NASA Scientist Publishes 'Colonizing the Red Planet,' a How-To Guide

A manned mission to Mars would be the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. And one man knows how to make it a reality. In fact, he just wrote the book on it -- literally.

Joel Levine, senior research scientist with NASA's Langley Research Center and co-chair of NASA's Human Exploration of Mars Science Analysis Group, just published "The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet." The book reads like a who's who of Mars mission science, featuring senators, astronauts, astrophysicists, geologists and more on getting to Mars, studying its atmosphere and climate, the psychological and medical effects on the crew and other details.

There's even a section detailing the science of sex on Mars, should NASA attempt to create a permanent colony there.

"For the last three years, I've been co-chairing a panel of about 30 U.S. and Canadian scientists, coming up with a blueprint, purely from a scientific perspective, of humanity's role on Mars," Levine told FoxNews.com. He was asked to put together a special edition of the Journal of Cosmology exploring the topic, which was just published as the new book.

Read the full story at FoxNews.com.

'Iceberg Cowboy' Finds Archway in Middle of Ocean

Forget moving mountains. Marine biologist Andrew Perry moves icebergs. And his latest adventure led to the discovery of an icy archway, right in the middle of the ocean.

Perry was out trawling for icebergs with Oceans Limited, a Canadian company that identifies which of the tremendous floaters are drifting towards stationary deep-water oil rigs, when he found the arch -- think Stargate meets portal to Narnia.

"It was a beautiful day, hardly a wave on the water. And then there it was -- a big beautiful arch," Perry told FoxNews.com. "No one had seen anything like this. We thought it was amazing."

Icebergs routinely break off Greenland and float down the Labrador coast, Perry explained, a corridor he called "iceberg alley." Along the way, they post a direct threat to deep-water oil installations. Though they don't move particularly quickly -- typically one to four knots -- they've got enough bulk to do major damage if they hit anything, he explained.

For the full story, see FoxNews.com.

Why You NEED to Care About Net Neutrality

Thanks for watching that YouTube video! That will be 50 cents, please.

Sound unrealistic? It's actually fairly likely, thanks to a ruling handed down Tuesday by the FCC that will allow Internet service providers to charge customers based on the amount of bandwidth they use. And some argue that it's the greatest threat to freedom we face today.

Welcome to the complex world of net neutrality.

The basic problem is simple: As online video has grown in popularity, thanks to sites like YouTube and Hulu.com, Internet service providers (ISPs) complain that each consumer is more of a burden to service -- that's you, me and your next-door neighbor, Phil.

Today, Comcast, Time Warner, or whomever you pay monthly, charges you and Phil more or less the same amount. But Phil watches four hours of basketball online every night. Should he pay more for that? There's the neutrality part, the argument that you should pay one fee for access to the entire Internet, regardless of what type of content you watch or which sites you visit.

For the full story, see my entire story on FoxNews.com.

iPad, Blackberry ... or Other?

Think of it as this season's digital Goldilocks question: Which size touch screen is just right for you?

Behind every screen there's a computer connected to the Web, ranging from smart phones to e-readers to out-sized portable tablets like the Apple iPad. But you can do largely the same things with each of these different-sized devices: surf the Web, play music, read books, control your TV, take pictures and make video calls.

So the question isn't which device do you want. It's which size is the right size? It's not only a problem for shoppers, but a conundrum for the electronics and computer industry, as well.

We Want YOU, Say Hacktivists … but Is It Legal?

Cyberactivism -- call it "hactivism" -- is sweeping the web. But legal experts put a starker label on it: criminal.

To show support for WikiLeaks and its controversial head Julian Assange, an anonymous group calling itself Operation: Payback has disabled numerous websites and targeted others over the past few days. The group offers free software to let anyone help takedown websites they believe are the "enemies" of WikiLeaks, targeting MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Amazon and others.

But is it legal? Experts told FoxNews.com that several international laws ban just this sort of activity.

In the U.K., Laws combating what is called "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, "have been in place since 2006 and could result in you being sent to jail for up to ten years. Similar laws have also been present in Sweden since 2007," wrote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos, in a blog post on his site.

"It's the same story in the USA, where they take a tough line on those who engage in denial-of-service attacks against websites. For instance, last year saw the jailing of a man who launched a DDoS attack against the Scientology website," he added.

Read the full story at FoxNews.com.

The Death of the Hard Drive

Stop worrying about when the hard drive in your computer will die. Google wants to kill it permanently anyway.

The new Google Chrome operating system, which was unveiled Tuesday, as well as hints and suggestions from Apple and Microsoft, offers us a preview of the PC of the future. And it will come without that familiar whirring disk that has been the data heart of the PC for the past 25 years.

The Chrome OS will at first be available on all-black laptops from Samsung and Acer. And because the new platform stores everything -- files, applications, data bits and bytes, literally everything -- on online servers rather than on your home or office PC, those new PCs running it won't require gobs of storage. In fact, they won't require any storage at all.

The new Google laptops come without hard drives, in other words.

Other hardware manufacturers have seen the trend, too: The ebook readers from Amazon and Barnes & Noble don't have hard drives. (And digital books you buy from Google's brand new eBooks store are stored online as well.) The Apple iPad has no drive, and the newest MacBook Air laptop skips a hard drive entirely as well; they all rely on flash memory chips for storage.

Read my full story at FoxNews.com.