Richard Branson's Virgin empire has announced that it has leased a site for its first Virgin Galactic spaceport.  Not surprisingly, they haven't gone for RAF Lossiemouth as proposed by the Scottish National Party.

It's been quite some road for Richard Branson, from the early days of publishing a school newspaper, to founding Virgin Records, at that time an independent label, with this release (left).  He was a tougher cookie than Malcom McLaren when dealing with the Sex Pistols.  He founded a major chain of record stores (as a student in Edinburgh, the small Virgin Record in the New Town was the place to get indie releases), which recently got rebranded and has gone bust.  I can remember wondering what the hell he was up to getting involved in an airline, but obviously what do I know!

The BBC reports that Stalin has been voted into third place in a poll for the greatest Russian, held by a Russian TV station.

Never mind that he was born in Gori in Georgia! (You may recall Gori from the Russian military action in 2008).  Anyway, the result is a little astonishing, given his three decade reign of terror in which millions of Soviet citizens died.  His claim to greatness (other than being a hugely important figure in the 20th century) is presumably his reputation as the person who led the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany.  As the BBC says:

The Royal Mail has issued (or will issue) stamps to celebrate the upcoming Darwin anniversary.  There's also a miniature sheet, depicting the Galapagos Islands, and a variety of the specialised fauna found there.

I think they are particularly attractive, and it's good to see the profile of this most important of anniversaries maintained.  For more information, visit Norvic Philatelics - there is a much more information on the design, background information, and how to buy first day covers etc (and I also linked to their images).  I have to say, I never thought I'd blog about postage stamps, but there you go!

[Post edited to remove direct links to the images]

The Open University is hosting a web page devoted to the upcoming Darwin 200 anniversary.  Usefully, it's also the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species (free e-book, web book), possibly the most influential work in science ever (your starter for '10'!).

Of course, I can be accused of a little bias since the site is the work of my colleagues at the OU, but it's a more graphically pleasing route to finding courses such as Darwin and Evolution than the standard OU website!  The course is one of a number of Science Short Courses that expect no prior qualification, but which reflect topical issues in science - the courses are very popular, and offer a relatively low commitment introduction to distance learning via the Open University.