China successfully launched the first piece of its upcoming space lab on Thursday. Named Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace), it is intended to serve as a testing base for space technologies that China will need in the future. This makes China the third country to successfully have launched their own space station, following Russia and the US. The station module is currently unmanned but will see several visitors in the coming months including China's first female astronaut.
In other news, the Tevatron shuts down for the final time tomorrow. After nearly 25 years of operation, it has seen its last ion particle beams. Tevatron bridged the gap between the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider and the building of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). With the closure of the Tevatron the US will lack a high energy particle collider on the scale of the LHC, meaning that US particle physicists interested in high energy collisions will have to go to CERN to do their experiments. The Tevatron itself may be recommissioned as a muon collider making it one of the first in the world to collide leptons at super high energy.
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