Endurance athlete, polar explorer, and motivational speaker Ben Saunders is on his way to Antarctica. Recreating Robert Scott’s heroic but ultimately doomed “Terra Nova” expedition from 1910-1912, Saunders has launched his own Scott Expedition to reach the South Pole on foot—and, more importantly, to walk back to the coast alive. If successful, this will make him and his co-traveler, Tarka L’Herpiniere, the first human beings ever to have done so. Read more…
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Walking To The South Pole (And Returning Alive)
Production has wrapped on the final episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars . Showrunner Dave Filoni has announced on Facebook that the episodes will be released in early 2014. Read more… 
With an average global broadband connection speed of just 3.1 Mbps, the internet has become one enormous bottleneck for those that send large amounts of data across it. At that speed, a 100 GB file would take around three days to transfer completely, eons too long in a digital era measured by millisecond pings. But a new double-duty satellite launched yesterday could cut that transfer time to just 90 minutes. Read more… 
Taco Cowboy writes “‘NASA is calling off attempts to find its Deep Impact comet probe after a suspected software glitch shut down radio communications in August, officials said on Friday.’ Last month, engineers lost contact with Deep Impact and unsuccessfully tried to regain communications. The cause of the failure was unknown, but NASA suspects the spacecraft lost control, causing its antenna and solar panels to be pointed in the wrong direction. NASA had hoped Deep Impact would play a key role in observations of the approaching Comet ISON, a suspected first-time visitor to the inner solar system that was discovered in September 2012 by two Russian astronomers. The comet is heading toward a close encounter with the sun in November, a brush that it may not survive.” Deep Impact has had a pretty good run, though: from its original mission to launch a copper slug at a comet (hence the name), to looking for Earth-sized planets. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 