|  Peanut-Shaped Asteroid Zooms Past Earth in Incredible Video  | Two giant radio telescopes teamed up to image a peanut-shaped asteroid that zoomed by Earth late last month.
| Read More » How to Get Electricity to 300 Million People in India, Without Fossil Fuels The company provides carbon capture technologies to chemical, power and natural-gas plants. This Op-Ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. In the fight against climate change, the world needs a global accord to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. Read More » An Encrypted Internet Is a Basic Human Right (Op-Ed) Nico Sell is co-founder and co-chairman of Wickr Inc. This Op-Ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. George Washington could have become a king, but instead devoted his life to giving power back to the people. Technology, as well as the hopes it fuels, has empowered millions of people across the globe to demand social and political change from some of its most oppressive governments. Read More » Helping Kids Beat the Summertime Bulge During long summer vacations from school, children are often home all day, watching television, playing video games and surfing the Internet. Therefore, during long, hot summers, America's children — especially those who prefer indoor and sedentary activities — can gain weight. If they lose the weight when school resumes, they may find themselves beginning a yo-yo weight cycle that lasts for years and results in obesity. Read More » Butter, Gravy and Sweet Tea? Southern Foods Tied to Heart Risks Adults who chow down on traditional Southern foods — such as fried chicken, gravy-smothered liver, buttered rolls and sweet tea — may be at an increased risk of acute heart disease, a new study finds. During the study, there were 536 cases of acute heart disease, which included fatal and nonfatal heart attacks. After controlling for other factors that may influence people's risk of heart disease — such as their level of education, income, physical activity, smoking and age — the researchers found that the people who frequently ate Southern fare were 56 percent more likely to have a heart attack or die from heart disease during the almost six-year study than those who ate it less. Read More » Spacewalking Cosmonauts Give Space Station Window a Shine  | Yes, they do windows, even in space: Two cosmonauts scrubbed a window, documented the International Space Station exterior, collected an experiment and battled cold fingers during a speedy spacewalk Monday, August 10. The Russian residents of the space station are experienced spacewalkers: it was flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko's second spacewalk and Expedition 44 commander Gennady Padalka's 10th. Padalkla is the most experienced spacewalker in history, with over 35 hours under his belt — his first was in September 1998, when he repaired damaged cables on Russia's Mir space station.
| Read More » Beautiful, Rat-Filled Island Seen From Space  | OK, it's not much of a tourism slogan, but this space-based image of a small island off the coast of northern Australia highlights a long-standing threat to bird life in the Pacific. Rattus exulans, the Polynesian rat, is an unwelcome intruder on this sandy outpost. According to the Invasive Species Compendium maintained by the agricultural nonprofit Centre for Biosciences and Agriculture, Polynesians colonizing the Pacific brought Polynesian rats to western islands like Samoa and Tonga as far back as 4,000 years ago.
| Read More » Lightning Can Warp Rocks at Their Core  | When this happens, the lightning-zapped rock becomes covered in natural glasses called fulgurites. In the new study, the researchers took a microscopic look at the quartz fulgurites and found "shock lamellae" — a thin layer of warped quartz crystals — underneath the glassy quartz, induced by the high pressure of the strike. The only other known natural event to induce shock lamellae is a meteorite impact.
| Read More » Thirsty Butterflies Disappearing from the UK  | Green-veined white butterflies with pale-yellow wings, among other butterfly species, could disappear from southern Britain in the next 35 years if climate change and habitat loss continue, according to new research. "The results are worrying," Tom Oliver, lead author of the study and an ecological modeler at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, said in a statement.
| Read More » It's Official: The Universe Is Dying Slowly  | The most comprehensive assessment of the energy output in the nearby universe reveals that today's produced energy is only about half of what it was 2 billion years ago. "We used as many space- and ground-based telescopes as we could get our hands on to measure the energy output of over 200,000 galaxies across as broad a wavelength range as possible," Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) team leader Simon Driver, of the University of Western Australia, said in a statement. When the Big Bang created the energy of the universe about 13.8 billion years ago, some portion of that energy found itself locked up as mass.
| Read More » Perseid Meteor Shower Gets a Boost from Dark Moon, Jupiter  | The Perseid meteor shower is the most widely observed and dependable annual meteor display of the year, and its peak this week has all the earmarks of being an excellent example of celestial fireworks, weather permitting. This year, the Perseids will peak in the overnight hours of Wednesday and Thursday (Aug. 12 and 13) just one day before the new moon. Today, NASA released a video on how to see the 2015 Perseid meteor shower.
| Read More » Publicly Chosen Names for Alien Planets to Be Announced Today  | The International Astronomical Union (IAU) will announce the results of its "Name the Exoworlds" campaign — which asked the public to vote on common monikers for 32 alien planets in 20 different star systems — during a press conference this evening (Aug. 11) at the group's 29th General Assembly in Honolulu, Hawaii. The names of the host stars, for their part, are often pulled from catalogues or are taken from the instrument or mission that discovered them (NASA's planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope in the case of Kepler-186). From April through June, astronomy clubs and nonprofit groups submitted common names for the 32 exoplanets and 15 of the 20 host stars (the other five stars already had common names).
| Read More » Scientists say fetal tissue essential for medical research  | BOSTON (AP) — The furor on Capitol Hill over Planned Parenthood has stoked a debate about the use of tissue from aborted fetuses in medical research, but U.S. scientists have been using such cells for decades to develop vaccines and seek treatments for a host of ailments, from vision loss to cancer and AIDS.
| Read More » Biggest Art Heist Ever: Will Released Tape Bring Paintings Back?  | On Thursday (Aug. 6), the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a fuzzy clip of a hatchback pulling up to a side door at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston. In the video, a man gets out of the car and is let in a museum side door by the security guard on duty, Richard Abath. The fake officers bound Abath and another guard with duct tape and made off with 13 works of art, including three Rembrandts and a Vermeer.
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