We've all heard the viability of biofuels for land transportation and sea, but when it comes to jet fuel, that's another story. Virgin Atlantic set out to prove that the idea of biofueled jumbo jets are plausible and flew a four jet-engine aircraft from London to Amsterdam to make a point. More details at the full story.

March 30 may have just been an ordinary Friday to most, but did you know that an asteroid passed near our Earth last Friday night? Well, it wasn't really near; the asteroid named 2006 W2 passed Earth last Friday about two million miles away. Can't picture two million miles? Well, let's just say that that's about nine times farther away than the Moon.

Although there was no danger of collision, that thing is huge! The asteroid is more than a mile wide and if it did hit Earth, it would have destroyed everything for hundreds of miles around. It would also most likely upset global commerce and create drastic climate change that Richard Branson's US$ 25 million contest couldn't fix. The rock directly passed Southern California at around 11 p.m. last Friday.

Astronomers have filed hundred of asteroids larger than a half-mile which sometimes passed by the Earth's orbit. One asteroid, Apophis, will pass very close to Earth in the year 2029 and has a minor chance of hitting our planet in 2036. We sure do hope that NASA and other space agencies have already concocted a solution for Earth-bound asteroids when that time comes.

You'd think that Sir Richard Branson is crazy when he came up with ideas like space tourist flights and storing your baby's umbilical cord and placental blood. But his next idea is attracting the good kind of attention.

The Virgin boss recently launched a contest looking for the person who can come up with the best way to remove huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The prize? A cool, US$ 25 million.

The competition was launched recently alongside former US VP, Al Gore. A panel of judges will oversee the prize, including James Lovelock (Gaia theory inventor) and NASA scientist James Hansen. Other members of the panel include British environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickells, Gore, and Australian mammalogist and paleontologist, Tim Flannery.

To win the cash prize, you have to come up with a method that will remove at least one billion tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere. Here's to hoping that those who'll enter the competition will not do it for the money or the fame, but will do it because this is a cause he/she believes in.

We've seen Virgin Galactic's spaceplane which is planned to be fully-operational come 2008, and now that everything is going as planned, Richard Branson is now ready to dabble on other projects. He recently announced that he is trying his hands on the world of stem cells (which could be harvested from amniotic fluid). And you thought offering space flights is a controversial business, huh?

This February 1, a Virgin-branded cold-storage operation will be launched. Parents can store their newborn's umbilical cord and placental blood - both of these are very rich in the type of stem cells that are unlikely to be rejected by the body. Stem cell transplants are currently being used to treat leukemia but stem cell treatment trials are underway for people who suffer cancer, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and heart problems.

No info has been revealed yet as to how much you'd have to shell out for Richard Branson to store your offspring's umbilical cord and placental blood. But in the UK, a similar service would cost roughly £1,500 for collection of the blood and about £100 a year for cold storage.

Quadriplegic physicist and author of "A Brief History in Time" Stephen Hawking is determined to embark on a travel to space. He's tired of theorizing and wants to experience the real thing. He's been hinting about his dreams of space travel and now he's close to achieving his dream. But how can he do that? He's paralyzed and can only communicate through a blink-controlled computer.

Well, Prof. Hawkings has coordinated with Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic's going to be able to take passengers into suborbital flight by 2009.

The plan is to have Prof. Hawkings take a zero-gravity flight courtesy of Zero Gravity Corp. He would be able to experience 30-second weightlessness during the flight and that would serve as a preparation for space travel.

Zero Gravity has clarified the procedures for flying disabled people with the FAA. Prof. Hawking's flight may not even have been scheduled yet, but he's already taken the proverbial giant leap ahead for all of us by proving that even a wheelchair doesn't have to be a barrier to space.

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson today revealed a mock-up of the rocket-propelled spaceplane that will take Virgin Galactic business customers into sub-orbital space flight. Tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight are expected to cost $ 190,000, a price that isn't bad considering that the spacecraft which Branson revealed today can only carry a total of 8 people, 6 passengers and 2 pilots, on the sub-orbital flight at an altitude of 140km.

The design of the yet unnamed craft was based upon the successful SpaceShipOne craft which was built by pioneer Burt Rutan, the first engineering beauty which claims the title for the first privately built vehicle to reach space in 2004. Since the success of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Group later created Virgin Galactic, the space-faring division of Virgin Atlantic and has contracted Rutan's company Scaled Composites to design and build a passenger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic will own and operate at least five spaceships and two motherships which carry the spaceships up to approximately 50,000ft.

The passenger flights which could begin as early as 2009, will take off from the purpose-built 5m facility called Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, technically the first private spaceport on earth. Virgin claimed back in July that they had already received 150 space-flight bookings already and that 60,000 potential customers had registered interest in the flights. It's just like Star Trek really, just without the faster than light engines.

Virgin Galactic, a division of the Virgin group owned by multi-millionaire Richard Branson plans to have it's own plane/rocket hybrids in flight as early as 2008. Former soap star Victoria Principal, designer Philippe Starck and a senior member of an unidentified royal family have already snapped up tickets for one of the worlds first space tourist flights in 2008.

Self-made millionaire Branson told MSNBC on Monday that Virgin Galactic were on track to launch the sub-orbital flights for the year after next and that they have already sold tickets to its first 150 passengers at no less than $200,000 per ticket! Along with the 150 passengers with tickets already, Virgin Galactic confirmed that 300 potential passengers were going through a detailed reservation process while 60,000 had registered interest via the Virgin Galactic Web site. Design work on Virgin's SpaceShipTwo spacecraft that will most likely carry the passengers is expected to be completed next year.

The spacecraft to be used by Virgin is based on SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 won the $10 million Ansari X prize offered to the first private organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Virgin Galactic are building five models of SpaceShipTwo, a larger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin said that the $200,00 customers will spend only 15 minutes in space, including just five minutes of weightlessness.