With the next to the last flight of the American space shuttle in the air, the US will soon be retiring their space shuttles to replace them with a new vehicle, scheduled for 2013. Of course, seeing how things always delay in America, it is more likely 2023 is a better year. Until then, the Americans will be riding on Russian Soyuz capsules . But the Soyuz itself, a 40 year old technology with many modernizations, is on its way out, to be replaced with bigger better platforms.

The replacement of the Soyuz will be the Kliper, a ship carrying 6 crew and a half ton of cargo. It is scheduled to fly its maiden voyage some time in 2010. The ship is about twice the size of the Soyuz and will require much larger rockets, most likely the Zenit class of booster rockets, in order to make orbit. It will return to earth by extending wings and gliding down, for a soft landing.

Interestingly enough, if things go according to plant, the new, larger Kliper, will actually save money. The present Soyuz missions run between $20 to $30 million each (compared to the American space shuttles at around $300 million each). Kliper flights are supposed to move more equipment and people for less money, but even it the costs stay the same, with more room on the ship, there will be room for more space tourists and at $20 million per pop, the ships will earn a profit, with just one added passenger.

Development of the Kliper is also priced at the low cost of $1 billion, compare that to the $10 billion for the American Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), which is still on the drawing board.

But the Kliper is only the first modern step in a new plan by the Russian space agency to conquer the inner sphere of our solar system. Next on the development board is a manned spacecraft powered by a nuclear electric engine. Russia and the Soviet Union before, had developed, for decades, nuclear powered satellites, which did not have to rely upon easily damaged solar arrays, for power. Of course those put out only kilowatts of power, while this ships engines will have to run on the megawatt range. Of course, after40 years of working on this technology, this is a very realistic capability.

The ship's design is scheduled to be complete by 2012 and a finished by 2021, at an estimated cost of 17 billion rubles, or $580 million. More realistic estimates put the price tag at $1 to $1.5 billion, over the next decade.

KEMEROVO (Siberia) - The winner of the Krasa Rossii (Russian Beauty) 2009 beauty pageant told reporters that she dreamed of playing a leading role in a movie about war, getting married and having 'a bunch of kids.'

Yevgenia Lapova, a 23-year-old elite model from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and a graduate from the prestigious All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, won a diamond-clad crown and a Nissan sedan on Saturday in a tough competition with 68 contestants from almost all regions of Russia.

The Siberian beauty, who already holds Miss Asia and Oceania 2005 among other titles, said her motto was 'if the best is attainable, then good is not enough."

Despite her focus on acting career, Lapova said she wanted to get married and have a big family.

"I want to marry the man I love and give birth to a bunch of kids," she said, adding that she was currently dating a businessman.

Moscow's medical workers discovered a magnificent gift of a sixteen-year-old girl Natalya Demkina from Saransk. The girl possesses “dual vision”. She is capable of discerning a person's internal organs without using X-ray or ultrasound.

Natasha has already disproved several medical diagnoses and has not made any mistakes. A series of medical experiments conducted in one of the clinics provide substantial and undeniable proofs of the girls' unique abilities.

“Growing up, my daughter was just an ordinary child,” states Natasha's mother Tatyana Vladimirovna. “Perhaps, she just a bit more mature than other kids her age. Natasha started to talk when she was only 6 months old. At 1, she could already recite Pushkin and Nekrasov by heart. By 3, Natasha mastered the alphabet and learned to operate a snowmobile,” continues her mother. “Since early childhood, Natasha has been resistant to cold temperatures. She practically walked around naked till winter. She once walked barefoot in the snow after sauna [Rus. banya] Overall, she was just a normal kid. Never was she able to see through humans!”

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.

Medical advances mean that many people who once would have died young now live to a ripe old age. This has led to a belief that natural selection no longer affects humans and, therefore, that we have stopped evolving.

"That's just plain false," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. He says although differences in survival may no longer select "fitter" humans and their genes, differences in reproduction still can. The question is whether women who have more children have distinguishing traits which they pass on to their offspring.

To find out, Stearns and his colleagues turned to data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of more than 14,000 residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948 – spanning three generations in some families.