Hasta La Gadget!

What do top-Hollywood earner Tom Cruise, talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and rock star Keith Richards have in common?

They are all celebrities “of a certain age,” still dominating their respective fields.

CNN recently put together a segment explaining how aging celebrities are changing the face of fame, putting to rest the notion that only the young embody Hollywood glamour.

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We all have bucket lists — a set of things we’d like to accomplish in our lives. In some cases, they are places to see, lifestyles we hope to achieve, milestones we’d like to mark. To make a bucket list, all you need is an imagination. But to accomplish what’s on that list? Well, sometimes that’s where the going gets rougher.

Joan Moran, motivational speaker, author and yoga-mediation instructor, recently spoke at the Healthy Aging Conference hosted by the UCLA Longevity Center on how midlifers can achieve their goals. The 69-year-old dynamo (she teaches more than 20 yoga classes a week and dances the tango internationally) spoke with The Huffington Post after her talk:

The Huffington Post: You are well-known for your energy and ability to motivate others. Can you explain the core of your message?

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In 2008, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander lay comatose in a hospital, a rare form of bacterial meningitis attacking his brain. His neocortex — the part of the brain that controls sensory perception, conscious thought and language, among other functions — had shut down. “My memories of my life on earth, of this universe… and certainly of family and all my words, language, all of that was completely gone,” he says.

Which is why what happened next is what opened this man of science to the existence of an afterlife. In a “Super Soul Sunday” interview with Oprah Winfrey (airing Sunday, December 2, at 11 a.m. ET on OWN), Dr. Alexander describes what he saw when he awoke on the other side.

He says he was “just a piece of awareness” with no memory of who he was or his life before, and describes seeing this new world from an “earthworm-eye” view. “Initially, I was in this kind of vague, foggy, murky underground,” he says. “It was like being in dirty Jell-O,” he says. “I had a very strong sense of either roots or vessels or something dark and red kind of strandy coming through around me.”

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NEW YORK — Word of a settlement agreement between former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and a hotel maid who accused him of trying to rape her could bring an end to a saga that has tarnished Strauss-Kahn’s reputation, ended his hopes for the French presidency and renewed a debate about the credibility of sexual assault accusers.

But it might not mean the end of legal troubles for Strauss-Kahn. He is awaiting a ruling on whether he is linked to “pimping” in connection with a French prostitution ring.

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By: SPACE.com Staff
Published: 11/29/2012 05:48 PM EST on SPACE.com

Contrary to rampant speculation, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has not made an earth-shaking find just a few months into its Red Planet mission, agency officials said today (Nov. 29).

Rumors of a big discovery began swirling earlier this month, after an NPR story quoted Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger as saying that the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument had recently gathered data "for the history books."

SAM is capable of identifying organic compounds, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. So many people assumed that Curiosity had detected organic compounds in the Martian soil.

But that’s not the case, officials said.

"Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect," officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., which manages Curiosity’s mission, wrote in a mission update today. "At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics."

Grotzinger, who is a geologist at Caltech in Pasadena, and several other members of the Curiosity team will hold a press conference Monday (Dec. 3) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Don’t expect a bombshell announcement.

"The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover’s full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil," JPL officials wrote.

The $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity landed inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a planned two-year mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life. SAM is just one of 10 science instruments Curiosity carries to help it in its quest, along with an array of 17 cameras. 

Curiosity scientists are currently scouting out potential targets for the first use of the rover’s drill, which can bore 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) into solid rock. The six-wheeled robot has already analyzed scooped-up soil samples with SAM and another instrument on its body known as CheMin.

While no huge news is apparently in the offing on Monday, NASA has high hopes for Curiosity and its mission.

"The mission already has found an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet, and there is every expectation for remarkable discoveries still to come," JPL officials wrote.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook & Google+. 

• Amazing Mars Rover Curiosity’s Martian Views (Latest Photos)
• Mars Rover Curiosity: Mars Science Lab Coverage
• 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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