Forty years ago Thursday, Apollo 11 blasted off on its 280,000-mile journey, fulfilling President Kennedy’s 1961 call to reach the moon by the end of the decade.

To commemorate the anniversary, NASA released newly restored video footage of the Apollo 11 moon landings — but the fabled “lost” moon tapes weren’t among them. Those tapes, alas, which preserved the highest-quality raw feed from the moon in July 1969, appear to have been accidentally erased. Instead, what NASA officials unveiled at a press conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., were partially restored versions of the compressed signal sent to Mission Control in Houston from three ground receiving stations in California and Australia. For example, mission commander Neil Armstrong’s face visor was too fuzzy to be seen in the original-quality recordings. The refurbished video shows his visor and a reflection in it.

“There’s nothing being created; there’s nothing being manufactured,” said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who’s in charge of the restoration project. The recordings of the special “slow-scan” video signal from the lunar lander were probably taped over more than 20 years ago. They had been recorded on data, not television tapes, which may have confused archivists back then. NASA officials at the press briefing said they regretted that proper procedures were not in place to preserve the best-quality recordings of the moon landing. Rumors had been circulating on the Internet for weeks that NASA had found those recordings in the basement of a university campus in Perth, Australia. But Thursday’s press conference dashed those hopes. The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a months-long project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done.

But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder, which includes the face visor image; Buzz Aldrin walking down the ladder; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; the planting of the flag on the moon. The restoration used four video sources: CBS News originals; kinescopes from the National Archives; a video from Australia that received the transmission of the original moon video; and camera shots looking at a TV monitor.

The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon. In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 of those tapes and reused them.

Of course I believe we went to the moon……. several times, but there is something extremely fishy about this story.

With great caution, the Quebec College of Physicians is prepared to cross the line on the controversial debate over euthanasia and propose that it be included “as part of the appropriate care in certain particular circumstances.”

After examining the issue for three years, the College’s task force on ethics concluded that Quebec society has evolved to the point where it could tolerate euthanasia in specific circumstances. The task force’s recommendation will likely be part of a “reflection” document the College will release next fall, hoping that a public debate on the issue will pressure the federal government to eventually amend the criminal code.

“We are being very cautious in our approach,” said the College’s secretary, Yves Robert. “Avoiding the debate contributes to the general hypocrisy around this issue. To say that it doesn’t happen because it is illegal is completely stupid. … We have to stop hiding our head in the sand,” Dr. Robert said.

Anyone out there think Americans will stop hiding their heads in the sand?

To celebrate 40 years of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, here’s a video of the launch. A website has been setup to recreate the mission in realtime, as can be seen in the widget below:

Proposed military robot would refuel by eating human bodies. What could possibly go wrong? — Cripes!

Those of you who follow the Robocalypse tag know that I find the rise of machine-based warfare and biomimetic freakery… troubling. Well, it just got a lot more so. Not content to have robots simply feed on widely available sunlight, or use an versatile diesel engine or something, some robo-pioneers have decided that this new robot should refuel on biomass.

Yes, it can use plants and compost and stuff like that, but let’s be honest. You’re deploying these on a battlefield. These sons of bitches are going to be eating bodies all day long. And you think it’ll stop there?

Found by Chris Wilson via Twitter.