The Big Three were late to the hybrid party, but they're finally getting into the swing of things with cars like the 38 39-mpg Ford Fusion Hybrid, a car that should make Toyota nervous and might just help Ford escape the apocalypse in Detroit.

The Fusion Hybrid Is Ford's Escape Route | Autopia from Wired.com

NASA has pushed back the launching of its next ambitious Mars mission by two years because of lengthening delays and lingering technical issues, agency officials announced Thursday.

NASA Delays Next Mars Rover Mission - NYTimes.com

A CANCER is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects. Unmistakable new indications of this illness surfaced last month with NASA’s decision to spend at least $100 million more on its poorly-managed, now-over-$2 billion Mars Science Laboratory. This decision to go forward with the project, a robotic rover, was made even though it has tripled in cost since its inception, it is behind schedule, there is no firm estimate of the final cost, and NASA hasn’t disclosed the collateral damage inflicted on other programs and activities that depend on NASA’s limited science budget.

Former Associate NASA Administrator Alan Stern delivered this scathing criticism of NASA spending/budget practices on the op-ed page of NYT 2 weeks ago. NASA = pork.

Op-Ed Contributor - NASA’s Black Hole Budgets - NYTimes.com

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers. Mediabistro’s TVNewser broke the story.

CNN Cuts Entire Science, Tech Team : CJR:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year.

YES! Kill the stick!

SPACE.com -- Obama to Review Costs of Shuttle Replacement Vehicle

The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.

The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an effort to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and limited availability.

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, he thinks his company, Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.

Better Place was written up in Wired a few months back... this is definitely an interesting approach.

Hawaii Endorses Plan for Electric Cars - NYTimes.com

"It’s hard to know that there is something out there that could help but they’re saying you can’t have it because of cost,” said Ms. Hardy, who now speaks for her husband of 45 years. “What price is life?”

This is really, really naive. Society makes decisions every day that effectively value human life: e.g. 45k people die on roadways in the United States and we aren't really doing anything about it.

In this instance, it is a completely straightforward question of how to allocate a scarce resource. We simply cannot spend an unbounded amount of the GDP on medical care, especially on prescription drugs many of which are sold for obscene margins even after discovery and trials and all that.

The Evidence Gap - British Balance Gain Against the Cost of the Latest Drugs - NYTimes.com

NASA is officially moving forward on a mission to conduct an unprecedented, in-depth study of Jupiter.

Called Juno, the mission will be the first in which a spacecraft is placed in a highly elliptical polar orbit around the giant planet to understand its formation, evolution and structure. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our early solar system.

NASA Prepares for New Juno Mission to Jupiter | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

NASA is officially moving forward on a mission to conduct an unprecedented, in-depth study of Jupiter.

Called Juno, the mission will be the first in which a spacecraft is placed in a highly elliptical polar orbit around the giant planet to understand its formation, evolution and structure. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our early solar system.

NASA Prepares for New Juno Mission to Jupiter | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

After days of glitches and tweaks, a new recycling system designed to turn astronaut urine back into drinking water is apparently working well aboard the International Station.

The thing that really irritates me about the coverage of STS-126 is that noone can spare any opportunity to say the word "urine" like a bunch of 8 year-olds: "OMG, they're going to drink pee!!!"

SPACE.com -- Space Station's Urine Recycler Passes Key Test