NASA nearly parks rovers for good, then realizes that that would be dumb.

NASA nearly parked the Mars Exploration rovers for good, telling the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that it needed to help NASA with its budget cuts by taking $4 million away from the rover missions. This would have meant shutting off the two rovers, which are still functioning perfectly despite having exceeded their design lives several times over, for the long Martian winter and possibly forever. Today NASA retracted that statement as it realized that sacrificing two on-going missions that have stayed in the public eye so long to fund future missions which might fail in space or never get to launch would be a bad idea.

But technology does march forward. Up next: a phone you can swallow. Or might swallow by accident, like in that episode of Futurama.

And finally, Quebec is trying to ban fighting in junior hockey after a high-profile goalie fight a couple of days ago. When it became the business of governments to change the rules of sports, by legislation no less, is completely beyond me. In any case, this would be difficult jurisdictionally as the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League has teams not just in La Belle Provence, but also in all four Atlantic provinces and the state of Maine.