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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The "Little House on the Prairie" star married the former "Thirtysomething" star on Wednesday in Santa Barbara,reported.

According to Melissa's rep, the "Dancing with the Stars" alum, 48, and Timothy, 55, wed "in a private ceremony at San Ysidro Ranch."

This marks the third marriage for both actors.

Melissa is a mom of two and Timothy, who now also directs, has three kids.

Copyright 2013 by . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The suspect identified only by his initials S.K. was questioned Saturday in the NationalCourt in Madrid after his arrest last week and agreed to the deal, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because court rules prevent him from giving his name.

Police say the 35-year-old suspect operated from a bunker in northeast Spain and also had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country. He was arrested Thursday in Granollers, 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Barcelona.

He is accused of attacking the anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus, whose main task is to halt ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills reaching the world's inboxes.

Dutch authorities alerted Spanish police in March of large denial-of-service attacks being launched from Spain that were affecting Internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the U.S. These attacks culminated with a major onslaught on Spamhaus.

Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic, jamming it with incoming messages.Recent cyberattacks such as the ones that caused outages at U.S. banking sites last year have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second. The attack on Spamhaus was three times that size.

Police from the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Spain and the U.S. took part in the investigation.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Defense lawyers for a Philadelphia abortion doctor accused of killing babies in a clinic that mainly serves low-income women rested their case on Wednesday without calling any witnesses in the high-profile murder trial.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing four infants during botched abortions and a woman who underwent an abortion and died at a nearby hospital after the procedure at his Women's Medical Society clinic in urban West Philadelphia.

He could face the death penalty if convicted in the case in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia that focuses on whether or not the infants were born alive and then killed.

The charges against Gosnell and nine of his employees have rekindled the debate in the United States about late-term abortions.

Prosecutors said Gosnell ran a "house of horrors" in a West Philadelphia health clinic where women went for late-term abortions. The district attorney's office said Gosnell delivered live babies during botched abortions and then deliberately severed their spinal cords, killing them.

Gosnell's defense lawyer, John McMahon, characterized the prosecution of his client, who is black, as "elitist, racist." He said there was no evidence that the babies were delivered alive, noting "the first rule of homicide is someone has to be alive."

It is legal in Pennsylvania to abort a fetus at up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. It becomes murder when the infant is fully expelled from the mother alive and then killed, according to a lawyer familiar with Pennsylvania law, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the case.

The move by Gosnell's attorneys to rest their case came a day after they succeeded in convincing Judge Jeffrey Minehart to dismiss three murder charges involving infants. Gosnell had originally been charged with killing seven babies.

Closing arguments in the case were expected to begin on Monday, with the seven-woman, five-man jury beginning deliberations the following day.

Outside court, reporters asked McMahon why he opted for what seemed like a surprise move. He said he had presented his client's defense during a rigorous cross-examination of more than three dozen prosecution witnesses.

"You saw a defense," McMahon said.

Gosnell has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest. Eight other defendants have pleaded guilty to a variety of charges and are awaiting sentencing.

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg, Cynthia Johnston, Nick Zieminski and Andrew Hay)

San Francisco Giants spokeswoman Staci Slaughter said Tuesday night that the reigning World Series champions in the process of replacing the plaque, which hung on the brick facade inside the ballpark beneath the flag court area in right-center field until a few days ago. The team is investigating where the missing hardware might be, Slaughter said.

"We're in the process of replacing it," Slaughter said. "We're not sure what happened. We're reviewing video, but haven't found anything yet."

There is still white glue on the brick wall where the plaque used to be.

Bonds, the seven-time NL MVP, broke Hank Aaron's home run record on Aug. 7, 2007, at home in San Francisco. The slugger hasn't played since that season, finishing his 22-year major league career with 762 total home runs. He has been back to the ballpark as a fan in recent seasons, receiving standing ovations from the crowd that still cheers him despite allegations he used performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his pursuit of Aaron's mark.

Bonds has long denied ever knowingly using steroids or performance-enhancing drugs and the 48-year-old slugger appealed his obstruction of justice conviction from April 2011 on one count of giving an evasive answer to a 2003 grand jury investigating illegal steroids distribution. In February, a lawyer for Bonds urged a federal appeals court to toss out the slugger's obstruction of justice conviction, saying a rambling answer he gave while testifying before a grand jury in December 2003 was not a crime.