Official word has just come down the wire about HacDC's entry for the Hackerspaces In Space competition. The HacDC Spaceblimp unfortunately didn't place in the top five. The weight of the near-space probe was 1.81 pounds (well under the limit) and was retrieved the day of the judged launch in just 93 minutes. However, the project went over budget by $70us, which kept the Spaceblimp out of the winner's circle by scoring only 70 points.

We're not done yet, though. There will likely be another competition next year, and there are plans afoot for launching a new Spaceblimp …

Last weekend the results of an interesting study were quietly released to the newswires without a press release or advisory notice, which pretty much guarantees that it'll be skipped over for bigger headlines. A study over the past few years to determine whether or not sex education programs that push abstinence over smart sex and birth control shows absolutely no noticable change in teenage sex or birth rates. The results of the study echo those of earlier abstinence-or-intelligence studies from the 1980's and 1990's, but it seems that history is doomed to repeat itself.