Female commander set to lead shuttle CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The first woman to command a space shuttle mission, Air Force Col. Eileen Collins, sees her flight next month as "a great challenge" in more ways than one. Besides being NASA's first female space commander, she has to make sure the $1.5 billion Chandra X-ray telescope is delivered safely into orbit. Thursday morning the 42-year-old Collins boarded Columbia for the final portion of the simulated countdown and, in doing so, became the first woman to take the commander's left front seat of a space shuttle. She has flown twice in space before, both times in the right pilot's seat. Columbia is tentatively scheduled to blast off July 20. See full story <http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2560055839-daf> Wildlife thrive in bad environment NEW ELLENTON, S.C. (AP) - The wide-mouth bass are monsters. The deer are fatter and the alligators longer. And the ponds, wetlands and rich bottomland brim with snakes, turtles, and salamanders - a bounty of biological diversity. But the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile expanse of longleaf pine forest and marshland along the river that divides South Carolina from Georgia, is an ecological paradox. For four decades one of the government's top-secret nuclear bomb factories where five reactors produced plutonium and tritium for nuclear warheads, it also is an ecological treasure chest full of wildlife and one of the hottest spots for biological research in the country. See full story <http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=2560054673-fe4>
