These are a few sites I thought were interesting from August 4th through August 6th:

• Howard Hughes’ Nightmare: Space May Be Filled With Germs – I’m particularly proud of this headline.
• NASA – A Brief History of Solar Sails – great overview of the topic
• BBC NEWS | In Pictures | In pictures: Beijing pollution-watch – Gallery of pics from Beijing, with data from the BBC’s own particulate matter sensor. Fascinating. Aug 4: worst air in over a month, apparently.
• Robot Milk – Boing Boing Gadgets – awesome
• This NASA Astronaut Was ‘Too Busy to Be Scared’ – Astronaut Peggy Whitson on a reentry via Soyuz capsule in which the module didn’t separate properly, G forces hit 8.5, the capsule bounced 10 meters and started a grass fire: “Obviously it wasn’t totally nominal.”