trip into space. In 2001, he spent nearly eight days in orbit as a crew member of ISS EP-1, a visiting mission to the International Space Station, after being accepted by the Russian Federal Space Agency as a candidate for a commercial spaceflight. Tito met criticism from NASA before the launch, primarily from Daniel Goldin, at that time the Administrator of NASA, who considered it inappropriate for a tourist to take a ride into space.      In the decade since Dennis Tito journeyed to the International Space Station, eight private citizens have paid the $20 million fee to travel to space, but it is believed that this number could increase fifteen-fold by 2020. A web-based survey suggested that over 70% of those surveyed were interested in traveling to space, 88% wanted to spacewalk, and 21% liked the idea of staying in a space hotel.

The literature on drug addiction has grown at a rate that defies anyone to keep abreast of the literature, and apparently in inverse proportion to our understanding of the subject. Addiction, or dependence, as it is more fashionable to call it, excites controversy and speculation yet true understanding of the phenomenon remains elusive.In fact the area is fraught with speculation and acrimonious debate. Definition of terms such as drug,addiction, and abuse is obviously less controversial than attempts to explain the nature of drug dependence,yet even the terminology is imprecise and overlain with subjective connotations. At its most basic, a drug, as defined by the World Heath Organization, is simply any substance which when taken into the living organism may modify one or more of its functions. This kind of definition is too wide to be of any use in a discussion of dependence: it covers everything from insulin to aspirin, penicillin to alcohol.

Carbon dioxide constitutes only a small part of the atmosphere. But it has an important function in maintaining the balance between radiation from the sun entering the atmosphere and radiation leaving the Earth. Some of the radiation is absorbed by the Earth and some is radiated back into the atmosphere. Since carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prevents some of the radiation from leaving the atmosphere, the heat remains in the atmosphere. Yet, if the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increased as a result of air pollution, the temperature of the atmosphere may rise with catastrophic consequences.

A new ‘super-Earth’ has been discovered that could have a life-supporting climate and water. The planet, given the catchy name HD 40307g, was discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun and lies at exactly the right distance from its star to allow liquid surface water. It orbits well within the star’s “habitable” or “Goldilocks” zone – the region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life.     Professor Hugh Jones, from the University of Hertfordshire said: “The longer orbit of the new planet means that its climate and atmosphere may be just right to support life. Just as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too cold but just right, this planet or indeed any moons that is has lie in an orbit comparable to Earth, increasing the probability of it being habitable.” The ‘super earth’ is one of six planets believed to circle the dwarf star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor. All the others are located outside the habitable zone, too close to their parent star to support liquid water.

Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of the invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications.

Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time”. The book became an international bestseller, selling over 6 million copies, and has been widely translated.             Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change overwhelms people, he believed, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation” – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term “information overload.”

The attitude of the scientific community towards the unconscious mind has shifted dramatically in recent years. While once viewed as a lazy reservoir of memories and non-task oriented behaviour, the unconscious is now regarded as an active and essential component in the processes of decision making.     Historically, the unconscious mind was considered to be the source of dreams and implicit memory (which allows people to walk or ride a bicycle without consciously thinking about the activity), as well as the storing place for memories of past experiences. But recent research reveals that the unconscious brain might also be an active player in decision-making, problem-solving, creativity and critical thinking. One familiar example of the operation of the unconscious in problem-solving is the well-known phenomenon of the “eureka moment” when a solution to a problem presents itself without the involvement of active thinking.

A new survey reveals that a family sit-down at dinnertime may reduce a teenager’s risk of trying or using alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. The study surveyed more than 1,000 teens and found that those who dined with their families five to seven times a week were four times less likely to use alcohol, tobacco or marijuana than those who ate with their families fewer than three times a week. A recent UK survey also found that dining together as a family is a key ingredient in ensuring a child’s happiness. Children in the survey reported higher levels of happiness when they dined together with their families at least three times a week. “Contrary to the popular belief that children only want to spend time playing video games or watching TV,” said researcher Dr. Maris Iacovou of the University of Essex, “we found that they were most happy when interacting with their parents or siblings.”

In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). A corpus may be used to help linguists to analyse a language, or for the purpose of dictionary writing or language teaching. The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late twentieth century from a wide variety of genres with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time.

The chemical formula of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is now well established. The molecule is a very long chain, the backbone of which consists of a regular alternation of sugar and phosphate groups. To each sugar is attached a nitrogenous base, which can be of four different types. Two of the possible bases—adenine and guanine—are purines, and the other two—thymine and cytosine—are pyrimidines. So far as is known, the sequence of bases along the chain is irregular. The monomer unit, consisting of phosphate, sugar and base, is known as a nucleotide. The first feature of our structure which is of biological interest is that it consists not of one chain, but of two. These two chains are both coiled around a common fiber axis. It has often been assumed that since there was only one chain in the chemical formula there would only be one in the structural unit. However, the density, taken with the X-ray evidence, suggests very strongly that there are two.