Spacecraft Twins Arrive at the Moon

The Moon is like an aging boxer, its face scarred and distorted by a lifetime of powerful blows. In the boxer's case, those blows are delivered over the course of a few decades. In the case of the Moon, the punishment has been going on for billions of years, courtesy of comets and asteroids that carved out craters and piled up mountains all over the lunar surface. The very birth of the moon was violent: planetary scientists are pretty sure our companion world was created when a Mars-size object slammed into Earth and ripped off a Moon-size chunk. Artist concept of GRAIL mission. Much of our understanding of that violent history comes from rocks hauled back by the Apollo missions four decades ago. But the astronauts who gathered that...

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'Fast Five' was downloaded 9M times

'Fast Five' is the most pirated movie of 2011 "Fast Five" will probably not be at the top of many year-end movie lists -- best, worst, biggest hits or otherwise. But it is No. 1 somewhere, although probably not where its studio, Universal, would want it to be. The movie was the most pirated film of 2011, according to data compiled by TorrentFreak. The Vin Diesel-Paul Walker-Dwayne Johnson action saga was swapped almost 9.3 million times via BitTorrent. That's a lot, but it's way down from 2010 piracy leader "Avatar," which racked up more than 16 million downloads. TorrentFreak says the average for the Top 10 this year was also way down from 2010, although the number of BitTorrent users didn't decline. "The Hangover Part II" and "Thor"...

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Top 3 Movies of 2011

These are top three movies of 2011: 3. 'The Descendants'  A number of major movies this year were about looking into the past and attempting to find some sort of solace or meaning there, creatively, personally or otherwise. But as Woody Allen revealed in his "Midnight in Paris," our view of the past is often distorted by our own desires, and things weren't truly any better then than they are now. That's why there's not a whole lot of emotional truth in a simple homage. But there's a ton of it in "The Descendants," which is ultimately about taking one's eyes off the rearview mirror and peering into the future. That means letting go, and the grief that Matt King (George Clooney) and his two daughters must work through as they say goodbye...

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Deer find safe home at FBI firing range, academy

'They're pretty immune to the sound ... they don't know what a gun is,' says FBI instructor QUANTICO, Virginia — Call it a playground for Bambi and G-Men, where imaginary criminals are hunted and deer are the spectators. Deer roam atop a berm surrounding the shooting range at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., on Dec. 19. The 547-acre FBI Academy, where some of America's best marksmen fire off more than 1 million bullets every month, happens to be one of the safest places for deer during hunting season. The property on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., is home to some of the FBI's most elite forces and training programs as well as a de facto wildlife refuge where deer, fox, wild turkeys, groundhogs and vultures roam fearless and...

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