Morning Buzz: Aug. 8, 2007

With the crack of a bat, Barry Bonds hit an 84-mph fastball into the right-center-field seats of his home park and with it broke Hank Aaron's all-time home-run record by slugging No. 756. Fireworks and festivities quickly followed the fifth-inning shot. For most of the 43,000 adoring San Francisco Giants fans in the audience, this was quite a remarkable achievement, but for others, Bonds's name will forever be tainted by suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs. U.S. News interviewed researcher Don Catlin in 2004 on how he was able to identify an almost untraceable steroid that was at the heart of the scandal.

Help may still be a week away  for the six miners trapped after a Utah mine collapsed Monday.  Mining company executive Robert E. Murray contends small earthquakes are to blame for wiping out the progress made over the past two days by rescue workers. Whether this is the case remains unclear, however, the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado has recorded seismic events since the cave-in. On Monday, seismographic stations recorded a 3.9-magnitude event, though they could have just been tracking the mine collapse itself. Murray became angry at members of the media when it was suggested that "retreat mining" was responsible for the mine's collapse. This type of mining practiced at the Utah mine, in which miners pull down pillars of coal and purposely allow the roof to collapse, has been blamed for 13 deaths since 2000.

The first schoolteacher to become an astronaut and the woman who was Christa McAuliffe's backup on the ill-fated Challenger mission will blast into space this evening on space shuttle Endeavour. Barbara Morgan and her six crew mates will spend the next 14 days in space at the international space station. While there, Morgan will answer questions from students in Idaho and perhaps Virginia and Massachusetts as well. The space shuttle program went on a two-year hiatus after Columbia disintegrated while returning to Earth in 2003. In 2005, U.S. News reported on the status of the program in the weeks before Discovery became the first shuttle to again fly to the international space station.  Endeavour is one of the three remaining shuttles, and they are all set to retire in 2010.