CHINA's Openly Aggressive Strategy to Dominate Space

China is making increasingly aggressive plans to launch 20 spacecrafts this year,2013.

This will include the country's third lunar probe Chang'e-3 and manned spacecraft Shenzhou-10, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced.

The country is scheduled to conduct a manned space docking test between orbiting target module Tiangong-1 and Shenzhou-10, the corporation said during an internal work conference.

The Chang'e-3 moon probe is expected to land and stay there during the second stage of the country's lunar probe program, it said.

According to CASC, by 2020, China will have more than 200 spacecrafts operating in orbit, accounting for about 20 percent of the world's total.

How many of the countries who are already under threat from China's expansionist plans will suffer as a consequence of their imposed domination of the space above the Earth's atmosphere?

What safeguards can be put in place to prevent their militarisation of Space and to make the Earth's atmospheric zone a de-militarised zone (DMZ)?

Video Games: White Males Dominate

You might not be surprised to hear that the demographics of video-game characters don't quite match up with those of real populations.

But the first "virtual census" of the human characters that inhabit US video games exposes just how much they diverge from reality.

The survey reveals that males, adults and white people are over-represented in games. Females, black people, children and the elderly are correspondingly under-represented.

Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, carried out the study with colleagues at Indiana University, Ohio University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He told New Scientist that the mismatch between real-world and videogame populations could be excluding some groups of potential players from games.

Identity feelings

Williams and colleagues say that this is the first research on the types of people represented by characters in video games – whose actions are claimed by some to act as role models for people's behaviour in the real world.

They ran a census on the top 150 games sold on nine popular video-gaming platforms, including the Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PS2, Nintendo GameCube, PSP, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and the PC. The research took place in February 2006 but has only just been published.