The biggest reason why we use a capsule and not a vehicle that doesn't "shed liftoff apparatus" is because of a simple reason:

I'm failing to find any credible documentation that the Sun presents a present risk to life on the surface of the Earth via CME or flare activity. Can you provide links or cite your sources for this claim?

No worries, our sun will not be capable of life extinguishing solar flares for at least a billion years, if not more. It just isn't energetic enough and the Earth's magnetosphere does a good job of deflecting. Asteroids are a far more likely danger, and Nuclear weapons many more times more likely still to be a…

Hopefully this gets released on the JPN store too. I've had my Vita tethered to my JPN account for the last few weeks for Persona and Ciel. Additional benefit of having the real NicoNico app, but I seriously miss Netflix.

Avatar (the good one). Sokka was waving hello to the friendly mushroom cloud since he was tripping on cactus juice. The GIF is edited though to actually show an explosion and water.

You know the sad thing is that he got to take his camera with him when they undocked so he could take those AWESOME pictures of the Shuttle docked to the ISS.

Clamps. Also, lots of effort to reduce ambient light. Those windows are triple paned (MMOD pain, and two pressure pains, as well as a scratch pane which is removed when taking pictures).

Don coined my favorite quote of all time in his blog explaining why he now jellies both sides of his toast: "Jelly on Both Sides" —

Each photography inclined astronaut will launch with his/her own camera. But as noted in the article, often times they are not allowed to bring them back down for re-entry.

It's there. The no-BSL color and the background are just too similar. That is to say, according to this map, NZ has no BSL.

The biggest thing that everyone overlooks in this "where's the life if planets and water and blah=de=blah is so abundant?!" statement is the time factor.

All I see when I look at that thing is an 8-person workers comp filing in slow motion.

I think the study should probably be compared with the diagnosis parameters for identifying schizophrenia as I'm pretty sure that diagnosis is more common now and more readily presented for less intense cases.

Yep, definitely okay. Sources for my response are Brian Cox's "The Quantum Universe", and Wikipedia articles for "Quantum Mechanics" and "Higgs-Boson Particle", as well as the CERN webpage for the Standard Model.

To put this in context, you have to understand first how most of the sub-atomic particle discoveries have been made over the last couple of decades.

X-37B is on the smaller side being an unmanned craft. Here is a picture with some peoples for size reference on scale.

No, a moon impact would be pretty awesome. First off, this isn't a planetary body shattering sized object, it's just a big asteroid.

Fortunately in this case it has been downgraded to a 0.2% chance to perform a keyhole event in 2023. If it does hit the keyhole event then there would be a 10% - 15% chance of an impact on 2040. If it does not hit the keyhole event, then it would again be only a 0.2% chance of impact.

The annoying thing is that Andrew Wakefield single-handedly made the link between Vaccinations and Bad Stuff Like Autism (tm). Before him it wasn't even a consideration, and he created that link intentionally after being paid to do so by a group of lawyers presenting cases by 8 very stupid parents that wanted to…

There is microscopic poop everywhere. There's also much more disgusting particulates all over stuff around you, where ever you are.