|  Bizarre Earthquake Lights Tied to Rifts in Earth  | Mysterious flashes of electricity known as earthquake lights are more likely to happen near rifts, where pieces of the Earth are pulling away from each other, new research suggests. The quick buildup of stress at these nearly vertical faults may cause electrical current to flow to the surface and cause the eerie light shows, the researchers find. The conclusions, published today (Jan. 2) in the current issue of the journal Seismological Research Letters, were drawn from analyzing 65 documented cases of earthquake lights over the last 400 years. But until recently, most seismologists didn't believe the earthquake lights were real because the reports were all anecdotal and hard to explain physically.
| Read More » Mystery of Bizarre Amazon Web Formations Unraveled  | About six months ago, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology first spotted a mysterious web unlike anything scientists had seen before: Each one of the weird webs was a tiny sphere surrounded by a circular fence less than an inch (2 centimeters) in diameter. The student, Troy Alexander, found the mysterious formation underneath a tarp at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru and had no idea what it was, so he posted photos of the webs on Reddit.
| Read More » Moon Rovers Planned for Commercial Lunar Exploration Project  | The commercial spaceflight company Golden Spike – which aims fly private missions to the moon by 2020 – has teamed up with the New York-based firm Honeybee Robotics to design robotic rovers for the planned lunar expeditions. "We're very proud to be working with Honeybee, which has tremendous experience and a record of successful performance in the development of flight systems for NASA," Golden Spike President and CEO Alan Stern said in a statement last month. Golden Spike first announced its goal of launching two-person commercial flights to the moon in December 2012. "Honeybee brings a unique body of knowledge and skills to help us augment the capabilities of human exploration missions with advanced robotics," Clive Neal, a researcher at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and chair of Golden Spike's lunar science advisory board, said in a statement.
| Read More » Your First Telescope: Stargazing Tips for Amateur Astronomers  | Over the years many other amateur astronomers have said their interest in the sky can be traced back to receiving their first telescope over the holidays.
| Read More » Boeing to Use Former Space Shuttle Hangar for Secret Space Plane  | A former NASA space shuttle hangar will serve as the new home and servicing facility for a fleet of secretive military space planes. The Boeing Company announced on Friday (Jan. 3) it will begin converting Orbiter Processing Facility-1 (OPF-1) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to support the U.S. Air Force X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV). Built by Boeing's Phantom Works, the winged X-37B space plane resembles in some ways a smaller version of NASA's shuttle with a 15-foot (4.5 m.) wingspan. The move to use OPF-1 will "enable the U.S. Air Force to efficiently land, recover, refurbish, and re-launch" the 29-foot-long (8.8 m.), reusable unmanned spacecraft, Boeing officials said in a statement.
| Read More » New Views of Famed Supernova Reveal Cosmic Dust Factory (Images)  | WASHINGTON — New views from a giant radio telescope in Chile are revealing massive amounts of dust created by an exploding star for the first time. Scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile to make the discovery while observing supernova 1987A, an exploded star in the Large Magellanic Cloud — a dwarf galaxy companion of the Milky Way located about 168,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers have long thought that supernovas are responsible for creating some of the large amounts of dust found in galaxies around the universe, yet they haven't directly observed the process until now, ALMA officials said. "We have found a remarkably large dust mass concentrated in the central part of the ejecta from a relatively young and nearby supernova," astronomer Remy Indebetouw, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the University of Virginia, said in a statement.
| Read More » 'Polar Vortex' Creates Huge Temperature Difference Across US  | A blast of Arctic air pushing south as far as Atlanta has caused air temperatures across the United States to plunge, creating a massive 140-degree Fahrenheit (77 degrees Celsius) temperature difference between the chilly Dakotas and balmy Florida yesterday (Jan. 5).
| Read More » Sunken Vases Double As 2,000-Year-Old Biology Experiments  | CHICAGO — Oysters, barnacles and corals that cling to ancient artifacts strewn about the seafloor are often a scourge in the eyes of marine archaeologists; The RPM Nautical Foundation is starting to document the creatures clung to ancient ceramic amphoras, as they map shipwrecks throughout the Mediterranean. These new data points promise to help scientists learn more about the region's underwater ecology and history, Derek Smith, a researcher at the University of Washington and RPM team member, explained here Friday (Jan. 3) at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting. "The amphoras have shape to them, they've got little cracks and crevices, they've got an interior and an exterior space, they've got different material types like different clays from around the region — things like that inspire all different communities to show up," Smith told LiveScience.
| Read More » Uncannily Lifelike Roman Masks Recreated in Wax  | CHICAGO — Some 2,000 years ago, elite Roman families stuffed their closets with wax masks made in the likeness of their male ancestors so that during funeral processions actors could fill in for the missing links of the genealogical line. Recently, however, a team of researchers at Cornell University made life-cast molds of their own faces to recreate these imagines maiorum, and they found that the wax masks were indeed uncannily lifelike. The group's work was presented here at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America this past weekend. With a limited wax supply, Jarriel had to melt down a botched mask she made of her colleague Carrie Fulton's face, she explained to LiveScience.
| Read More » China Destroys Part of Illegal Ivory Stockpile  | As part of an effort to discourage elephant poaching and the illegal trade in elephant ivory, China this morning (Jan. 6) destroyed part of its stockpile of confiscated ivory. The ceremony, largely symbolic, was conducted in the city of Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, and destroyed 6 tons of ivory (including tusks and various carvings) by burning, according to news reports and a release from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Elephant numbers have declined drastically across much of the continent, with some 96 elephants killed each day on average, mostly for their ivory, according to the WCS. Along with burning part of its ivory stockpile, China has increased some of its enforcement against illegally trading ivory, with the arrest last month of five poachers in Jilin Province, a record, the WCS said in its release.
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