Articles about Space Travel – latimes

BUSINESS

November 26, 2013 | By Shan Li

Virgin Galactic, the company aimed at taking tourists to space, is accepting the digital currency bitcoin as payment for future space travel. Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded the futuristic company, called bitcoin "a brilliantly conceived idea" that has "really captured the imagination recently. " "All of our future astronauts are pioneers in their own right," Branson wrote in a blog post titled "Bitcoins in space. " "This is one more way to be forward-looking.

HEALTH

November 2, 2013 | By James S. Fell

Col. Chris Hadfield, who until recently was commander of the International Space Station, has a workout regimen that is out of this world. Sorry. Couldn't resist. Hadfield's new book, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth," goes into detail about what it takes to be in shape for space travel. What kind of shape do you need to be in to qualify for the space program? To qualify to live on the space station, you have to pass the hardest physical exam in the world. There has to be a high lack of a probability of a problem, whether it's your appendix or an injury.

TRAVEL

October 6, 2013 | By Jane Engle

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - I was inept at moonwalking. My rocket was a dud. And I crashed the space shuttle. Fortunately, I was just an astronaut wannabe and not the real deal. But it's as close as this middle-aged space geek is going to get. That geekiness, inspired by IMAX documentaries on space and news coverage of NASA's final shuttle launch in 2011, was what brought me to Adult Space Academy. The trip was a gift from my wife. The three-day program is among more than a dozen versions of Space Camp, which the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville created more than 30 years ago to give visitors a taste of what it's like to train as an astronaut.

ENTERTAINMENT

October 3, 2013 | By Scott Collins

NBC is hoping to get a space-travel reality show off the ground this time. The network is teaming up with producer Mark Burnett and billionaire Richard Branson to make "Space Race," a competition series that would send the winner up in SpaceShipTwo, a commercial space-travel service from Branson's Virgin Galactic. The series could offer Virgin a key opportunity to plug its services. FULL COVERAGE: Fall TV preview 2013 "Virgin Galactic's mission is to democratize space, eventually making commercial space travel affordable and accessible to all," Branson wrote in a statement.

SCIENCE

September 4, 2013 | By Geoffrey Mohan

A lemur that hibernates is strange and cute enough. But studying its lethargic state may provide a clue to sending humans on long-distance space travel or healing the ravages of heart attacks, stroke and head trauma, according to researchers at Duke University. The western fat-tailed dwarf lemur, a pocket-sized nocturnal primate native to Madagascar, is the closest genetic cousin of humans to hibernate for long periods, a discovery made by a German research team in 2004. The revelation that primates hibernated led to a happy coincidence at Duke, which happens to have a lemur center and a sleep laboratory.

ENTERTAINMENT

June 21, 2013 | By Joe Flint

A new distribution platform is emerging and no one knows what to make of it. The established players are wary of it and see it as more foe than friend. Others are afraid of losing their shirt by investing in it. Sound familiar? But this isn't the Internet. This was cable television in the early 1980s. Back then there were only a handful of networks and few were talking about 500 channels full of original content. "It was an unproven business, investors were not convinced that cable programming was a good investment," said John Hendricks, founder of Discovery Communications.

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Articles about Space Travel - latimes