“More than 4,000 Chinese children are named Olympic Games.” No shit. That headline just kinda jumped out at me. Naming your child “Olympic Games” is the new. Jennifer? Charles? No, Olympic Games. Prince, the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known Prince, is way jealous.

From BBC:

More than 4,000 children in China have been given the name Aoyun, meaning Olympic Games, in the past 15 years.
The rise in popularity of the name is seen as a sign of support for the Games being staged in August in Beijing.
Officials in charge of identity cards say that more than 92% of the 4,104 registered Aoyuns are boys.
It is not uncommon for Chinese children to be given names of common events and popular slogans - such as Defend China, Build the Nation and Space Travel.
There are 290,798 registered Civilisations.
The first surge in Aoyuns came in 1992, when China applied to host to the 2000 Games. About 680 Aoyuns were registered at the time.
In 2002 another 553 Aoyuns were named, after China was chosen to host the 2008 Games.
The BBC’s Chinese service says that in recent weeks babies have also been given names such as Hope for Sichuan, to show solidarity with earthquake victims.

On April 10th, 29-year-old South Korean bio-engineer Yi So-yeon became the country’s first astronaut. On Monday, she became the first South Korean to be scared shitless by a rough return to planet Earth.

“During descent I saw some kind of fire outside as we were going through the atmosphere,” said Yi So-yeon, a 29-year-old bioengineer. “At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn.”

But then she said she noticed it was not even warm inside the Soyuz capsule. “I looked at the others and I pretended to be OK,” Yi said.

As it turned out, Yi had every right to be a little freaked out. She and the capsule’s passengers — American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko — were subjected to gravitational forces 10 times greater than what is experienced on Earth for three and a half hours. A technical glitch caused the craft to take a steeper than usual decline and sent its landing 260 miles off course.

All three members are fine, though were a little shaken up upon emerging from the TMA-11 space craft. Though everyone was okay, this is the third time since 2003 that the Soyuz capsule has had a balky landing. Maybe someone should get that checked.

Sir Richard Branson, billionaire owner of the Virgin Group, has taken one more step towards commercial space travel. Virgin Galactic, whose mission is “to fly passengers who are not professional astronauts to an altitude slightly over 100 kilometers (62 mi) and allow them to experience weightlessness for up to 6 minutes,” today introduced a model for the spacecraft at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The engine will be Canadian built, and seats upon “SpaceShipTwo” (great name) will cost about $200,000 apiece. Quite a deal for the budget traveler. Regardless, in the event of such a journey, I can say without hyperbole that there is only one man I would want sitting next to me on the ride up…