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In Maitland, Florida, residents of an apartment building found a terrorism warning posted on their doors. Tenants in Renton, Washington received a warning letter from their landlord. This is the result of a recent FBI warning, which was sent to the agency’s field offices, that al-Qaeda has threatened to rent apartments with the intention of turning them into bombs and blowing them up. The warning has been handled differently by various landlords in different states.

The FBI warning says the threat is unconfirmed and does not specify any target. A U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the information came from interviews with prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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China will not be launching a manned mission to the Moon in the foreseeable future, says Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China’s Moon exploration program. He wants to clarify earlier news reports in the Chinese media that said Beijing would be putting a man on the Moon by 2010 with the establishment of a Moonbase soon afterwards. “We will explore the Moon certainly,” says Ziyuan, “but with unmanned spacecraft. One of our goals is to bring lunar samples back to China for analysis. We are interested in the minerals on the Moon. We will prepare an unmanned spacecraft to do this.”
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Movie special effects artists have learned how to put people into photos and videos, even if they were never there, and make animals talk. They can insert dead people into advertisements, such as the recent TV ads featuring Fred Astaire and John Wayne. Gareth Cook of the Boston Globe writes that now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created the first realistic videos of people saying things they never said.

The researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she doesn?t speak. The results were good enough to fool viewers.
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Military planners foresee a future filled with anti-satellites and space mines. They say we also need orbiting laser and particle beam weapons that focus killer rays of energy to zap satellites, enemy warheads in flight, or even blast targets on Earth. Then there are the thunder rods, that can be fired from orbit. These long and slender kinetic-energy devices destroy by using their own mass and high velocity.

Space-based weapons are the topic of a new report authored by think-tank experts at RAND. The study does not argue for or against space weapons, says Bob Preston of RAND. The intent is to sort through the realities and myths surrounding space weapons.
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