Astronaut Robert Satcher uses a digital still camera to expose take a self-portrait during the STS-129 mission's first spacewalk. During the six-hour, 37-minute spacewalk, Satcher and astronaut Mike Foreman installed a spare S-band antenna structural assembly to the Z1 segment of the station's truss, or backbone. Satcher and Foreman also installed a set of cables for a future space-to-ground antenna on the Destiny laboratory and replaced a handrail on the Unity node with a new bracket used to route an ammonia cable that will be needed for the Tranquility node when it is delivered next year. The two spacewalkers also repositioned a cable connector on Unity, checked S0 truss cable connections and lubricated latching snares on the Kibo robotic arm and the station's mobile base system. Image Credit: NASA

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Japan has had a long and distinguished tradition in modern physics. Just to pick one example, the amazing efforts of Shin’ichirō Tomonaga to understand quantum electrodynamics, anticipating the work of Schwinger and Feynman while remaining essentially isolated from the rest of the world during World War II. More recently, Japan has continued to [...]