The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has just awarded Virginal Galactic their first operating license, allowing them to start using their SpaceShipTwo craft for commercial use - as soon as certain guidelines are met. This means that the company - owned by billionaire Richard Branson - will soon be able to shuttle paying passengers into space.

Other than making the flights legal, the license dictates the conditions required before Virgin Galactic can actually let any passengers on board SpaceShipTwo, which will be carried by White Knight Two (below) roughly 99 kilometres (62 miles) into the sky.


Once everything is squared away with the FAA, SpaceShipTwo - a spacecraft designed to hold two pilots and six passengers - will hitch a ride w ...

Seeing through objects may seem like something straight out of a comic book, but researchers have found a way to make entire animals transparent – from their brains to their bones. The method lets fluorescent proteins visibly shine through bodies, lighting up entire vascular systems (above) and other structures.

To produce such light shows, researchers treat euthanized rodents with several organic solvents to remove the water and lipids that made them opaque. The technique is dubbed uDISCO because it’s a variant of the original DISCO technique, which stands for 3D imaging of solvent-cleared organs. This technique allows the highest resolution images yet for a whole body, its creators report online today in Nature Methods, and it can create ...