January 17

For an explanation of this project, read here.

Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation’s college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. ABC News is in the midst of a major promotion of Dr. David Agus’ book, “The End of Illness.” Radiation, like alcohol, is a double-edged sword. I’m 61. My mother turned 65 this summer, an event Medicare marketers ensured she would not overlook. Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o, the stories said, played this season under a terrible burden. Notre Dame says a story about Manti Te’o’s girlfriend dying, which he said inspired him to play better as he helped the Fighting Irish get to the BCS National Championship, turned out to be a hoax apparently perpetrated against the linebacker. Deadspin Editor-in-Chief Tommy Craggs says Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey were faced with a tough question when reporting their now famous Manti Te’o story: “What lengths do we go to to try and prove a negative?” Every week, our panel of sports fans discusses a topic of the moment. I don’t know anything. Her name is Lizzy Seeberg. Less than a day into the Manti Te’o revelations, we’ve heard more about a fake dead girlfriend of a Notre Dame football player than a real dead girl. Well, since you asked — and many of my friends have, some more than once — no, I will not be cheering for my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, to win big-time college football’s championship on Jan. 7. NASA is teaming up with the European Space Agency to get astronauts beyond Earth’s orbit. NASA and the European Space Agency have signed an agreement calling for the Europeans to provide the service module for the Orion space capsule, the U.S. space agency’s crew vehicle for exploration beyond Earth orbit. Plans for Europe to provide a key component for NASA’s 2017 test flight of a new spacecraft represent the start of the international collaboration needed to send humans on deep space destinations, officials said Wednesday. The US and Europe have cemented their plan to work together on the Americans’ next-generation capsule system to take humans beyond Earth. The Orion spacecraft has gotten a new look for its first launch atop the inaugural flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) booster on the Exploration Mission-1 flight around the Moon in 2017 as seen in this new animation. The European Space Agency will supply the service module that will power an initial unmanned test flight of NASA’s Orion deep space exploration capsule in 2017 and provide components for a second, manned mission in 2021 under an agreement discussed Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center. It is now more than 40 years since a human ventured beyond Earth orbit. NASA’s proposed Orion spacecraft has taken another step closer to its planned 2017 launch with NASA announcing an agreement with the European Space Agency covering the craft’s service module. A new deal between NASA and a commercial spaceflight company to add a privately built module to the International Space Station could lead to future uses of the novel space technology beyond low-Earth orbit, space agency and company officials say. The international space station is getting a new, inflatable room that resembles a giant spare tire, NASA announced Wednesday. NASA is expected to announce today the terms of a landmark deal that will allow Bigelow Aerospace, a private company based in North Las Vegas, to attach one of its inflatable habitats to the International Space Station. An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station. A low-cost space dwelling that inflates like a balloon in orbit will be tested aboard the International Space Station, opening the door for commercial leases of future free-flying outposts and deep-space astronaut habitats for NASA. NASA is partnering with a commercial space company in a bid to replace the cumbersome “metal cans” that now serve as astronauts’ homes in space with inflatable bounce-house-like habitats that can be deployed on the cheap. A COUPLE of evolutionary psychologists recently published a book about human sexual behavior in prehistory called “Sex at Dawn.” It turns out you can deny evolution and still get published on the New York Times op-ed page.