PHOENIX – The Padres were happy to see a freakish talent such as Barry Bonds leave the National League West last fall.

Unfortunately for them, the rival Arizona Diamondbacks employ a transcendent pitcher who is improving in the prime of his career.

Brandon Webb now has a deft change-up to go with his illustrious sinkerball, and the deceptive slow balls helped him deal the Padres a 4-1 defeat, which wrapped up first-place Arizona's three-game sweep of last-place San Diego last night.

"The first time I faced him, he'd throw sinker, sinker, sinker," said Padres cleanup man Adrian Gonzalez. "He's throwing his change-up more now than he did. I don't recall him throwing it much before. It's a pitch you've got to worry about it."

A pitcher who knows something about change-ups, TrevorLester at Exinetics and Robert Anderson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop the concept of "exploration telepresence."

In a typical scenario, astronauts would travel to another planet, but they wouldn't go down to its surface. Instead they would park their ship in orbit around the planet, then send down telepresence robots. The astronauts would be remotely controlling the robots from the ship, seeing through their cameras and controlling their manipulator arms as if they were there themselves. Because of the short transmission distance involved, the communications lag would only be a fraction of a second.

When the mission was over, the robots would simply be left behind.

Ultimately, Hodges believes that putting humans directly on other planets is still the best way to go, but that his approach is a