According to this blog post from the Young and Catholic blog, the location for World Youth Day 2008 is “semi-official”: Sydney, Australia. According to the blog post:
The “official”, official announcement won’t be made until the end of the Mass and activities taking place at Marienfeld on August 21.
For World Youth Day 2005 coverage, I suggest you check out the Catholic Insider podcast, which is a member of Disciples with Microphones.
Although I’m not sure if this would succeed, is is a very interesting possibility: Japanese scientists using mammoth DNA from preserved mammoth carcasses to create a half-mammoth baby inside of a female elephant. 50 years of careful breeding could result in an animal that’s 88% mammoth. However, my Future Problem Solving thought processes tell me that if this were feasible, bringing an extinct species back to life could possibly present some unforseen challenges. But for more information, see this National Geographic article.
For those of you who love to drool over feature lists (like me 
), you’ll want to check out the first Windows Vista feature list (that I know of) posted on Microsoft.com. The Windows Vista Experiences page contains features divided into four categories: Productivity and Information Management, Mobile and Connected, Networking and Connectivity, and Assistance, Upgrading, and Backup.
One of the coolest new features (“new” meaning I had not heard of the feature until I read this webpage) is File Shadow Copies and is featured on the Assistance, Upgrading, and Backup page. The feature description is as follows:
Shadow Copies for Shared Files is a technology included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that allows you to recover prior versions of an accidentally overwritten or deleted file without backup. Windows Vista incorporates this technology to enable you to recover prior versions of files on the PC without needing a server.
Kind of like Microsoft Word’s “file versions” feature, but this is for every single file type.
Oooh… ahhh…
The NASA site announced that just a day before the Discovery was supposed to land, Steve Robinson transmitted the first podcast from space! You can listen to the podcast or read the podcast transcript at the NASA website; here’s the first paragraph of the transcript:
Hello, this is Mission Specialist Number 2 Steve Robinson from the Space Shuttle Discovery. We’re high in orbit on our last day of orbit. Tomorrow we come home. I’m currently talking to you just off the southeast tip of Indonesia in the daylight and moving on towards night. It’s been a fantastic mission up here, absolutely amazing. Some of the hardest work that any of us have ever done. We haven’t had a whole lot of sleep, and we’ve been extremely busy and really happy.
Although this is pretty cool, I’m not sure if this qualifies as a podcast because I can’t find an RSS feed anywhere. Oh well.
That’s what I call excessive game-playing! Reuters article.