Private rocket blasts into history

After three failed launches, SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket, Falcon 1, has made it into space.

The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.

As the rocket ascended, cheers rang out during every crucial step of the launch sequence, and at the final stage their headquarters in Hawthorne, California erupted in excitement. (Wired.com viewed the launch over the Internet on SpaceX's live webcast.)

The tensest moment came just before stage separation. At that critical juncture, the third launch attempt had failed. This time, it worked out perfectly.

Sarah Palin : The Movie

Picture it ... The United States, 2008. The McCain-Palin ticket is a winner and Sarah is prepared to use every tool she has in her arsenal to make the world a better place.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Guess where part of that $700,000,000,000 goes

As the U.S. Congress argues over how to get the financial system back on its feet, they have had to debate limits on executive pay. The New York Times reports that the chief executive of Washington Mutual, who was on the job just 17 days, is eligible for $19.1 million in compensation.

For short-time CEO Alan H. Fishman -- named to run the failing bank less than three weeks ago -- that would work out to $1.12 million per day (assuming he worked weekends). If he worked eight-hour days, it works out to $140,000 per hour.

He's either really smart or really stupid!

A Swiss man has become the first person to fly solo across the English Channel using a single jet-propelled wing.

Yves Rossy landed safely after the 22-mile (35.4 km) flight from Calais to Dover, which had been twice postponed this week because of bad weather.

The former military pilot took less than 10 minutes to complete the crossing and parachute to the ground.

Dancing with dinosaurs

In 1994, while walking around a cement factory in southern Bolivia, Klaus Schütt discovered a limestone wall with a shear size of 25'000 square meters literally covered by dinosaur tracks. A few years later, in 1998, a scientific team lead by Swiss paleontologist Christian Meyer investigated the wall, and proved it was "the largest site of dinosaur tracks found so far".

The immense Bolivian site is the rock face of an outcropping on a slant of 73 degrees, 80 meters high and 1.2 km long. There are more than 5,000 tracks of 294 different dinosaurs made during the second half of the Cretaceous period.

There is such an impressive amount of tracks that some of the researchers said this place seemed to be a dinosaurs’ dancefloor.