Adobe has released Photoshop CS6 Beta, a free preview of the company’s upcoming refresh to the much-loved image editing app, and bringing with it a range of new Content-Aware tools. The new Content-Aware Patch, for instance, can easily duplicate an area of an image elsewhere as a fill, while  Content-Aware Move makes shuffling a section of an image elsewhere in the frame more straightforward.
The Beta also includes the CS6 Extended 3D editing features and quantitative imaging analysis tools, to give users a taste of what they can expect from the …

Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars.
The SpaceX CEO says he has finally worked out how to do it, and told the BBC he would reveal further details later this year or early in 2013.
Musk is one of Nasa’s new commercial partners, building systems to take cargo and crew to the space station.
He has developed his own rocket and a capsule for the purpose.
The Falcon 9 launcher and the Dragon vessel are expected to …

Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft has spied possible signs of geological activity on Saturn’s icy moon Dione.
It sees features that resemble hot fissures and indications of a possible ice volcano on the satellite.
The fissures look remarkably similar to the “tiger stripes” found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which spew powerful jets of water into space.
On Dione these features may now be idle, but other lines of evidence suggest some activity is ongoing.
The new findings suggest this saturnian moon could be a more dynamic place than was previously supposed.
However, scientists are yet to find …

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is wading into one of the 20th century’s most enduring mysteries: the fate of American aviator Amelia Earhart, who went missing without a trace over the South Pacific 75 years ago.
Clinton will meet Tuesday with historians and scientists from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which is launching a new search in June for the wreckage of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra plane off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati. Earhart and her navigator …

As a vast cloud of gas collapses under its mutual gravity and seeds the birth of a young star, the process of planetary formation begins. But far from it being a neat and tidy formation process, astronomers have uncovered a mechanism that determines why some orbits around the new star may be devoid of planets, whereas others become jammed with planets.
It may be logical to think that as a young star develops, surrounded by a protoplanetary disk — a spinning disk of dust and gas fertile for planets to grow …