Hybrid cars aren't the only thing that's going green. By 2009, Australia's Solar Sailor is planning to set up solar-powered ferry boats to sail across San Francisco Bay, carrying tourists and passengers alike.

If all goes well, the boat will be ferrying passengers in two years time. The boat still runs on diesel, but it mostly gets around on wind or solar power.

The full story after the jump!

A grand total of 132 racehorses were diagnosed with a mild strain of herpes several days ago following police investigations of deliberate horse poisoning in the city's racetracks.

Fortunately, the horses were declared out of danger by local veterinarians after appropriate treatment was applied. "The horses are showing elevated temperatures but they seem to have recovered after a couple of days of rest. Overall, the symptoms are very mild," said Brian Stewart.

Containment measures were also conducted to stop the spread of the infectious disease. The quarantine measures are proving to be effective as no additional cases have so far been reported.

Police are still investigating how a device found in one of the city's racetracks could be linked to the outbreak of herpes. A small contraption designed to shoot poison darts into the animals at the start of the race was detected and confiscated by law enforcers.

This places the 2007 Beijing Olympics in a precarious position as equestrian events have been moved to the freeport island from Beijing because of disease-control problems. A growing concern among the ranks of the international jockeys may derail the events or have them moved elsewhere. The Hong Kong Jockey Club which sanctions horse race operations in the area has declined to comment so far.

Seems like there really is no stopping now the archaeologists from probing deep within the walls of the great Cheops pyramid. After failing to fully explore the pyramid back in 2002 from the Queen's chamber because of a stone wall or door with copper handles, the team is back, and armed with a new robot.

This robot will trek the same narrow passages in the Queen's chamber as the robot in the first expedition did. This time, however, it will be armed with tiny cameras, which can be inserted via a tiny hole drilled through the blockage. It is the archaeologists' hope that they will find more clues that will lead them to the discovery of the very tomb of Cheops.

The team will be composed of experts from Egypt, Singapore, Britain and Hong Kong. The robot will start its mission some time in February next year.

Many regions in China which have been suffering from increasing pollution from coal-fired plants, have recently released reports of lead poisoning. These reports have been coming in from the Gansu province in the northwest region of that country. Residents of two villages in the area were reported to be seeking hospital treatment after their blood test results showed high levels of lead. A nearby smelter is pointed out as the possible source of the pollution which has ultimately led to the harm that has been caused to these villagers, according to Chinese newspapers.

According to The Beijing Daily Messenger, almost every family in the area were found to have high levels of lead in their blood.

Lead poisoning damages the nervous system, eventually leading to dementia, convulsions and death.  In fact, the Roman habit of drinking wine from lead-lined vessels is thought by some scholars to  have contributed to the decline of Roman society. Hopefully, as China modernizes, they will pay closer attention to the lessons of history than their Western counterparts.

Want to fly out to space? If you have a cool 20 Mil on you, and you're in China, you can contact Hong Kong Space Travel for a reservation. The company is helping Space Adventures to open the upsurging Chinese Market to Space Tourism.

Hong Kong Space Travel is hooking up with Space Adventures. The started around 2001 when they booked Dennis Tito, an American tycoon, to go to the International Space Station (ISS). Since then, Russia's Federal Space Agency hooked up with Space Adventure and is in the process of sending more tourists into space.

The costs are the ones hampering most people from enjoying the trip to space. A 10 day trip to the ISS costs $20M, an 18-day ISS mission with a spacewalk is $35M. They're even planning a trip that will send two tourists fly around the side of the moon! Cost? $200M. In order to promote more people to join this tour, they're announcing that they'll be offering suborbital tours. The costs are cheaper, just about a $100K. However, they're still in the process of testing reusable launch vehicles for an hour-long space trek. Once they've chosen the launch vehicle, expect the 200 who have already reserved to go up into suborbital space.

So what's the connection with China? Space Adventures, through Hong Kong Space Travel, is planning to initiate and develop a working relationship with the China National Space Administration because of their cheaper rockets. They have a spacecraft called, Shenzhou, that has already completed two missions that may be integrated into Space Adventures's plans.

Time to save up for that suborbital flight!

One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Dr. Stephen William Hawking, is urging all of us to pack up and leave our beloved planet and move into artificial habitats in space or in a deconstructed Moon. In his recent talk in Hong Kong, the famous physicist said, "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

He mentions the wrong shape of the earth as one of the leading factors on why we must flee. Mathematics will support this idea of Hawking's to an outstanding degree. Think about it. The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has less surface area than any other form of the same volume. This means that, in the near future we could have already occupied most of the existing land on the planet.

But, he also poses possible solutions to our dilemma. We could either occupy Mars now, and by the mid-century we'd already have it filled. And even that won't be the best solution, because we are still moving into a sphere, which the main reason why we are moving out. So, he then suggests along with physicists like Freeman Dyson, that asteroids and perhaps the diminutive worlds of the Kuiper Belt, could be the next best thing. Unfortunately, Dyson reckons that our descendants will migrate to where land is abundant.

Building artificial habitats in space could probably be the perfect solution to our realty needs. This is not an entirely new concept though. Building gigantic, rotation aluminum cylinders in orbit, has dated back to 1970s, when Gerald O'Neill and Tom Heppenheimer wrote speculative books on how it might be done. Or if that doesn't sound appealing to you, we can always take the moon apart and redevelop it as a dream suburbia.