A collection of fairytales penned by Harry Potter author JK Rowling is to be published to raise money for a children’s charity.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which Rowling first mentioned in The Deathly Hallows, will go on sale on 4 December.

A handwritten copy of the book was sold at auction for £1.95m last year.

Rowling wrote and illustrated seven copies of the book, but offered only one for sale. It was thought the book would never be published.

Collector’s edition
British charity the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG), which was founded by Rowling and Baroness Emma Nicholson to help vulnerable children across Europe, will publish three editions of the book. Bloomsbury and Scholastic will publish a £6.99 edition, featuring additional commentary on each fairytale from Professor Dumbledore, and an introduction by Rowling.

Amazon, who bought the handwritten copy at auction last year, will produce a maximum of 100,000 Collector’s Edition copies aimed at replicating the look and feel of the original tales. “There was understandable disappointment among Harry Potter fans when only one copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard was offered to the public last December,” said Rowling. “I am therefore delighted to announce that, thanks to the generous support of Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Amazon - and with the blessing of the wonderful people who own the other six original books - The Tales of Beedle the Bard will now be widely available to all Harry Potter fans.” [BBC NEWS]

Glenn Martin’s invention is far more unwieldy — a 250-pound piano-sized contraption that people settle into rather than strap on.

As thousands looked on Tuesday, the inventor’s 16-year-old son donned a helmet, fastened himself to a prototype Martin jet pack and revved the engine, which sounded like a motorcycle. Harrison Martin eased about three feet off the ground, the engine roaring with a whine so loud that some kids covered their ears.

With two spotters preventing the jet pack from drifting in a mild wind, the pilot hovered for 45 seconds and then set the device down as the audience applauded.

The Martin jet pack can — in theory — fly an average-sized pilot about 30 miles in 30 minutes on a full 5-gallon tank of gas. The apparatus was unveiled Tuesday at AirVenture Oshkosh 2008, the annual aviation convention of the Experimental Aircraft Association in east-central Wisconsin.

“Wow, that went better than expected,” Glenn Martin said afterward, his accent revealing his New Zealand roots. “People will look back on this as a moment in history.” That remains to be seen. Federal regulations limit the use of such devices, and it’s unclear whether people will shell out $100,000 for a jet pack whose capabilities have been demonstrated on paper but not in the air. The Martin jet pack is designed to conform to the Federal Aviation Administration’s definition of an ultralight vehicle, which weighs less than 254 pounds and carries only one passenger.

There’s an emergency parachute that’s effective above about 400 feet, and an impact-absorbing undercarriage that can soften a rough landing or short fall, Martin said. He’s still refining the safety features for those heights in between. “A lot of it comes down to how do you fly, at what speed, at what angle,” he said. Like Kent Couch, the Oregon man who flew 235 miles earlier this month with 150 helium balloons attached to his lawn chair, Martin always wanted to soar through the air. He quit his job as a pharmaceutical sales rep to launch his jet-pack company.

Martin says venture capitalists are backing him, but he didn’t give names. Reaction to the test flight was mixed. Attendees with aviation backgrounds raved, calling it an engineering marvel and saying the 45-second flight was fantastic proof that the idea works. Others who hoped to see the machine go higher and move in different directions seemed generally disappointed. Martin began taking orders Tuesday for jet packs to be delivered at next year’s AirVenture, though he’s keeping his sales expectations in check.

Jet Pack has “hundreds” of people on a waiting list for its jet fuel pack, spokeswoman Kelly McLear said, but she wouldn’t say when it would be available. “Our No. 1 priority is safety,” McLear said. “We’re not going to put a product on the market unless we’ve checked it a million times over and worked all the bugs out.” No other major companies have revealed plans to produce jet packs. [Yahoo]

At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn’s moon Titan studied by the international Cassini spacecraft contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the Cassini mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil. Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world.

Scientists had theorized that Titan might have oceans of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons, but Cassini found hundreds of dark, lake-like features instead, and it wasn’t known at first whether they were liquid or dark, solid material, JPL’s statement said. “This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid,” Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini’s visual and mapping instrument, said in the statement.

The instrument was used during a December flyby to observe a feature dubbed Ontario Lacus, in the south polar region, that is about 7,800 square miles, slightly larger than North America’s Lake Ontario. Cassini reached Saturn in mid-2004 and at the end of that year launched a probe named Huygens that parachuted to the surface of Titan the following January. The mission is a project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. [Yahoo]