The attendees came to the first-ever Space Hacker Workshop on Saturday and Sunday (May 4 and 5) to learn about how they could build and fly experiments on a new generation of manned suborbital vehicles such as XCOR Aerospace's .

The event, which was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Space Center and Citizens in Space, attracted high-school and college students, university professors, space professionals, scientists, technology experts and others interested in this emerging field. []

New reusable vehicles slated to come online soon will provide affordable and repeated access to space for professional and amateur scientists and help to revolutionizeand science education, said Citizens in Space founder Ed Wright.

"With the suborbital vehicles being developed...there's going to be an opportunity to fly many thousands of small payloads on suborbital vehicles every year," Wright said.

Citizen space scientists

Citizens in Space is a program run by Wright's Texas-based organization, the U.S. Rocket Academy, which has purchased 10 flights aboard the two-seat Lynx just for research. Ten lucky citizen scientists will get to fly in the passenger seat of the vehicle and operate the experiments that they have designed and built. Five of those slots already have been filled.

So, just how cheap will it be to fly experiments in space? Wright said that while a typical tinymight cost between $3,000 and $5,000 to build and another $100,000 or more to launch into orbit, developing and flying scientific payloads aboard the Lynx will be many orders of magnitude cheaper.

"At the base level, you're going to have people who are able to build an experiment for $200 or less and have an opportunity to fly in space through programs such as Citizens in Space, and I think this is just going to change everything," Wright said.

"We may reach the point in five or 10 years where every high school science major will have the opportunity to build and fly a payload in space during the course of his academic career before he graduates, he added.

The development of suborbital vehicles such as the Lynx andis coming at a time when maker spaces are popping up all over the country. Wright said these joint work spaces are perfect places for people to build the types of do-it-yourself science experiments that Citizens in Space wants to fly.

Wright's academy is developing the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier, a unit that can hold up to a dozen small experiments in a space behind the pilot's seat. The carrier will give XCOR the ability to flyin the passenger's seat while also carrying scientific experiments as secondary payloads.

A seat on Lynx costs $95,000, while a ticket to fly on SpaceShipTwo which last week made its will set you back $200,000 at the moment. (Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said recently that ticket prices would soon temporarily rise to $250,000.) []

A range of experiments

Four XCOR employees traveled 300 miles (500 kilometers) north from the town of Mojave, where they are building the first Lynx, to address the Space Hacker audience and answer questions.

Khaki Rodway, XCOR's director of payload sales and operations, gave an overview of Lynx's capabilities and a progress update on the assembly of the first vehicle, which could fly by the end of this year.

"We're doing it because there's lots of stuff to do," Rodway said of the emerging market for experiments.

During the two-day workshop, participants heard talks about the experiments that will be carried out in the microgravity environment and vacuum of space. These experiments will range across many different fields, including materials processing, fluid dynamics, life sciences, protein crystal growth and technology demonstrations.

NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle talked about sending odd "water bears" into space. Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are tiny organisms that are virtually impervious to heat, radiation and vacuum conditions. Cagle believes that by studying water bears, scientists can learn a great deal about how to help humans adapt to space.

Jason Reimuller, president of the company Integrated Spaceflight Services, told the audience about his Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM) campaign, which will use a Lynx to study the dynamics of clouds over the North Pole. The vehicle will operate out of a high-altitude spaceport in either Alaska or Sweden, Reimuller said.

Ryan Gillespie, an aerospace engineer from Sunnyvale, Calif., said he is interested in pursuing Citizens in Space's High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge, which is offering cash prizes of up to $10,000 for the development of a device that will collect micro-organisms living at the edge of space.

I'm not so much interested in the $10,000 it's more the fact that when you come up with anything, it needs a purpose," Gillespie said. "Here's something that actually has a purpose for mankind."

Driving technology forward

Richard Mains of Mains Associates, who works with the NASA Flight Opportunities Program that funds experiments on , said these new spaceships are driving technology development at a much faster rate than traditional NASA programs tend to do.

"I think what's actually going on here with these reusable suborbital launch vehicles is kind of a whole new paradigm where you're not putting a payload up onfor six months," Mains said. "And these vehicles aren't that big. But they are flying very often, So these payloads now have to be small, smart, autonomous very very easy to kind of activate and deactivate, reprogram, get data out of."

"I see all of that driving technology in a very, very interesting fashion," Mains added, mentioning the emergence of open-source platforms as another powerful driver. "So I'm very excited about what I've heard here."

Silicon Valley was a perfect location to hold the workshop given that it's at the leading edge of technology development, Mains said.

Wright said he was extremely pleased with the workshop, which sold all of its 95 tickets and had a waiting list on Saturday morning.

"I think it's gone very well," Wright said. "It's really been a great turnout. It's been very exciting for everyone here. The people from the NASA Flight Opportunities program were very excited about this. XCOR was very excited about this."

Wright says he hopes to conduct five or six additional workshops in cities across the country over the next year.

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July 13 (Reuters) - American Daniel Summerhays fired a nine-under-par 62 to grab a two-stroke lead over Canadian David Hearn heading into Sunday's final round of the John Deere Classic in Silvis, Illinois.

Defending champion Zach Johnson, the 2007 Masters winner and overnight co-leader, was lurking just off the pace another shot back at 16-under-par 197 after posting 67 at TPC Deere Run in the third round on Saturday.

Summerhays, looking for his first PGA Tour win, had 10 birdies against a lone bogey in ideal scoring conditions, using a string of three in a row from the 15th hole to vault to the top of the leaderboard.

"I think when I'm playing well the mentality is make as many birdies as you can," Summerhays told reporters.

"I'm really looking forward to (Sunday). I'm playing really well."

Hearn, also seeking his maiden tour victory, posted eight birdies and one bogey in his 64, running off three successive birdies over the same stretch of holes from 15.

Tied for fourth on 198 were Americans J.J. Henry (65) and Jerry Kelly (66).

Australian Matt Jones and Americans Nicholas Thompson and Chris Kirk were another shot back. Two-time U.S. Junior Amateur champion Jordan Spieth, 19, was among three players on 200, six shots off the pace after three rounds.

Summerhays blew a two-shot lead during the final round of last year's Mayakoba Golf Classic in Mexico but said he was more relaxed this time.

"I know there's going to be obstacles and challenges, as there always are," he said.

"There are always things that stand in your way. But I'm just excited to see what those are and deal with them."

Johnson sank not one but two massive putts on Saturday, a 60-foot eagle putt on the par-five second hole then a 42-foot birdie putt on the par-four 14th, to surge into contention.

"I certainly think there were a lot more positives out there than negatives," Johnson said. "My putter has been great. Even the ones I've missed have been great."

(Reporting by Larry Fine in New York; Editing by Gene Cherry/Greg Stutchbury)

LONDON (Reuters) - Speculation about baby names, hair color and hypnosis swirled around Britain's Duchess of Cambridge on Thursday during her last solo public appearance before she gives birth to a royal heir.

British glossy magazine Grazia reported the duchess has considered using hypno-birth for a delivery expected next month in which women use a form of self-hypnosis to control pain by learning techniques to boost production of pain-relieving hormones.

Bookmakers said bets favored the duchess joining the growing band of women dubbed "too posh to push" by opting for a caesarian rather than a natural birth.

The royal family has declined to give any details on plans for the first child of Prince William and Kate Middleton, 31, who have been officially known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge since their marriage in April 2011.

A royal spokeswoman said she was aware of rising speculation about the birth but declined to confirm or deny any details for the baby who will be the third in line to the British throne after Prince Charles and his oldest son William.

"This is a happy occasion and there is lot of speculation about what the duchess might and might not do but this really is a private matter," the spokeswoman said.

Royal watchers expect the baby to be born at St Mary's Hospital in central London where Princess Diana gave birth to William, who turns 31 next week, and his brother Prince Harry.

The duchess was under scrutiny for any hints about the baby during her last solo public engagement on Thursday when she launched Princess Cruises' new 3,600-passenger vessel Royal Princess in Southampton on England's south coast.

BABY TALK

Wearing a black hat and Dalmatian print coat, the duchess was careful to give nothing away after a slip in March when she accepted a teddy saying: "Thank you, I'll take this for my d.."

Rupert Adams from bookmaker William Hill said this dropped "d" led to such wide speculation that the baby was a girl that it suspended all bets on gender just weeks later while rival bookmaker Paddy Power paid out on bets that it was girl.

Bets on names have continued to roll in with Alexandra the clear favorite followed by Diana, after Prince William's mother who died in a car crash in 1997, and then Elizabeth.

Alexandra has a history in the royal family with Princess Alexandra, 76, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria's son Edward VII married to Alexandra of Denmark in 1863.

The favorite boy's name is George and the favored date for the birth is July 17.

"We are seeing lots of small bets from over 100 countries. The Aussies and Canadians particularly love this," said Adams.

Rory Scott from Paddy Power said people were also putting money on more obscure bets, such as the baby's future career, university, and hair color with brown favored over ginger.

"You combine the royal family with betting and you have two of the favorite pastimes in Britain," Scott said.

Both bookmakers found gamblers expected the duchess to opt for a caesarian instead of natural birth with one in four babies now delivered this way in the UK, up from 12 percent in 1990.

The focus on how the duchess gives birth has drawn her, unwittingly, into the complex web of childbirth politics where campaigners of different birthing methods battle for supremacy.

The Blissful Birth website which deals with hypno-birthing said a number of hypno-birthing practitioners have "spun" speculation about the duchess using hypno-birthing into suggestions that she was considering their particular approach.

But the website's founder Heidi Woodgate, urged these practitioners to stop the race for recognition.

"Quite frankly, whether my customers are royalty, celebrities or normal everyday women, the focus should be on their birth story, not the particular hypno-birthing programme they used," Woodgate wrote in a blog on the website.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

SAN JOSE (Reuters) - Suffering a potentially fatal swelling in the brain, Costa Rican grandmother Floribeth Mora says a voice spoke to her through a photograph of the late Pope John Paul II, miraculously curing her and sealing the late pontiff's sainthood.

The Vatican said on Friday Pope Francis had approved Mora's cure as the requisite second miracle for the sainthood of John Paul II, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005.

Mora says she was diagnosed with an aneurysm in a cerebral artery on April 14, 2011 and sent home from the hospital with the warning she could be dead within a month, although the surgeon who made the diagnosis denies he gave such a warning.

According to Mora, she drifted off to sleep in the early hours of May 1, 2011 after watching a mass on television to mark the beatification of John Paul II, who died in 2005.

She says she prayed to the late pope to heal her, and when she awoke, her eyes fell on a picture of him she had on top of the television.

"I woke up when I heard a voice that said 'get up,'" Mora, now 50, said on Friday at the Roman Catholic Church's administrative offices in San Jose, showing the clipping. "I was alone in my room, I only had this clipping that was published around those dates to commemorate John Paul II's papacy."

"I had it in front of me and I heard a voice again that said 'get up' and I looked at his photo and saw his open arms and I heard a voice that said 'be not afraid' and I said 'Yes Lord,'" she added between tears, a golden rosary hanging around her neck.

"I went to my husband and he asked me what I was doing and I just said 'I feel fine, I feel fine, I feel fine.'"

In a written statement distributed by the Church, Mora said she had been warned that she likely only had a short time to live.

"I was even warned that it would not be more than a month," she said.

The neurosurgeon who admitted and diagnosed Mora, however, denies he gave her a month to live. Alejandro Vargas says he forecast only a 2 percent chance Mora could bleed into her brain again within a year of her diagnosis, possibly killing her.

"She was sent home with medication that would reduce her blood pressure and was advised to improve her diet so as not to raise her cholesterol levels and thus decrease the chance of her having a second bleeding episode. She was sedated because the headaches were too sharp," he told Reuters. "We didn't send her home to be sedated and wait until she died in her sleep."

NO EXPLANATION

However, Vargas cannot explain how Mora's aneurysm disappeared.

"What we found remarkable, unbelievable really, was that by November there was absolutely no trace in her brain that she ever had an aneurysm," he said. "I had never seen this in my career."

Before he was beatified, the late John Paul had already been credited with asking God to cure a French nun of Parkinson's disease, the same malady he himself had suffered from.

Mora lives in a small house in the eastern province of Cartago, around 14 miles southeast of the capital, San Jose, with her husband, Carlos Arce, and their youngest child.

On the doorstep of their small, tidy house, she has erected a shrine to John Paul II.

A large printed image of the first Polish pope is decorated with colorful plastic flowers and Christmas lights. Resting on the pope's portrait is a piece of paper confirming the diagnosis of her aneurysm.

Not everyone accepts her accounts as a miracle, her husband said.

"We've faced a lot of non-believers these last two years," he said.

A few days ago, their youngest son showed his mother some posts on Facebook from people who didn't believe that what happened to her was an act of God.

"It's been very hard on her, those messages did nothing but make her cry," Arce said.

(The story was refiled to give a new headline)

(Reporting by Isabella Cota; Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by David Brunnstrom)

U.S. District Judge Anita Brody in Philadelphia federal court, who is overseeing the litigation, on Monday ordered both sides to meet with mediator Layn Phillips, a retired federal judge, in an effort to settle the dispute.

In the brief order, Brody said she would hold off on ruling on the NFL's motion to dismiss the case until September 3 to give the two sides an opportunity to make progress.

More than 4,000 players have accused the league of glorifying football's ferocity while concealing the risks of concussions and long-term brain damage as a result of repeated hits to the head.

The league has said it disclosed what information it had regarding research into brain trauma. It has also argued that the lawsuit is inappropriate because the issue of player safety is governed by the collective bargaining agreements negotiated between the league and the players' union.

Phillips, currently a partner in the California law firm Irell & Manella, served four years as a federal judge in Oklahoma City.

The case is In re National Football League Players' Concussion Injury Litigation, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 12-2323.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

The department says it's reviewing evidence to determine whether criminal civil rights charges are warranted, but legal experts see major barriers to a federal prosecution including the burden of proving that Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch leader, was motivated by racial animosity and say Justice officials would likely be saddled with some of the same challenges that complicated the unsuccessful state case.

"The Justice Department would face significant challenges in bringing a federal civil rights case against Mr. Zimmerman," said Alan Vinegrad, the former U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. "There are several factual and legal hurdles that federal prosecutors would have to overcome: They'd have to show not only that the attack was unjustified, but that Mr. Zimmerman attacked Mr. Martin because of his race and because he was using a public facility, the street."

The department opened an investigation into Martin's death last year but stepped aside to allow the state prosecution to proceed. It said in a statement Sunday that the criminal section of its civil rights division, the FBI and federal prosecutors in Florida are continuing to evaluate the evidence generated during the federal investigation, plus evidence and testimony from the state trial. The statement came as the NAACP and others called on the Justice Department to open a civil rights case against Zimmerman for the shooting death of the unarmed black 17-year-old.

Zimmerman was acquitted Saturday night in a February 2012 shooting that tapped into a national debate about racial profiling, equal justice and self-defense. Civil rights leaders, Martin's parents and many others said Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin when he followed the teenager through a gated townhouse community and shot him, but Zimmerman said he was physically assaulted by Martin and shot the teenager in self-defense.

Though the Justice Department does have an established history of using federal civil rights laws to try to convict defendants who have been previously acquitted in related state cases, experience shows it's almost never easy getting guilty verdicts in such high-profile prosecutions. In this case, federal prosecutors pursuing a civil rights case would need to establish, among other things, that Zimmerman was motivated by racial animosity, even though race was barely mentioned at the state trial.

Lauren Resnick, a former federal prosecutor in New York who secured a conviction in the killing of an Orthodox Jew during the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn, said the Justice Department could conceivably proceed under a theory that Zimmerman interfered with Martin's right to walk down a public street based on his race. But even that is difficult since the conflict occurred in a gated community, which may not fit the legal definition of a public facility. Prosecutors would also probably need to prove that trailing Martin on the street constituted interference, she said.

"One could argue it did, if it freaked him out and he couldn't comfortably walk down the street there's an argument here," said Resnick, who now specializes in white-collar defense and commercial litigation.

But she said federal prosecutors were likely to encounter the same hurdles as state prosecutors in establishing that Zimmerman was driven by racial animus and was the initial aggressor, as opposed to someone who acted in self-defense.

"When you have a fact pattern where one person's alive, and one person's not, and the person alive is the efendant, it's hard to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt," she said.

Samuel Bagenstos, a former No. 2 official in the Justice Department's civil rights division, said: "This is an administration that hasn't shied away from bringing hate crimes cases that are solid prosecutions based on the facts and the law, but from what I've seen this would be a very difficult case to prosecute federally because the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman acted because of Trayvon Martin's race. If you're trying to prove racial motivation, you are usually looking for multiple statements related to why he is engaging in this act of violence. I think it's a difficult case to prove."

Another federal case, the Rodney King prosecution, illustrates just how difficult it can be for the federal government to come in behind a state prosecution that ended in acquittal, even when there's videotaped evidence of the crime.

King was beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers after a high-speed car chase in 1991, but the four police officers charged in the incident were acquitted on state charges of assault with a deadly weapon and three of the four were acquitted on a charge of use of excessive force. The jury deadlocked on the excessive force charge against the fourth officer.

Federal prosecutors obtained an indictment on charges of violating King's civil rights. Two of the officers were found guilty and were imprisoned. The other two officers were acquitted.

In a 1970 prosecution, the Justice Department charged three white Detroit police officers and one black private security guard with allegedly conspiring to deprive eight black youths and two white girls of their civil rights during the 1967 riots in Detroit.

The officers had gone to the Algiers Motel in a reported search for snipers. Three black teenagers were slain at the motel. One of the police officers had been acquitted earlier of a state charge of first-degree murder in the case; another officer had been found innocent in a separate state trial on a charge of felonious assault.

The federal case took place in Flint, Mich., an hour's drive north of Detroit, after the defense complained that the defendants could not get a fair trial in the city where the slayings occurred. A jury acquitted all four defendants.

In prosecuting the law enforcement officers, the Justice Department invoked an 1871 civil rights law. Prosecutors alleged that the officers had lined up the people staying at the motel and slugged them with clubs and rifle butts. There was testimony that several of the guests were taken into separate rooms where shotguns were fired into the ceiling in an effort to get those in a nearby hallway to disclose the identity of the alleged snipers and the location of firearms.

In a defense that turned out to be successful, defense attorneys emphasized that the charge against their clients was conspiracy, not assault, coercion, intimidation or murder. Lawyers for the two officers previously charged in the state cases also argued that their clients were being charged with serious criminality even though they had already been acquitted.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With time running out, U.S. officials are struggling to cope with the task of launching the new online health insurance exchanges at the heart of President Barack Obama's signature health reforms by an October 1 deadline.

The White House, and federal agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), must ensure that working marketplaces open for enrollment in all 50 states in less than 80 days, and are responding to mounting pressure by concentrating on three essential areas that will determine whether the most critical phase of Obamacare succeeds or fails.

"The administration right now is in a triage mode. Seriously, they do not have the resources to implement all of the provisions on time," Washington and Lee University professor Timothy Jost, a healthcare reform expert and advocate, told an oversight panel in the U.S. House of Representatives last week.

Current and former administration officials, independent experts and business representatives say the three priorities are the creation of an online portal that will make it easy for consumers to compare insurance plans and enroll in coverage; the capacity to effectively process and deliver government subsidies that help consumers pay for the insurance; and retention of the law's individual mandate, which requires nearly all Americans to have health insurance when Obama's healthcare reform law comes into full force in 2014.

Measures deemed less essential, such as making larger employers provide health insurance to their full-time workers next year or face fines, and requiring exchanges to verify the health insurance and income status of applicants, have already been postponed or scaled back.

"The closer you get to the actual launch, the more you focus on what is essential versus what could be second-order issues," said a former administration official. "That concentrates the mind in a different kind of way, and that's what's happening here."

But the risk of failure in the form of major delays is palpable, given the administration's limited staff and financial resources, as well as the stubborn political opposition of Republicans, who have denied new money for the effort in Congress and prevented dozens of states from cooperating with initiatives that offer subsidized health coverage to millions of lower income uninsured people.

Any further delay could help Republicans make Obamacare's troubles a focus of their campaign in next year's congressional midterm elections and in the 2016 presidential race.

HHS denies that its strategy has changed and insists that implementation continues to meet the milestones laid out by planners 18 months ago.

"All of the systems are exactly where we want them to be today. They will be ready to perform fully on October 1," said Mike Hash, director of the HHS Office of Health Reform.

White House officials acknowledge the approach of the open enrollment deadline has put a greater emphasis on priorities. They describe the strategy as a "smart, adaptive policy" and assert that delayed or scaled-back regulations demonstrate better policy decisions or flexibility with stakeholders, rather than a need to minimize distractions.

NO MARGIN FOR ERROR

Advocates point out that the reform, formally titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and informally known as Obamacare, constitutes the most sweeping healthcare legislation since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, large successful government programs for the elderly and the low income that also faced fierce political opposition when they were created in 1965. Both required years of work after their launch to refine implementation.

The administration has already delayed or scaled back at least half a dozen health reform measures since last year. These include regulations involving star quality ratings for insurance company plans, the choice of insurance plans for small-business employees and a requirement that state Medicaid agencies notify individuals of their eligibility for federal assistance.

Other efforts that could still be delayed include deadlines for some health insurers to get their plans certified by HHS as well as requirements for how the insurance exchanges provide customer service.

House Speaker John Boehner and other House Republican leaders, warning of a "train wreck", have called on Obama to defer an essential task: the individual mandate, which requires people to have insurance coverage in 2014 or face penalties that begin modestly, but rise sharply by 2016.

But experts say it is the other essential tasks - establishing the high-tech capabilities necessary to process government insurance subsidies and create online shopping and enrollment for consumers - that could be most vulnerable with such a compressed timetable.

"The biggest hurdle is to get the systems up and running," said one health insurance official. "Nothing's happened so far that prevents you from being up and running on October 1. But there's virtually no margin for error."

The administration is working according to an ambitious schedule for testing a technology hub and its ability to transfer consumer data on health coverage, income, tax credits and other topics between federal agencies, insurance companies and states. The hub is already exchanging data between the necessary agencies.

A report from Georgetown University's Center on Health Insurance Reforms says state-run exchanges are on track for a successful October 1 launch and have exceeded federal minimum requirements in some cases.

Failure to have adequate systems in place by September 4, when HHS is due to give insurers final notice about which health plans are qualified to be sold on 34 state exchanges run by the federal government, could delay open enrollment by days or weeks but still allow the law's core reform provisions to take effect on January 1, experts said.

Insurers will have several days in August to review plan data as it would be presented to prospective enrollees in side-by-side comparisons online. The administration also needs to test the system with a wider audience than the IT experts working on the exchanges to make sure they are consumer-friendly.

Michael Marchand, spokesman for Washington's Health Benefit Exchange, said the state's online marketplace had conducted frequent tests with the federal data hub, which had worked well so far. But any last-minute changes to the government's requirements to its operations could throw a wrench into the IT system, he said.

"If you start adding or removing lines of code it could bring the whole thing down," he said. "As you add or take away pieces, you have to re-test from the beginning."

(Additional reporting by Patrick Temple-West in Washington and Sharon Begley in New York; Editing by Michele Gershberg, Martin Howell)

The discovery was made using NASA's(IBEX), a coffee-table-sized spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system.

"Many models have suggested the heliotail might look like this or like that, but we have had no observations," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex., said in a statement. "We always drew pictures where the tail of the solar system just trailed off the page, since we couldn't even speculate about what it really looked like." []

The heliotail is "a much larger structure with a much more interesting configuration" than scientists had previously predicted, McComas added during a news conference announcing the finding.

The heliotail is inflated by the solar wind of particles streaming off the sun, and the four-leaf clover shape is the result of fast solar wind shooting out near the sun's poles and slower wind flowing from near the sun's equator, researchers say. The finding is based on the first three years of IBEX's measurements of energetic neutral atoms.

In the interstellar boundary region, charged particles from the sun stream outward far beyond the planets toward the gas- and dust-filled space between stars. Collisions between these particles and interstellar material create fast-moving particles with no charge, known as energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs. Some of these particles speed inward toward the sun, where IBEX can detect them from its perch 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) above Earth.

"Scientists have always presumed that the heliosphere had a tail," Eric Christian, IBEX mission scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a Google+ Hangout announcing the finds. "But this is actually the first real data that we have to give us the shape of the tail."

Though IBEX data has given scientists an idea of the shape and structure of the heliotail, they say they have not been able to measure its length particularly well. They think it is probably evaporating over something like the 1000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun, McComas said.

The $169 million IBEX spacecraft, launched in 2008, was built for an initial two-year mission, which has since been extended. Early on in its mission, IBEX detected ENAs flowing toward the sun in an unexpected pattern: They were significantly enhanced in aon the edge of the solar system that scientists now think is a reflection of the solar wind, shot back toward the sun by a strong galactic magnetic field.

IBEX has made several other important discoveries throughout its mission. In 2010, the spacecraft turned its gaze back toward Earth and got the first-ever peek at the solar wind crashing into the . Last year, NASA announced that the spacecraft made its first detection of matter from outside the solar system,of hydrogen, oxygen and neon in the interstellar wind.

The new findings are detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter . We're also on and . Original article on SPACE.com.

He didn't deserve any blame for fans leaving early, either, though hundreds found their way to the exit even before the 12th round began.

If they were spending $1,000 and up for tickets to a brawl, they should have known better. Mayweather built a career on not getting hit, and there was no reason to think he was going to make the same mistakes as last year against Miguel Cotto against a fighter whose only hope of winning was to rough him up.

Instead of booing, they should have been applauding. Instead of leaving, they should have been on their feet cheering.

On the canvas where he does his best work, Mayweather painted a boxing masterpiece only he could produce.

"Everyone was saying at the age of 36 I don't have it no more," Mayweather said. "All I want to do is give fans exciting fights."

This one wasn't as much exciting as it was brilliant. Mayweather used defensive skills built up over a lifetime to take apart a very good fighter Saturday night and do it in such lopsided fashion that ringside judges seemed to be searching for a round to give to Guerrero.

He hit Guerrero with right hand leads all night and might have knocked him out had he not hurt his hand in the eighth round. When Guerrero tried to land big shots of his own, Mayweather was either smothering him on the ropes or had danced out of harm's way.

It was a $32 million display of all that's right about the sweet science. And if it didn't satisfy all the fans at the MGM Grand or those who paid $69.95 for the pay-per-view, it kept Mayweather undefeated in 44 fights in what is becoming a remarkable boxing career.

"I showed the world I can still box," Mayweather said. "I showed my defense is still there. I'm still fast."

Most importantly, perhaps, it showed Mayweather himself that he still has it. After spending two months in jail and a year out of the ring, he returned with a performance that was vintage Mayweather.

His father was back in the corner and was put to good use. Both Floyd Sr. and Floyd Jr. thought the boxer got hit too much when he went toe-to-toe with Cotto last May and were determined to focus on defense against Guerrero, who tried his best for 12 rounds to turn the fight into a brawl, to no avail.

The plan was to hit and not get hit. It worked to perfection, with Guerrero landing only 19 percent of his punches to 41 percent for Mayweather.

"The less you get hit, the longer you last in boxing," Mayweather said.

Mayweather has followed that creed so well that he has lasted 17 years in the sport, and he looks no worse for the wear. He's managed to build a boxing empire on pay-per-view sales despite having a style that is less than crowd pleasing, and his $32 million payday for Guerrero shows he remains a huge attraction.

He wants to fight again in September, which would be the first time since 2007 he fought twice in a calendar year. That could be delayed by his injured right hand, though Mayweather insisted after the fight he would be ready to go.

The question now becomes who Mayweather will face. Upcoming Mexican star Canelo Alvarez would be the most attractive fight, but the short lead time to September virtually ensures that bout won't happen until at least next May, at best.

Mayweather is in the unique position where he can handpick his opponents, and he's been criticized for trying to find fighters he knows he can beat. Alvarez would be a risky fight, one Mayweather might want to save until late in the remaining five fights he has under a deal with Showtime that he says will be the last of his career.

"He's a young guy," Mayweather said of Alvarez. "Floyd Mayweather isn't going to duck anybody. My job is to go out there, rack up victories and be the best Floyd Mayweather I can be."

Whether that is good enough to make Mayweather among the all-time greats was a topic of questioning at the post-fight news conference. Mayweather may be a dominating fighter, but he hasn't had a rivalry to get fight fans excited and he came up with excuse after excuse not to fight Manny Pacquiao when Pacquiao was still in his prime.

He also hasn't fought regularly enough to press a claim for greatness, something that could change if he goes through on plans to fight every six months or so under the Showtime deal.

"I just do what I do," Mayweather said. "I've given this sport my whole life."