|  Trail from Ship Exhaust Leaves 'A' in the Sky  | You may not have seen it, but in July there was a large "A" written in the sky over the ocean near the Kamchatka Peninsula, in far-eastern Russia. The image of the A, published on Sunday (Dec. 27) on NASA's Earth Observatory website, shows how ocean-going ships produce a stream of exhaust gases that leaves tracks across the sky behind them, called ship tracks. A camera aboard NASA's Aqua satellite took the image on July 27.
| Read More » Google Glass Redux: High-Tech Wearable Gets Ready for Business  | Google Glass is alive and well, and it could be coming to a workplace near you. Although Google announced nearly a year ago that it would no longer be producing its futuristic Internet-connected spectacles, the company now appears to be working on a modified version of the product, for a different kind of user, according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filings posted yesterday (Dec. 28). The new version of Google's product has been dubbed the "enterprise edition" or "Google Glass EE," according to the tech website 9to5Google, which has been reporting the news of Glass' evolution from geeky prototype to workplace tool for months.
| Read More » Forget the Flashlight: New Ninja Shark Species Lights up the Sea  | It joins a group of nearly 40 other species commonly called lanternsharks, which are marine predators with the ability to glow that live in oceans around the world, including the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, said Vicky Vásquez, lead author of the new report and a graduate student in marine science at the Pacific Shark Research Center in California. The new report documents the first time a lanternshark has ever been found off the Pacific coast of Central America, Vásquez told Live Science. The new species had a uniform dark-black coloring, as opposed to the greys and browns seen on other lanternsharks, Vásquez said.
| Read More » 3D printing process brings art to blind people By Sharon Reich Writer and pod cast host Romeo Edmead is using his fingers to unlock a world he has never experienced before. Edmead lost his sight when he was just two-years-old, so he has always had a complicated relationship with art and museums. While he has heard of classical paintings, he says school trips to museums were uncomfortable. "I knew that what my friends would experience, because I went to public schools with sighted kids, and knew that what they would experience, I wouldn't necessarily experience because they could use their sense of sight and I didn't have that. ... Read More » India test-fires long range surface-to-air missile developed with Israel By Sankalp Phartiyal NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India successfully test-fired on Wednesday a new long range surface-to-air missile capable of countering aerial threats at extended ranges, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushes to enhance the country's military capabilities. India, which shares borders with nuclear-armed China and Pakistan, is likely to spend $250 billion over the next decade to upgrade its military. It is the world's biggest buyer of defense equipment but Modi is trying to build a defense industrial base in the country to cut overseas purchases. Read More » Camera trap system could help fight against poaching By Joel Flynn The Zoological Society London (ZSL), whose mission is to promote and achieve the world-wide conservation of animals and their habitats, says it may have taken a step closer to fulfilling that with the development of a new camera, which it calls Instant Detect. Developed in partnership with other companies like Seven Technologies Group, which specializes in security technology and helped train rangers on conservation sites on how best to use Instant Detect devices, ZSL hopes it could help the fight against poaching, as well as the monitoring of endangered and other species. Instant Detect is a camera trap system that uses satellite technology to send images from anywhere in the world, according to ZSL Conservation Technology Unit Project Manager, Louise Hartley. Read More » Giant Comets Periodically Smash Earth, Scientists Say  | Giant comets that originate in the planetary fringes of the solar system pose a greater threat of colliding with Earth than do asteroids, which originate closer to the sun, a new review paper argues. No centaur poses a known immediate threat to Earth, but the discovery of this massive population has led a group of astronomers to re-assess the threat of these seemingly distant bodies to this planet. Estimates currently suggest that one of these giant comets crosses Earth's orbit on average only once every 40,000 to 100,000 years, at which time the comet is believed to break up into dust and debris that can collide with the planet.
| Read More » Baghdad Blasts: Earthquake Detectors Map Sounds of War  | Seismic equipment that was installed in Iraq to detect earthquakes has also recorded plenty of other big bangs — explosions from nearby mortars and car bombs. In Baghdad throughout 2006, the sound of bombs was common. What happened at the ammunition depot, captured by onlookers on video, is referred to in the military as a "cook-off," when excessive heat causes ammunition to explode prematurely.
| Read More » Tasmanian Devils' Mysterious Cancer May Come in Two Varieties The Tasmanian devil has long been known to suffer from an unusual type of cancer that can spread from animal to animal, but now researchers say the endangered species is plagued by at least two kinds of infectious cancer. The finding suggests that Tasmanian devils are especially prone to the emergence of contagious tumors, and that transmissible cancers may arise more frequently in nature than previously thought, scientists added. The furry, dog-size mammals are found only on the island of Tasmania, which sits about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Australia. Read More » Volcanoes Sparked an Explosion in Human Intelligence, Researcher Argues  | Vast lava flows may have provided humans with access to heat and fire for cooking their food millions of years ago, one researcher has proposed. That, in turn, would have enabled the evolution of human intelligence, Michael Medler, a geographer at Western Washington University, said at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union earlier this month. If cooked food provided the extra calories that allowed people to evolve big brains, and big brains are required to start fires, then how did hominins, with their teensy brains and relatively meager smarts, produce fire in the first place?
| Read More » Space Fuel: Plutonium-238 Created After 30-Year Wait  | Scientists have produced a powder of plutonium-238 for the first time in nearly 30 years in the United States, a milestone that they say sets the country on a path toward powering NASA's deep-space exploration and other missions. Plutonium-238 (Pu-238) is a radioactive element, and as it decays, or breaks down into uranium-234, it releases heat. During the Cold War, the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina was pumping out Pu-238.
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