French skydiver Michel Fournier failed on his second attempt to set a new free-fall record after his $500,000 balloon left without him on Tuesday. Fournier's initial plan was to be inside a small capsule attached to the balloon and then jump 24. 85 miles (40 kilometers) to earth. To prepare for his ascent, Fournier was breathing compressed oxygen and wore a space suit. The ascent would have taken 120 minutes and the descent only a quarter of an hour.

French skydiver Michel Fournier failed on his second attempt to set a new free-fall record after his $500,000 balloon left without him on Tuesday. Fournier's initial plan was to be inside a small capsule attached to the balloon and then jump 24. 85 miles (40 kilometers) to earth. To prepare for his ascent, Fournier was breathing compressed oxygen and wore a space suit. The ascent would have taken 120 minutes and the descent only a quarter of an hour.

Amid Earth Day celebration and despite a memo from county officials reminding employees to save on energy, the Bronx County Hall of Justice was brightly lit at the wee hours of the morning. The New York Daily News published photos and ran a story on the brightly lit public building as proof of the apparent lack of environmental consciousness among its occupants and users.

Two residents of Hawaii have asked a district court in Honolulu to stop the Department of Energy and its partners from constructing a particle accelerator facility on the border between France and Switzerland. Walter F. Wagner and Luis Sancho's federal lawsuit filed Monday also seeks to delay the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) pending its safety inspection on grounds that the gigantic atom smasher that physicists will use to study the origin of the universe could accidentally create "strangelet," an unknown matter, or an expanding black hole that both could destroy the Earth.

A recent survey done on elementary school students revealed that about one-third of the population thought that Sir Winston Churchill was the first man on the moon, instead of NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong. The survey, gathering a number of 1,400 students aged 4 to 10, was commissioned by the Royal Astronomical Society, in conjunction with Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.