The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is preparing to insert itself into an orbit around the Red Planet, a task that's always tricking for robotic spacecraft. Let's just hope NASA's got the whole metric/English measurement thing down this time. Read the full story.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is preparing to insert itself into an orbit around the Red Planet, a task that's always tricking for robotic spacecraft. Let's just hope NASA's got the whole metric/English measurement thing down this time. Read the full story.

The Firefly soundtrack doesn't have the same cinematic, awe-inspiring musical grandeur of the score for a Star Wars or Star Trek film. Instead, it yields the familiar sensations all too common in Firefly ... the sense of coming home, and the sense of something great once held, then lost.

The songs are as rich and textured as the series that spawned them. It's got the western twangs you'd expect, mixed in with the mystical Oriental strings, and occasionally torn by horrific riffs reflecting horrors confronted and bested. Or run screaming from.

SCI-FI.com has launched a new tech blog called SCI-FI Tech. The last two days have seen posts about robot toy sharks, new MP3 players, underwater stealth jets and glow-in the dark carpet. It's not Engaget, but it's a good start. Read the full story.

Atlantis will be mothballed, probably in 2008, and then canabalized for parts to keep the other two shuttles flying until 2010. Read the full story.

The appearance of two viruses on the Mac -- which were more proof-of-concept scrawlings and less a real danger -- has analysts tripping over themselves as they alternate between doom, gloom and outright glee ... finally the Mac is exposed!

Is your weekly game looming before you, and you don't have a single adventure hook in mind? Then check out this blog posts, which discusses using real-world news (or in some cases, fake news from real tabloids) for inspiration. Read the full story.

Leap-A is the first "worm" to hit Apple computers in the while, and while there's some debate as to how effective it is (and whether it's even a worm) the fact remains that Mac users need to start being a bit more paranoid about receiving files they weren't expecting. Read the full story.

Radio Active #26 offers a well-rounded podcast, with some updates on the ongoing Nuketown Beta project, followed by an editorial on the sorry state of science fiction publishing, particularly with regards to using technology to promote their wares. There are also three sites of note, including the podcast Most People Are DJs, the Cthulhu-inspired LEGO layout Cthulego, and the game mastery blog Treasure Tables. Finally, there's a review of the classic science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama.

Apple's engineers left a poem for hackers trying to port Mac OS X to other, non-Mac Intel systems, which includes the line "There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he'd do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined." Read the full story.