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Obama administration announces new fracking rule The Obama administration is requiring companies that drill for oil and natural gas on federal lands to disclose chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations within 30 days of completing operations. A final rule released Friday by Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also updates requirements for well construction and disposal of water and other fluids used in fracking, a drilling method that has prompted an ongoing boom in natural gas production.The rule, which takes effect in June, has been under consideration for more than three years, drawing criticism from the oil and gas industry and environmental groups. By the time the new standard was released Friday, it had collected 1.5 million public comments, according to the Interior Department. The industry fears the regulation could hinder the drilling boom. The environmental groups worry that it will allow unsafe drilling techniques to pollute groundwater. The rule relies on the online database FracFocus - used by at least 16 states -to track the chemicals used in fracking operations.

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U.S., Turkey soon to sign Syrian opposition train-and-equip deal The United States and Turkey have reached a tentative agreement to train and equip moderate Syrian opposition fighters and expect to sign the pact soon, U.S. and Turkish officials said on Tuesday with Ankara predicting a signing in days.The U.S. military has said it is planning to send more than 400 troops, including special operations forces, to train Syrian moderates at sites outside Syria as part of the fight against the Islamic State.U.S. officials have said they plan to train about 5,000 Syrian fighters a year for three years under the plan. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as Turkey, have publicly offered to host training sites.Turkey hopes the training will also bolster the weakened and divided Syrian opposition in their struggle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad."Negotiations have been concluded and an agreement text will be signed with the U.S. regarding the training of the Free Syrian Army in the coming period," Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic said. "We will share all the technical details ... when the text is signed, but it is anticipated that this will happen in the coming days," he told reporters in Ankara.In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed an agreement with Ankara in principle."As we have announced before, Turkey has agreed to be one of the regional hosts for the train-and-equip program for moderate Syrian opposition forces. We expect to conclude and sign the agreement with Turkey soon," Psaki told reporters.The Free Syrian Army is seen by Turkey as a key actor in Syria's kaleidoscopic conflict, but the group has been riven by divisions and suffered setbacks at the hands of government forces and other rebel factions.A deal between Ankara and Washington would be a positive development between the two longstanding allies, despite strains over Middle Eastern policy. Turkey wants Assad's departure to be the focus in Syria, while Washington's priority remains battling the Islamic State insurgents.

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Solar eclipse to darken skies Friday The world is set to experience a total eclipse on Friday, although few people will see the eclipse in its total glory and North Americans will miss out entirely. The total eclipse - when moon completely obscures our view of the sun - will happen mostly over the north Atlantic Ocean Friday morning and will only be visible in the Faroe Islands, located halfway between Iceland and the tip of Scotland, and Norway's Svalbard Islands. Those remote islands are now destinations for scores of eclipse chasers and scientists like Jay Pasachoff at Williams College who see this as a unique opportunity to study the sun."We need good weather and we won't know until the last day whether we will get some holes in the clouds to see the eclipse," said Pasachoff, who was heading to Svalbard Wednesday and has seen more than 60 eclipses."Each one is tremendously exciting," he told CBS News. "They are all different and it is thrilling to be outdoors when the sky darkens so abruptly and so dramatically." While a total eclipse will be a hard-to-catch sight, billions around the globe will be able to see a partial one, when the edge of the moon first intrudes into the solar disc. It will be visible in most of northern Africa, western Asia and parts of the Middle East. All of Europe will see a partial eclipse, though some will get a better view than others. In northern Scotland, the sun will appear 97 percent eclipsed, 84 percent in London,75 percent in Paris, 65 percent in Madrid and 56 percent in Rome, according to the European Space Agency. Viewers in North America will be out of luck, except for a select few who will see a partial eclipse in Saint John's, Newfoundland. The next chance to see a total solar eclipse in the U.S. will come on Aug. 21, 2017. During totality, the sun appears to have a wispy white halo, offering ground observers a rare direct view of its atmosphere or corona, normally kept out of sight by the intense brightness of the solar disc. For scientists, this gives them a rare chance to directly observe the interactions between different layers of the sun's atmosphere, known as the photosphere, chromosphere and the solar corona. "In the past, we needed to have the total eclipse to observe the chromosphere," Joe Zender, who is a project scientist on the European Space Agency's Proba-3, which launches in 2018 and will, among other things, study the sun's faint corona. "Even today in a spacecraft and especially on the ground, it's difficult to observe the chromosphere." As part of this, Zender and other scientists said the data gathered helps them better understand such things as coronal mass ejections where bubbles of gas burst forth from the sun's corona and sometimes head to Earth.The implications of such work became clear this week when Earth was hit by a severe solar storm, potentially disrupting power grids and GPS tracking while pushing the colorful northern lights farther south. Two blasts of magnetic plasma left the sun on Sunday, came together and arrived on Earth Tuesday, several hours earlier and much stronger than expected. "We want to be able to understand these ejections and how they travel through space in all directions as part of finding out how to predict them," Pasachoff said. Taking high-resolution images and measuring the spectrum of the corona, Pasachoff also is interested in sunspot activity and exploring whether, as some scientists have suggested, this phenomenon is going away."We have just passed the maximum of the sunspot cycle so it is interesting to see how the corona differs from what it was for the last couple of eclipses, which were at solar maximum, and whether we have some particular coronal mass ejections (we had two in 2013 during the eclipse) that we can study in detail," he said. And while they only have a few minutes to do their work during an eclipse, Pasachoff said the opportunity was invaluable. "If I were a heart surgeon and I told you that I could look inside a human heart two years ago for two minutes, would you be asking me why I wanted another two minutes?" said Pasachoff, who is also chair of the International Astronomical Union's working group on eclipses. "It's the same as studying the sun's atmosphere. We get a glimpse for a few seconds every couple of years so there is always lots to see and study," he said. "Not only the sun, but also billions of other stars have similar atmospheres. So, what we learn about the sun in detail applies to all the other stars that we can't study so well."

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​Become an asteroid hunter for NASA Protecting the Earth from the threat of asteroid impacts means first knowing where they are. That's the opening statement on the site where you can download NASA's new computer app that turns astronomy enthusiasts into citizen scientists on the hunt for the next flying space rock likely to smash into our planet. The app, announced Sunday at the South by Southwest music and tech festival in Austin, Texas, works on the back on an algorithm developed as part of NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge competition, launched at last year's festival. The algorithm takes images of space and homes in on spots that are likely to be asteroids.It's an updated version of the system that astronomers have been using to find asteroids since the 1930s. The basic idea is to take images of the same place in the sky and look for star-like objects that move between one frame and the next. But there are so many pictures from so many telescopes nowadays that it's too much data for humans to handle on their own. The algorithm developed enables a computer to narrow down the images to those that appear to have captured an asteroid candidate.Users can grab telescope images of the night sky online from places like the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., or the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Ariz., and run them through the app on their desktop or laptop, letting the algorithm sift through and look for any bright spot that appears to be moving.They can also upload their own images from their own telescopes, to see if they've captured a potential asteroid themselves. "This increase in knowledge will help assess more quickly which asteroids are potential threats, human destinations or resource rich," said Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer at Planetary Resources, in a statement. That way we'll have a better chance of spotting and redirecting a potentially hazardous projectiles -- like the meteor that got by astronomers and crashed into Russia in a fiery blaze in 2013 -- or finding a good rock to land on.The app is free to download for Windows and Apple machines.

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Lawmakers to weigh in on net neutrality Lawmakers are getting their chance this week to weigh in on the "net neutrality" debate that has pitted Internet activists against big cable companies and prompted a record number of public comments filed to U.S. regulators. The issue requires lawmakers to walk a delicate political line: Many consumers want to keep the power of cable and wireless providers in check, and they oppose the idea of paid fast lanes on the Internet. But service providers say the latest plan endorsed by the Federal Communications Commission will become a regulatory land mine that will discourage investment.The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday was convening the first hearing on the subject since the FCC voted last month to put the Internet in the same regulatory camp as the telephone, using the 1934 Communications Act. This means that whenever a company provides an Internet connection, it has to act in the public interest and not do anything considered "unjust or unreasonable." The goal is to prevent Internet service providers like Comcast, Sprint and T-Mobile from blocking or slowing data that moves across its networks. The idea is known as "net neutrality" because it suggests providers should remain agnostic about web traffic instead of capitalizing on it by creating fast lanes and charging "tolls" to content providers like Netflix and Amazon.The FCC's 3-2 vote along partisan lines was cheered by consumer and Internet activists. They say the move is critical to protecting the Internet as Americans have always known it - an open architecture that allows anyone to offer web-based services without having to first get permission from service providers. But cable and wireless companies have threatened to sue, saying that Depression-era regulation shouldn't apply to the Internet. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have sided with cable and wireless companies contending that using the 1934 Communications Act is too drastic and represents dangerous government overreach. They proposed a bill that would enforce basic open Internet rules but strip the FCC of other authorities, including its ability to expand municipal broadband service. That's a non-starter for Democrats and would likely get vetoed by President Barack Obama. It's unclear whether Democrats would bother trying to negotiate a bipartisan bill with their GOP counterparts so long as Obama is in office and the courts haven't weighed in. Still, industry officials opposed to the plan say they are hopeful the FCC rules won't stick. Jim Cicconi, a senior executive at AT&T, said that ultimately "we are confident the issue will be resolved by bipartisan action by Congress or a future FCC, or by the courts."

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A surprising benefit of electric cars: Cooler cities Electric vehicles are attractive as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cut down on smog and even noise pollution in urban areas. Now, a new study suggests they might provide another surprising benefit: cooling down sweltering cities. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports on Thursday, deduced that switching from conventional gas-burning vehicles to electric ones would have a positive impact on a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect, which refers to the observation that cities tend to be hotter than surrounding rural areas."The replacement of conventional vehicles by electrical vehicles can reduce heat emission in urban areas," lead author Canbing Li, of China's Hunan University, told CBS News. Looking at the smog-filled city of Beijing, Li and his fellow authors modeled what it would have meant if such a switch had been done back in 2012 during an especially hot summer.First, they calculated that electric vehicles emit only 19.8 percent of the heat of a conventional vehicle per mile. From there they determined how swapping conventional cars for electric ones would affect urban island intensity (HII), which is one indicator of urban heating, and represents the difference between the temperature in the city and the temperature outside it. They found that a complete switch-over would lower HII by 0.94 degrees Celsius (1.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Resultantly, the switch also would reduce the amount of electricity that would be consumed by air conditioners in buildings around Beijing by 14.44 million kilowatt-hours, reducing daily CO2 emissions by 10,686 tons. "It's easy not to see the big picture on issues like electric cars and global warming, but when we look with a holistic approach, we find these unexpected connections," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, another author on the paper, who holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability at Michigan State and is director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. "Heat waves kill, and in terms of climate change, even one degree can make a difference." "From a policy perspective, in my opinion, it is a smart choice to inspire the residents in metropolises to replace their conventional vehicles with electric vehicles by providing subsidies, promoting the infrastructure such as charging stations, giving higher priority for electric vehicles in parking, and so on," Li said. The authors caution that several factors can influence the urban heat island effect, not all of which were addressed in the study. For example, there are conflicting reports regarding the impact of reduced aerosol pollution on heat island intensity. These factors may need to be considered when weighing the benefits and disadvantages of replacing conventional vehicles with electric vehicles. They also acknowledged that the production of electric vehicles causes more pollution that the traditional car manufacturing, which is one of the arguments that continues to stymie electric adoption. To date, the environmental argument, supported by these new findings, has not helped kick sales of electric vehicles into high gear. Electric and hybrid cars until now have been a hard sell. The entire segment, which launched in 1999, has struggled to reach a weak 3.2 percent of the U.S. marketplace, which is now heading toward 17 million units a year. The drop in fuel prices has only made things that much harder. To make up for the higher cost of acquisition of hybrids and electrics, fuel prices need to be at least $6 per gallon and higher. Customers are also concerned about a shortage of charging stations, something car companies are trying to address. Still, there is no ignoring that cities are heating up- as is the rest of the globe - due to the rise of greenhouse gas emissions. Brian Stone, Jr. a member of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech's City and Regional Planning Program, found that large cities are warming at twice the rate of the globe and that deaths from heat waves in the United States are responsible for more weather-related deaths than all other forms of extreme weather combined. A separate study found that cities absorb more solar energy during the day and are slower to release it after the sun sets, making for uncomfortable nights and no real relief from the heat. And because they haven't cooled down as much overnight, mornings are warmer and the thermometer goes right back up when the sun starts beating down the next day. As for using electric cars to counter these so-called heat islands, Stone said the idea has merit. "Their findings are entirely plausible based on what we know about the contribution of waste heat emissions to urban heat islands," Stone said. He said that a previous study in Portland found that heat islands on weekdays were 1 to 2 degrees C warmer than on weekend days and the researchers attributed the difference to vehicle traffic. "Other than the higher densities found in Beijing than most U.S. cities, there is every reason to believe that the order of magnitude benefits measured here would translate to other cities," he said. "We should definitely be promoting electric vehicle deployment, in concert with a greater reliance on transit and non-vehicle modes, as a climate change management strategy in cities."

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Why did 1,800 sea lion pups wash ashore in California? More than 1,800 starving sea lion pups have washed up on California beaches since Jan. 1 and 750 are being treated in rescue centers across the state, according to updated numbers released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Scientists with the federal agency believe the crisis hasn't reached its peak and sea lions could continue to arrive on beaches sick and starving for at least two more months. Here are a few things to know about the sea lion crisis unfolding in California: WHY ARE THEY STARVING? Waters off North America's Pacific Coast are about 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average. That could be pushing the fish that sea lions eat - sardines, market squid and anchovies, for example - further north. The majority of sea lions give birth in rookeries on the Channel Islands off the Southern California coast and mothers are leaving their pups alone for up to eight days at a time as they are forced to travel further in search of food. The pups aren't eating as much or as frequently and they are weaning themselves early out of desperation and striking out on their own even though they are underweight and can't hunt properly.WHY IS THE WATER SO WARM? Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say an El Nino weather pattern is to blame. North winds, which stir up the coastal waters in the spring and bring colder, nutrient-rich swells to the surface, are just now starting to materialize off California and might bring some relief over time. The warming off California is likely the result of regional weather patterns rather than a direct effect of global warming, said Nate Mantua, a NOAA research scientist based in Santa Cruz, California. HAS THIS HAPPENED BEFORE? Yes. In 1998, a strong El Nino weather pattern led to significant warming in Pacific coastal waters and 2,500 sea lion pups were found washed up on California beaches. A large number also washed ashore in 2013. Current numbers are on track to surpass the 1998 record but have not done so yet, said Justin Viezbicke, coordinator for NOAA's California Stranding Network.WILL THIS HURT THE SEA LION POPULATION? It's unclear. This year's crisis probably won't have any immediate effect but several years of such big losses could reduce the sea lion population in the future. Currently, there are about 300,000 sea lions and the numbers of dead pups represents less than 1 percent of the total population, said Viezbicke. The number of pups born each year in the past few years is also much greater than during previous episodes of coastal warming in the 1990s. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SEA LIONS THAT ARE RESCUED? Many of the sea lion pups are beyond help by the time they are reported to authorities. Some die at the rescue centers and others are euthanized. Those that do survive are tube-fed until they regain their strength and then released back into the wild. NOAA doesn't have a tally of how many have been successfully treated and released. The ones being released are tagged with a number but placing satellite trackers on all of them is too costly so scientists aren't sure how many are making it. HOW CAN HUMANS HELP? People who live in California can volunteer at a rescue center. Most centers are now running at full capacity and aren't able to take many new sea lion pups in but they still need extra hands. Another alternative is to donate money. A map showing the marine rescue centers helping sea lions, along with contact information, can be found here.

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Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk on "Con Man": We can't wait to get started Now that they've smashed a couple of crowdfunding records, Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk say they will most likely expand their "Con Man" plans -- think spaceships, comic books and maybe even William Shatner (if he's available, of course). The former stars of the TV series "Firefly" turned to crowdfunding last week to raise money for "Con Man," a Web series, which would follow the post-TV show life of Wray Nerely (Tudyk), the pilot and co-star of "Spectrum," a short-lived sci-fi show-turned cult classic (sound familiar "Firefly" fans?).Wray's good friend, Jack Moore (Fillion), who co-starred on the TV series, goes on to become a big celebrity, while Wray continues to struggle to find his big break. "Con Man" will take a cue from the convention circuit, highlighting the personalities and characters that thrive in the sci-fi community. What shocked Fillion and Tudyk the most was how quickly they raised money for the project. Two days after last week's Indiegogo launch, the campaign broke records for the highest amount crowdfunded by a Web series in 24 hours and for the all-time highest crowdfunded Web series across all platforms. At last check, the campaign raised more than $2 million -- and there are still 25 days left."We're surprised that the fans have been so immediate in their response -- so fast," Fillion told CBS News.In the years since Fox canceled their space sci-fi drama "Firefly," Fillion and Tudyk have become quite acclimated to the comic book convention circuit. The sci-fi duo soon realized the passion fans had for their short-lived TV series, which premiered in 2002 and was scrapped after just 11 of the 14 episodes had aired."Nathan and I have been going to conventions for years now and we've seen the enthusiasm from fans...They are actual people that you've met, hugged, taken pictures with -- answered questions and talked to," said Tudyk."When I go to conventions, fans are excitable, they are happy to see me. When Alan goes to conventions it's very much the same reaction -- if not, just a little less probably," Fillion joked."That's fair," Tudyk chimed in."But when we're together, the excitement is exponential. And I think this Indiegogo campaign is perhaps a reflection of that...Together we are strong, and that is now our new motto," Fillion, 43, said laughing."I think people are excited to see us together because 'together' is how most of them know us -- through 'Firefly.'" What people may not know, though, is that these two actually hang out together in "real life.""We're together more than people realize," said Fillion, also star of the TV series, "Castle." "We haven't been able to work together a lot since 'Firefly.' So this is our opportunity to do that and not only that -- it's within the convention world," said Tudyk, who's writing, producing and starring in "Con Man."A lot is in store for the Web series, they say."We're going to end up on a spaceship now," Tudyk said. "We are going to do all 12 episodes that I wrote and you're going to be able to see us on a spaceship in space." And now with the extra money raised (their goal was just $425,000), Tudyk and Fillion may be able to spend another day shooting on the spaceship.Each episode will last about 10-12 minutes. Filming will get underway in June, and they hope to have something to "show people" by July."Now that we're going to be doing those [spaceship] episodes there's going to be some special effects that are going to take a little bit of work....Now that people are still pledging money and we've gone beyond our goals there are things that were cut out that we can shoot now."Tudyk, 44, says the idea for "Spectrum" -- the sci-fi show within "Con Man" -- is based on a book currently being written by novelist PJ Haarsma -- who also serves as their co-producer. "He's written four other novels called 'The Soft Wire.' And the idea of 'Spectrum' was a prequel to those other novels," said Tudyk.With that, they plan to enhance that story-within-a-story "universe.""Because of that [the book] we have a whole universe that is already laid out there. One chapter is written and with this extra money, we can make comic books to tell that story. There's a lot of ways it can go. It's a big world and if the fans are into it, it can just keep growing," he said.They plan to incorporate the convention spirit into the series, too."A lot of conventions -- they're parties. You have celebrities that you don't see, then you see them as the super-people they were. When you have actors in the green room and you see The Hulk, 'I Dream of Jeannie' and a wrestler and someone from 'Grim'...you cock your head to the side just trying to understand it," Tudyk said.Some of the celebrity Comic-Con regulars, for example, are going to make their way into the Web series, including Sean Maher, Gina Torres, James Gunn, Seth Green, Felicia Day and Amy Acker."We have a lot of friends in the sci-fi world who have so much success -- who are gracious enough to help us out with this project. We're thinking with all of the attention the project is getting now and the incredible success of the Indiegogo campaign, we might even be able to get to some people we don't know," said Fillion.Like Shatner perhaps? There's been a bit of a Twitter movement to get the "Star Trek" actor to come on board."I don't know his schedule, but I thought that was a great idea that those fans had," Tudyk said. "I would love to see any cast of any 'Star Trek,'" added Fillion.Or maybe even actors from "The Walking Dead," Fillion pointed out, before realizing the cast's shooting schedule will probably conflict with "Con Man.""We'll just take all their dead guys," joked Tudyk. "They're dropping like flies!"Regardless of who joins the upcoming series, Tudyk and Fillion are just excited to climb aboard the spaceship."I can't wait to get to making them," said Tudyk.

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Prehistoric whale skull helps place humans' first steps A 17-million-year-old beaked whale fossil is helping researchers solve a puzzle about the likely birthplace of humanity in East Africa, a new study finds. The whale (Ziphiidae) lived when the East African plateau was substantially lower and covered by dense forests, the researchers said. Scientists have long tried to figure out when the uplift occurred, because when it did, the moisture from the Indian Ocean could no longer reach the trees and vegetation, and the area turned into a savannah, research suggests. Extinct ancestors to modern humans may have lived in trees in East Africa, but after the area turned into grassland, these early humans gradually began walking on two feet, researchers suggest. [Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans] "It's more or less the story about the bipedalism," said study researcher Henry Wichura, a postdoctoral candidate in geoscience at University of Potsdam in Germany. But the timing of the East African plateau uplift has eluded scientists. The whale fossil helps researchers get closer to that date, which likely occurred sometime between 17 million and 13.5 million years ago, according to the new study. A whale of a tale The story of the whale skull is one of rediscovery. Researchers originally found the fossil in 1964, but didn't publish a study on it until 1975. Then, they misplaced the skull until 2011. The skull is the oldest known fossil of a beaked whale, and it confounded researchers at first. Beaked whales are deep divers that live in the ocean, but the fossil was found 460 miles (740 kilometers) inland from the present-day East African coast, and at an elevation of 2,100 feet (640 meters). Perhaps the 23-foot-long (7 m) whale used to live in the Indian Ocean, but mistakenly strayed into a river that led it into modern-day Kenya, the study researchers said. "We came to the idea that it used a large river system, because the whale had been found in lake sediments which are [mixed with] river sediments," Wichura said. "So we can say that it died in a kind of river-lake environment." But the fossil sat unstudied for nearly 40 years, until researchers rediscovered it at Harvard University. (Interestingly, a curator found the fossil in the former office of renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. At the time, the university was using Gould's office for temporary storage during a remodel, according to the study.)Once recovered, the skull helped Wichura and his colleagues date the East African plateau's uplift. They wondered how low the East African plateau was before the region's topography changed, so they searched for other instances of whales getting lost in rivers. For instance, one whale became stranded in the Thames River in 2006, and killer whales have swum into the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The scientists took the grade of the steepest river from case reports, and applied it to the prehistoric river used by the whale. So, if the ancient river rose at 2.5 inches a mile (4 centimeters per km) from the coast, the East African plateau was between 79 feet and 121 feet high (24 m and 37 m) at the time the whale lost its way and died. (The difference in height takes into account the different routes the whale may have taken to swim inland from the Indian Ocean.) Considering that the plateau is now about 2,034 feet (620 m) tall, the northern part of the Eastern African plateau must have been uplifted by about 1,925 feet (590 m) over the past 17 million years, the researchers determined. Furthermore, Wichura found that at 13.5 million years ago, part of the Eastern African plateau uplift had already begun, putting a bookend on when the uplift started. (He noted that the uplift happened because of mantle plumes, hot material that rises through the Earth's mantle and pushes up against the crust.) Without the rediscovered skull, it would have been difficult to help date the uplift, he said. "With the whale, everything started," Wichura told Live Science. The study reminds both professional and amateur paleontologists to study the location and age of each fossil they find, said Frank Brown, a professorof geology at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study. "Even single specimens of organisms tell us a great deal about the history of the Earth, and they sometimes appear in surprising cases," Brown said. "This is one such case." The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Carbon-storing Amazon forest is losing its touch The Amazon has long been seen as a life preserver of sorts in the global warming fight, its lush forest storing billions of tons of carbon. But now a paper published in Nature Wednesday says that the Amazon is losing its capacity to serve as a carbon sink. In a 30-year study of the South American tropical forest, an international team found that the Amazon has gone from storing 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year in the 1990s to half that now.As a result, emissions across Latin America have now overtaken the amount of carbon dioxide stored. "The Amazon has been doing us a great service in taking up large part of our CO2 emissions," Roel Brienen, the lead author, from the University of Leeds, told CBS News. "What our study basically shows at least for the Amazon basin is that there is a limit to how far this goes, how far the Amazon can continue to take up carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the forests." Brienen said researchers couldn't fully explain this decline, though drought and unusually high temperatures in the Amazon could be to blame. But they think it has to be more than that, since the die-off of millions of trees began before an intense drought in 2005.One theory is that an increase of carbon emissions could be influencing the life cycles of trees in the forest. To calculate changes in carbon storage they examined 321 forest plots across the Amazon, identified and measured 200,000 trees, and recorded tree deaths as well as growth and new trees since the 1980s. "With time, the growth stimulation feeds through the system, causing trees to live faster, and so die younger," said Oliver Phillips, a co-author on the paper who is also from the University of Leeds. Brienen agreed, saying the study illustrated that models suggesting that increased carbon dioxide is good for trees and other vegetation like agriculture crops might be "too optimistic." "Climate change models that include vegetation responses assume that as long as carbon dioxide levels keep increasing, then the Amazon will continue to accumulate carbon," he said. "Our study shows that this may not be the case and that tree mortality processes are critical in this system." William R. L. Anderegg, a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Environmental Institute who did not take part in the study, said the findings were "big news" and showed the potential limits of forests as a solution for combating global warming."Scientists have known for a long time that eventually forests would saturate and their carbon uptake would decline to zero over time as mortality of trees caught up with the increased growth rates," Anderegg said. "But what's really stunning to me is that we thought this saturation would occur decades from now, even towards or beyond the end of the century. This study shows that it really seems to have started in the 2000s. That's decades before we expected. This is bad news, because forests are currently one of the most effective carbon sinks." At 6 million square kilometres, the Amazon forest covers an area 25 times as great as the United Kingdom (or 15 times the size of California), and spans nine countries, of which by far the largest is Brazil. It remains a critical component to the environment in South America and beyond. Not only does the Amazon forest each year process 18 billion tons of carbon - more than twice as much carbon as the combined emissions of all the fossil fuels burned in the world - but its water vapors are critical to agriculture in the region. Until now, much of the focus in the Amazon has been on deforestation, which had declined from 2004 to 2011 in part due to a moratorium on soy in forested areas. But it inched up in 2013 and then skyrocketed last year, increasing 467 percent over a year earlier.But that doesn't seem to be the problem here. Considering this study was conducted in tracts untouched by logging, it suggests there may be a more troubling trend at work that could force scientists to recalculate models that have factored in forests as a key component to fighting climate change.It may be that the tropical carbon sink is becoming saturated, posits Princeton's Lars O. Hedin. "The CO2 component of climate change may become substantially more difficult to manage and abate in the future if the findings from the Amazon basin apply more generally to the land carbon sink," he wrote in an article accompanying the study. The findings - if confirmed to be happening in forests around the world - could put pressure on world leaders to make deeper cuts on global greenhouse gas emissions when they meet in Paris later this year to forge a new climate agreement.Currently, world leaders are hoping to ink an agreement that would keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) over what they were in preindustrial times. The various scenarios all contain efforts to preserve forests as part of a climate strategy."The takeaway isn't that forest aren't part of the solution. They have to continue to be part of the solution," Anderegg said. "But it increases the urgency to address climate change while these forests are still healthy."

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Geneva auto show's vision of electric, autonomous future Much of the talk at this week's Geneva International Motor Show was taking the electric car to the next level. Here are three technologies moving electric cars forward, starting from the ground up.Running on rubber Goodyear rolled out two concept tires at the auto show including one that electric carmaker Tesla says could charge its Model S.Named the BHO3, the first tire would charge the batteries of electric cars by transforming the heat generated by the rolling tire into electrical energy. A second concept from Goodyear called Triple Tube contains three tubes that adjust tire inflation pressure in response to changing road conditions, offering drivers a range of levels from wet to sporty to eco/safety. Going farther, faster The Achilles heel of most electric cars has been the battery, which prospective buyers fear will leave them stranded on the side of the road. A new car unveiled in Geneva could nearly triple the range of today's electric vehicles.The Quantino from nanoFlowcell AG has a range up to 621 miles (1,000 kilometer) while being able to reach speeds upwards of 124 miles per hour (200 kilometer per hour).The car replaces a traditional battery with two tanks of ionized electrolytic liquids that combine to generate electricity. The owner fills up the tanks with the two liquids -- one carrying a positive charge, the other a negative charge -- much the way you would at the gas pump. When they interact, it creates electricity as you drive. Eliminating the human element The Italian firm Ed Design unveiled the TORQ, a sleek, futuristic race car that is all electric and autonomous. It features four powerful engines as well as a design that replaces glass windows with a set of obstruction-free 360-degree wraparound monitors that eliminate all blind spots. Though the car in Geneva was only a prototype, the company hopes to have one ready in the next 24 months. The company is reportedly hoping to have it at Le Mans, the 24-hour endurance race, by 2025.

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Help name these baby bears at the National Zoo The Smithsonian National Zoo is asking for your help. Two Andean bear cubs need names before their official unveiling to the public March 28. "By inviting everyone to select the cubs' names, we hope to instill a connection to this charismatic yet vulnerable species," said Dennis Kelly, director of the National Zoo. "Bear conservation efforts are vital for bears in their native habitats. I'm proud of our success in the past five years, which has been a combination of cooperative animals and keeper expertise." Andean bears -- South America's only bear species -- are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species, and it is estimated that there are only 20,000 left in the wild. Habitat destruction and hunting pose the greatest threats to their survival. The bears are also called spectacled bears, for the unique beige markings that encircle their eyes.The zoo's 18-week-old male Andean bears were born to 8-year-old mother Billie Jean and 21-year-old father Cisco Nov. 10 and 11, 2014. The cubs have been exploring their new compound, tussling with each other and climbing on rocks, logs and concrete walls. "This is the first time we've had a pair of male cubs, and already we're seeing them wrestle, pounce on and play with each other much more than our previous litters," said Karen Abbott, animal keeper at the zoo. "Their interaction with one another and mom is especially endearing; I think the public will enjoy watching them play and explore their yard." Bear fans have until Sunday to vote on the Zoo's website. The options for names reflect the cultural significance of Andean bears to the Quechua and Aymara, the indigenous communities of the Andes region they are native to. For Cub 1, voters can choose between Larusiri (lah-roo-SEE-ree), meaning "giggly" in the Aymara language, Mayni (MY-nee) meaning "unique" or Kusisqa (coo-SEES-kah) meaning "happy." The choices for Cub 2 are Tusuq (too-SOOK) meaning "dancer" in Quechua language, Muniri (moo-NEE-ree) meaning "loving" and Wayna (WHY-nah), which means "young." The winning names will be announced March 26.

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Jeb Bush: U.S. 'got nothing' for opening ties with Cuba U.S. Republican Jeb Bush on Wednesday criticized the Obama administration for opening diplomatic ties with Cuba, saying "we got nothing in return.""I wouldn't call what we did a reset," Bush, the former governor of Florida and a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, said in a question-and-answer session following a speech. "I would call it bad negotiations."

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Mystery dust cloud, glowing aurora spotted on Mars The action on Mars isn't only on the planet's surface. In the latest surprising discovery, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has for the first time observed an unexplained high-altitude dust cloud and aurora lights reaching deep into the Martian atmosphere. The dust was found at orbital altitudes from about 93 miles (150 kilometers) to 190 miles (300 kilometers) above the surface. The source of the dust remained a mystery, although it posed no danger to the MAVEN and other spacecraft orbiting Mars. The cloud was detected by the spacecraft's Langmuir Probe and Waves instrument and was found to be most dense at lower altitudes. The dust may have come from Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, it may have moved in on the solar wind, or it could be debris from comets orbiting the sun. Another theory is that the dust wafted up from the atmosphere. "If the dust originates from the atmosphere, this suggests we are missing some fundamental process in the Martian atmosphere," said Laila Andersson of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospherics and Space Physics, Boulder, Colorado. MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph observed the aurora spanning Mars's northern hemisphere on Dec. 20. Scientists nicknamed it "Christmas lights." Aurorae, known on Earth as northern or southern lights, are caused by energetic particles like electrons crashing down into the atmosphere, causing gases there to glow. "What's especially surprising about the aurora we saw is how deep in the atmosphere it occurs - much deeper than at Earth or elsewhere on Mars," said Arnaud Stiepen, IUVS team member at the University of Colorado. "The electrons producing it must be really energetic." Scientists believe the source of the particles was the sun. MAVEN's Solar Energetic Particle instrument detected a huge surge in energetic electrons at the onset of the aurora.Billions of years ago, Mars lost a global protective magnetic field, so solar particles can directly strike the atmosphere. The electrons producing the aurora have about 100 times more energy than you get from a spark of house current, so they can penetrate deeply in the atmosphere. MAVEN was launched to Mars on Nov. 18, 2013, to help solve the mystery of how the Red Planet lost most of its atmosphere and much of its water. The spacecraft arrived at Mars on Sept. 21, and is four months into its one-Earth-year mission.

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​Why do penguins waddle? Maybe it's because they look like refugees from a formal dinner party. Maybe because they're birds that swim like fish and walk like people. Maybe it's because -- let's face it -- they don't so much walk as waddle. Whatever it is, penguins draw a crowd. "They're dapper little birds," said James Proffitt with the University of Texas. "People find them irresistibly charming."It's become one of the great scientific dilemmas of our time. Now, finally, American ingenuity is being brought in to figure out the wonder of the waddle.Proffitt and a team from the Royal Veterinary College designed a pad, full of sensors, to measure the force the birds apply as they waddle along on those silly little legs. As Ricky the rockhopper showed, the first trick was to actually get these petulant penguins to walk the plank. And what the team found was that the walk wasn't so silly after all. "What they found out actually is that when it comes to waddling they're probably saving a bit of energy too because they are using this kind of lateral motion to do this weird sort of (waddle) to help them with the fact that they have short legs."Proffitt says he's not sure anyone knows how penguins can move without waddling. "I think pantomime is kind of, you know, part of the whole part and parcel," he said."I think people would maybe like to believe that they all can wear tuxedos and look good," said Proffitt. "And penguins pull it off very well." Even with that funny walk.

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Arctic sea ice cover hits a record low Sea ice cover in the Arctic reached a record low this winter, in the latest sign that the region is being pummeled by the warming associated with rising greenhouse gas emissions. The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder found that, at its peak, the extent of sea ice -- the ice that freezes and floats on Arctic waters -- was 14.54 million square kilometers (5.61 million square miles). That is 1.10 million square kilometers below the 1981 to 2010 average and 130,000 square kilometers below the previous lowest maximum, which occurred in 2011. Based on the satellite records, ice cover was below average everywhere except in the Labrador Sea and the Davis Strait. The ice cover also hit its maximum earlier than is typical. This year's maximum occurred on Feb. 25, 15 days earlier than the 1981 to 2010 average date. "We are increasing greenhouse gases, the planet is heating up, the ice is melting, and this means we should expect new records to be set," Jennifer Kay, an atmospheric scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Science at the University of Colorado told CBS News. "The record-low Arctic sea ice extent this winter is not surprising to me from a scientific standpoint." The analysis found that part of the explanation for the melting lies with recent weather patterns. It noted that February was characterized by an unusual configuration of the jet stream, leading to warm conditions over the Pacific side of the Arctic that maintained low sea ice extent in the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. "While ice extent varies from year to year due to changeable weather conditions, the Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth, and Arctic sea ice has shown a dramatic decline over the past thirty years with recent climate models predicting ice free summer conditions as early as 2050," according to the communication group Climate Nexus, which highlights climate impacts and energy solutions. "Research shows that before the 20th century's influx of greenhouse gasses and subsequent period of Arctic sea ice retreat, the Arctic was in a 2,000-year cooling trend." "The fact that this year's maximum sea ice extent is the lowest since satellite monitoring began in 1979 is yet another warning sign of just how swiftly climate change is reshaping the Arctic," it said in a statement.The findings comes in the wake of a separate study earlier this month that found the sea ice is thinning at a steadier and faster rate than researchers previously thought. Using modern and historic measurements, the researchers got an extensive view of how the thickness of Arctic sea ice has changed over the past few decades. According to measurements from multiple sources, the ice in the central Arctic Ocean thinned 65 percent between 1975 and 2012, from 11.7 feet to 4.1 feet. The melting ice is taking its toll on a range of marine animals that call the Arctic home, from polar bears to Arctic ringed seals. The worsening conditions prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in December to propose designating a huge stretch of waters off Alaska as protected habitat for endangered Arctic ringed seals. Known for their trademark pattern of dark spots surrounded by grey rings, the seals designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act are a favorite prey of polar bears.

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Hummingbird, thought extinct, rediscovered in Colombia Conservationists Carlos Julio Rojas and Christian Vasquez had gone into a Columbian mountain range looking to document fires burning in the fragile ecosystem. They ended up rediscovering a hummingbird that had not been seen since 1946 and was believed to have gone extinct.The duo earlier this month managed to snap the only known photographs of the blue-bearded helmetcrest. As he hiked through the region's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park, Rojas said he "saw the flash of a bird screeching past me and saw it perch on a bush nearby." "I managed to take a quick photo of it before it flew off. I then reviewed the photo on the camera screen and immediately recognized the strikingly patterned hummingbird as the long-lost blue-bearded helmetcrest," said Rojas, whose discovery was first reported in the journal ProAves. "I was ecstatic. After reports of searches by ornithologists failing to find this spectacular species, Christian and I were the first people alive to see it for real." The bird is known for its prominent crest and elongated throat feathers forming what looks like a beard, according to Birdlife International. In the center of the beard are metallic purplish-blue feathers, and the tail has an extensive buff-white area. The duo then set up camp in the area and spent the next two days searching for more signs of the birds. They managed to spot three birds in what Vasquez described as "in an area of less than 10 hectares [25 acres] with three scattered tiny patches of forest clinging to the steep hillsides and surrounded by the remains of burnt vegetation." Found only the Santa Marta region of northeast Colombia, the bird had seen its numbers drop due to habitat loss caused by deforestation, overgrazing from herds of cattle and extensive burning by the Kogi indigenous people for farming. Some 50,000 indigenous people, mainly Kogi and Arhuacos, live in the area. In 2014, the journal Science identified Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park as the world's most important protected area for the conservation of threatened terrestrial species. Despite the exciting discovery, Rojas and Vasquez warned the bird's future remains clouded.The species is dependent on stunted forest and bushes amongst natural páramo grasslands - habitat that is highly susceptible to fires during the dry season. The situation is even more difficult because the flowering plant the helmetcrest depends on - the Santa Marta Frailejon (Libanothamnus occultus) - is itself threatened by persistent fires and has also been declared critically endangered."Sadly the survival of the blue-bearded helmetcrest hangs by a thread," Rojas said. "The impacts of fire are everywhere with the charred remains of plants littered across the páramo. It is crucial that the fires are stopped immediately and that cattle and pigs are removed from the highest elevations to allow the fragile páramo ecosystem to recover before this unique hummingbird and its equally rare food plant become extinct." The discovery is the second in a month of a bird that ornithologists believed had gone extinct. In early March, scientists announced that the Jerdon's babbler (Chrysomma altirostre) had been rediscovered. It had not been seen since 1941.

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This is what Apple's website looked like in 1998 In honor of the 30th anniversary of .com, take a surf down memory lane. The Open University put together this GIF of what it was like to be online in the 1990s. (Using Netscape's Navigator browser, of course.) Charming, isn't it? In May 1998, Apple.com was showing off its latest breakthrough, the iMac. Who could forget the sunny, colorful, dare we say adorable, all-in-one desktop? They called it "the most original Macintosh since the original Macintosh."It seems a particularly fitting time to look back at what Apple was up to back then, just a week after it officially launched the Apple Watch (note: no "i") and ditched all but one port in the new MacBook (note: no CD-ROM drive).

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Microsoft bids Internet Explorer farewell Microsoft's (MSFT) Internet Explorer may not be as old as the Web, but it's been around for decades. However, the company has announced that with Windows 10 it will virtually retire the brand and move to a new browser name (still to be decided) and identity. IE will still exist, but only for compatibility with existing corporate software.Although the change is small in one sense, it shows how far Microsoft's power and influence have fallen over the years. And it raises questions again about how long Microsoft can continue as a mainstay in corporate computing.Once the backbone of many corporate online application strategies, the IE has been eclipsed by competition that offer perceived better performance. Google's (GOOG) Chrome recently had a 43.2 percent share of users, while Firefox had 11.6 percent. Internet Explorer had 13.1 percent, according to the site StatCounter.Code-named Project Spartan, Microsoft has billed the new browser as lighter and nimbler with the ability to work across all Windows-powered devices and allowing users to annotate websites.But introducing a new browser has some significant implications for Microsoft's overall strategy. IE was a standard for many corporations, which built Web-based applications on the assumption employees would run them on that browser. Some companies held on to old versions of IE for years to avoid rewriting major corporate applications.In trying to address competition, which it had to do, Microsoft has opened the door for companies to move completely away and use either other browsers or apps built for Google's Android or Apple's (AAPL) iPhones and iPads. Keeping IE compatibility in some versions of Windows may not be enough for business customers.The fewer ties corporate IT departments have to Microsoft, the more easily they can eventually shift to other technologies, like cloud-based hosting and mobile apps. That road is dangerous for Microsoft because it still depends greatly on holding an important place in corporate computing.

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Spring weather outlook: Drought in West, floods in East Much of the West including California, Nevada and Oregon will endure a fourth year of drought, with dry conditions increasing the likelihood of wildfires and adding further hardship to struggling farmers. The dire prediction, made Thursday, was part of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's Spring Outlook for April to June, which found that while the West Coast will be unable to wrench itself from the grips of a multi-year drought trend, the East is in danger of flooding from the melting of record-setting snowfall.On the Pacific, NOAA officials said, the weather phenomenon known as El Nino arrived too late and was too weak to help replenish water in the region. Another factor has been the record-low snow pack this winter, due to above average temperatures from the Rockies to the West Coast. California and several other states saw record highs. "If the drought persists as predicted in the Far West, it will result in an early and active wildfire season, continued stress on crops due to low reservoir levels and expansion of water conservation measures," Jon Gottschalck, chief of the operational prediction branch at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, told reporters.Dryer conditions will also be seen in parts of the northern Plains, upper Mississippi Valley and western Great Lakes.The forecast couldn't be more different farther east.Record snowfall and unusually cold temperatures in February through early March have increased the likelihood of floods across northern New England and western New York."Rivers in these areas are expected to exceed moderate flood levels this spring if there is a quick warm up with heavy rainfall," Mary Mullusky, acting chief of NOAA's Hydrologic Services Division, told reporters. There is also a 50 percent chance of exceeding moderate flood levels in small streams and rivers in the lower Missouri River basin in Missouri and eastern Kansas. This flood potential will be driven by rain and thunderstorms. For a second year running, no region is at risk of exceeding major flood levels. Much of the West beyond the Rockies will also see a warmer than average spring, with above average temperatures projected across the Far West, northern Rockies, and northern Plains eastward to include parts of the western Great Lakes, and for all of Alaska. Below normal temperatures are most likely this spring for Texas and nearby areas of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. The warmer temperatures echo trends seen from December through February, NOAA reported. The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.42 degrees F above the 20th century average. This was the highest for that period since record keeping began in 1880. It surpassed the previous record set in 2007 by 0.05 degrees F. And that comes on top of record temperatures in 2014, driven in part by rising greenhouse gas emissions. The latest forecasts will be especially dispiriting for California, which has watched as lakes dried up and its economy lost as much $2.2 billion and shed 17,000 seasonal and part-time jobs. A NASA study found that California would need 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from its three-year dry spell. That's roughly equivalent to filling up Lake Meade, the U.S.'s largest reservoir, one and a half times. "Everybody in California is under restrictions, pressure. It is not easy now and a fourth year of drought, a fifth year of drought will be more perilous as reservoirs continue to drop," NOAA hydrologist Robert Hartman said. "They are already at low levels and ... our snowpack is a record low, quite dismal. So our spring runoff is not going to be much to write home about." Farmers have been hit especially hard, with new water restrictions forcing them to pull back on the amount of acres planted. There was an 11 percent reduction in planting acres in 2014 compared to 2013, according to Brad Rippey, meteorologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with water-intensive crops like rice and cotton down a quarter.Those trends will continue. "I see nothing that would indicate much improvement, if any improvement, in the overall situation for field crops in 2015," Rippey said. "We are in the same boat as we were a year ago. There is going to be significant reduction in field crops."

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Turning pollution into exquisite works of art When John Sabraw, an art professor at Ohio University, visited the southeastern part of the state, something looked wrong. "When I toured this area, I was struck by the local streams that are largely orange, red and brown as if a mud slide was happening further upstream," Sabraw said.It wasn't mud, but acid runoff from the region's many coal mines.Over the last century, Ohio has been one of the states extensively mined for coal. In the annual coal report by the Energy Information Administration, Ohio is ranked tenth in the nation in coal production. The part of the state Sabraw saw has the largest concentration of coal-burning power plants in the world.Countless abandoned or disused underground coal mines are scattered over thousands of square miles there. Many are not sealed properly and consequently they fill with water that reacts with the exposed minerals, forming sulfuric acid and high levels of iron, said Guy Riefler, associate professor of civil engineering at Ohio University.Millions of gallons of water drain out of the mines daily, entering streams, turning them yellow, orange and red as the metals mix with water and oxidize."The streams ... connect to other streams and rivers and eventually the ocean. It's all intertwined," Sabraw said. "This might seem a local issue but it's not -- it's a global issue and it affects everything on this planet." An environmentalist as well as an artist, Sabraw was fascinated by the streams' colors and wanted to figure out a way to remediate (clean) the streams and do something with the leftover toxic sludge.Knowing that the toxic waste was made out of iron oxide, which imbues paints with vibrant colors, he decided use it to make his own paint, which he could then use to create his paintings.Sabraw said making his own pigments directly from waste has multiple benefits. Beyond a way to reduce pollution, it would also take shipping of commercial paints out of the equation, cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions associated with his art. Moreover, he wanted to let others know that producing sustainable art was possible. "Most of the conflict, injustice, and devastation in the world today can be traced back to supply and demand related to abuse of natural resources," Sabraw said. "I think the artist lucky enough to be in a country with the wealth and access that we have owes a debt to use this support to push for greater responsibility, positive change, and sustainability." Meanwhile, Riefler had been doing research on acid mine drainage for several years, and wanted to come up with a cheap or free water treatment process."Ohio does not have many water treatments to help clean polluted water from acid mine drainage and it's very expensive to clear it up," he said. The two began collaborating on a project to create works of art from pigments derived from the polluted streams. Their ultimate goal? To take pollution -- something that is undesirable -- and commercialize it. The revenue from the sale of the pigment would directly fund the continued remediation of the streams, Sabraw said. With the help of undergraduate researchers and graduate students at the university, Sabraw and Riefler took several trips to the polluted areas and pumped the toxic, acidic water coming from the mines into a large, portable containers. After bringing the batches back to the lab, they then poured it into a reactor and bubbled air through it, oxidizing the iron contained within. Clean water was left on the top and concentrated iron waste fell to the bottom. They then brought the clean water back to the streams and converted the leftover pollution into valuable pigments for the paint that Sabraw used to create his artworks.Sabraw's works are currently on display at the Thomas McCormick Gallery in Chicago. For Sabraw and Riefler, the next step is to build a pilot program at a site that treats millions of gallons toxic water, and to try to create their pollution-based pigment on a commercial scale. Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the university where Sabraw and Riefler teach. It is Ohio University in Athens (www.ohio.edu), not the Ohio State University in Columbus.

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It's been 30 years since the first ".com" If it weren't for .com, you wouldn't be where you are today. That is literally, right here, on CBSNews.com. It was 30 years ago this Sunday -- March 15, 1985 -- that the first dot com domain was registered, changing, well, kind of everything. "In the last 30 years, the Internet has evolved from an unknown phenomenon used primarily by academics and researchers to a global communication, commerce and information sharing channel that few could imagine life without," said Verisign, a leading seller of domain names. "In fact, nearly three billion people around the world are online today, and more than $300 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales and over $1.3 trillion in global e-commerce sales rely on the Internet." Thirty years, three billion people, $1.3 trillion -- largely attributable to three little letters. Now-defunct Massachusetts computer company Symbolics registered the first dot-com domain, symbolics.com, on March 15, 1985. (Though its machines are long dead, the site lives on.) The World Wide Web, which we use to access the information on the Internet, didn't even exist yet. It wasn't launched until 1991.It would take until 1987 for the total number of .com domains to reach 100. Today, there's a .com registered every second. That's more than 80,000 per day. Until the end of 2013, there were 22 domain extensions, including .net, .org and .edu, according to GoDaddy. And though .com is still the go-to for legitimate-looking web addresses, over a thousand new ones will be rolling out over the next few years. Look out for new options such as .food, .video, . goo, .rocks and .sucks. Not that we need them. According to Verisign, if all 2.5 billion Internet users in the world registered a .com every second for 30 million years, that would only add up to one billionth of one billionth of one percent of all available domain names.Check out the timeline the company put together illustrating the history of dot coms:

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This is how NASA tests its spacesuits When astronauts eventually get to Mars, they will need the right outfits.Engineers and technicians at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are currently testing the spacesuits that astronauts will wear in the agency's Orion spacecraft on trips to deep space. The Orion mission will carry astronauts further into space than they've ever been before, possibly to an asteroid, and one day to Mars.In the photo above, taken March 17, members of the Johnson team completed a so-called Vacuum Pressure Integrated Suit Test to verify that the suit will meet the standards required to be worn aboard the Orion spacecraft, which was built to carry astronauts to deep space and back.During the test, which was the first of four, the engineers suited up and entered an 11-foot chamber designed to simulate the vacuum environment experienced in the spacecraft. The suit was connected to life support systems and then the air was sucked out of the chamber. The suit is a version of the launch and entry suits already worn by space shuttle astronauts, and will contain all the necessary functions to support life in the unlikely event the spacecraft loses pressure. It will also enable astronauts to leave their spacecraft for spacewalks. In the most serious known incident ever encountered during a NASA spacewalk, on July 16, 2013, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano's helmet flooded with water, a near-fatal mishap. An investigation followed, which blamed the leak on a complex combination of factors that included a misunderstanding of the subtleties of the suit's operation in weightlessness. In February, NASA astronaut Terry Virts returned from the second of three spacewalks with a small amount of water in his helmet. NASA had already delayed the start of the spacewalk to complete troubleshooting to ensure that the suits were in full working order. NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars aboard the Orion spacecraft in the 2030s.

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Obama admin sets new record for denying, censoring government files For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press. The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn't find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law - but only when it was challenged. Its backlog of unanswered requests at year's end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. The government's new figures, published Tuesday, covered all requests to 100 federal agencies during fiscal 2014 under the Freedom of Information law, which is heralded globally as a model for transparent government. They showed that despite disappointments and failed promises by the White House to make meaningful improvements in the way it releases records, the law was more popular than ever. Citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 714,231 requests for information. The U.S. spent a record $434 million trying to keep up. The government responded to 647,142 requests, a 4 percent decrease over the previous year. The government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 250,581 cases or 39 percent of all requests. Sometimes, the government censored only a few words or an employee's phone number, but other times it completely marked out nearly every paragraph on pages. On 215,584 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper. The White House touted its success under its own analysis. It routinely excludes from its assessment instances when it couldn't find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law, and said under this calculation it released all or parts of records in 91 percent of requests - still a record low since President Barack Obama took office using the White House's own math."We actually do have a lot to brag about," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. The government's responsiveness under the open records law is an important measure of its transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas. It cited such exceptions a record 554,969 times last year. Under the president's instructions, the U.S. should not withhold or censor government files merely because they might be embarrassing, but federal employees last year regularly misapplied the law. In emails that AP obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration about who pays for Michelle Obama's expensive dresses, the agency blacked-out a sentence under part of the law intended to shield personal, private information, such as Social Security numbers, phone numbers or home addresses. But it failed to censor the same passage on a subsequent page. The sentence: "We live in constant fear of upsetting the WH (White House)." In nearly 1 in 3 cases, when someone challenged under appeal the administration's initial decision to censor or withhold files, the government reconsidered and acknowledged it was at least partly wrong. That was the highest reversal rate in at least five years. The AP's chief executive, Gary Pruitt, said the news organization filed hundreds of requests for government files. Records the AP obtained revealed police efforts to restrict airspace to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In another case, the records showed Veterans Affairs doctors concluding that a gunman who later killed 12 people had no mental health issues despite serious problems and encounters with police during the same period. They also showed the FBI pressuring local police agencies to keep details secret about a telephone surveillance device called Stingray. "What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years," Pruitt wrote in a column published this week. "The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time."The U.S. released its new figures during Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information. The AP earlier this month sued the State Department under the law to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. The government had failed to turn over the files under repeated requests, including one made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013. The government said the average time it took to answer each records request ranged from one day to more than 2.5 years. More than half of federal agencies took longer to answer requests last year than the previous year. Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news fared worse than ever. Under the law, the U.S. is required to move urgent requests from journalists to the front of the line for a speedy answer if records will inform the public concerning an actual or alleged government activity. But the government now routinely denies such requests: Over six years, the number of requests granted speedy processing status fell from nearly half to fewer than 1 in 8. The CIA, at the center of so many headlines, has denied every such request the last two years.

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Texas judge's immigration rebuke may be hard to challenge President Barack Obama's administration faces a difficult and possibly lengthy legal battle to overturn a Texas court ruling that blocked his landmark immigration overhaul, since the judge based his decision on an obscure and unsettled area of administrative law, lawyers said.In his ruling on Monday that upended plans to shield millions of people from deportation, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen avoided diving into sweeping constitutional questions or tackling presidential powers head-on. Instead, he faulted Obama for not giving public notice of his plans.The failure to do so, Hanen wrote, was a violation of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which requires notice in a publication called the Federal Register as well as an opportunity for people to submit views in writing. The ruling, however narrow, marked an initial victory for 26 states that brought the case alleging Obama had exceeded his powers with executive orders that would let up to 4.7 million illegal immigrants stay without threat of deportation. "It's a very procedural point – that he did this too quickly," said Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.Hanen's ruling left in disarray U.S. policy toward the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally. Obama said on Tuesday he disagreed with the ruling and expected his administration to prevail in the courts.The U.S. Justice Department was preparing an appeal of Hanen's temporary injunction to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Obama said. The court could consider an emergency request to block Hanen's ruling, potentially within days, although most of the 23 judges on the court were appointed by Republican presidents.There was no consensus among lawyers with expertise in administrative law and immigration law on whether Hanen would be reversed on appeal. But they said the judge was wise to focus on an area of administrative law where legal precedent is sometimes fuzzy.In the near term, the narrow approach allowed Hanen to issue a temporary injunction barring federal agencies from putting Obama's plans into place. An appointee of President George W. Bush, Hanen had previously criticized U.S. immigration enforcement as too lax. BRAKE ON PRESIDENTIAL ACTIONHanen's ruling turned on the Administrative Procedure Act's requirement that a proposed rule or regulation appear in the Federal Register so people have a chance to comment. The Federal Register is a daily journal of U.S. government proceedings.The "notice and comment" requirement acts as a brake on all presidents, slowing their plans by months or years.The requirement, though, does not apply to "interpretative rules" or general statements of policy, an exception that Justice Department lawyers said applied to Obama's announcement in November. Rules that must be submitted for notice and comment are sometimes known as "legislative rules."For Hanen, the pivotal question became whether the new rules, such as granting work permits to potentially millions of illegal immigrants, was binding on federal agents or merely general guidance. He ruled that they were binding, and that Obama should have allowed for notice and comment.Lawyers with expertise in administrative law said there was little guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court on what qualifies as a rule that needs to be published, leaving disagreement among lower courts and a grey area for Hanen to work in."The case law as to what qualifies as a legislative rule is remarkably unclear," said Anne Joseph O'Connell, a University of California Berkeley law professor. LENGTHY PROCESS LOOMSO'Connell said it was hard to predict how the appeals court would rule in the end, although she thought it was likely the court would lift Hanen's temporary injunction and allow the Obama administration to begin putting its program in place.The subject is not strictly partisan, she said, because sometimes a liberal interest group might favor a strict requirement for notice and comment. An appeal before the 5th Circuit could take months, as lawyers file written briefs and the court holds oral argument and comes to a decision.The appeals court could also consider other questions, such as whether the states that brought the lawsuit had what is known as standing to sue or whether Obama violated the clause of the U.S. Constitution that requires presidents to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."There is no chance Obama would begin the notice-and-comment period now, because U.S. immigration policy would be frozen in place during the lengthy process, said Peter Margulies, an immigration expert at Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island.He said it could delay Obama's policy for "a minimum of six to eight months, and potentially much longer."

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​One-fifth of world's worst coal plants are in U.S. Data from a March report on coal energy production revealed some dirty truths about the state of coal in America.Coal provides 40 percent of the world's electricity and of that, three quarters comes from inefficient and often aging power stations that require more fuel and water to generate the same amount of electricity as newer, better plants. Compared with the most modern stations, these so-called "subcritical" coal-fired power stations (SCPS) emit 75 percent more carbon pollution and use up 67 percent more water. China holds the title for pumping out the most energy from plants that fall into this category, but right on its heels is the U.S., which accounts for more than one-fifth of the power generation from such facilities, according to a new report from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Seventy-three percent of America's coal energy comes from subcritical plants.The report also determined that of the 100 global companies with the greatest stake in these highly polluting subcritical plants, 29 are in the United States. AES Corporation, Southern Company, Duke Energy, NRG Energy, American Electric Power Co. and Berkshire Hathaway Energy make up six of the 20 top SCPS-holding companies in the world. The report argues that in order to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C over what they were in preindustrial times -- the aim of a potential international deal to be sealed at climate talks in Paris later this year -- "it is necessary to close a quarter or 290 gigawatts (GW) of subcritical generation worldwide by 2020." One study in Nature in January estimated that reaching the two-degree target would require keeping 92 percent of country's coal reserves completely untouched. Short of that, closing old, over-polluting, underperforming coal plants is a good preliminary move. The average age of coal plants in the U.S. is 39 years old, compared with a world average of 21. "Since SCPSs are the least efficient and most greenhouse gas intensive centralised generation technology, they are both vulnerable to regulation and a logical first step in any climate mitigation strategy," the authors of the Oxford paper wrote. "Furthermore, because subcritical plants typically represent the oldest part of nations' power generation portfolios, they may also represent a practical policy choice for closure by budget-constrained policymakers looking for cost-effective emissions reductions." The report estimated that in the U.S., policies intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions will force the closure of at least 16 percent of SCPS capacity in 2015, and "proposed state-based GHG emission reductions promise to put further pressure on existing SCPSs." The analysis found that proposed regulations could affect $28 billion in industry value, "though immediate plant closures are expected to be minimal." President Obama imposed regulations on coal plant carbon emissions in 2014, and Republican dissenters have accused the administration of waging a "war on coal." Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments against a 2011 EPA ruling limiting certain air pollutants from coal-fired power plants.

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Winter was world record warmest With Bostonians digging out of their snowiest season and New York expecting flurries on the first day of spring, it might be hard to believe, but a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association released Wednesday said that globally, winter 2014-15 was the warmest on record. From December through February, NOAA reported, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.42 degrees F (0.79 degrees C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest for that period since record keeping began in 1880. It surpassed the previous record set in 2007 by 0.05 degrees F. Average temperatures for 2015 to date also set a worldwide record, with last month coming in as the hottest February since 1998. The new data follow on the heels of the official word in January that 2014 was the hottest year on record.But the story has seemed much more complicated here in the U.S. The Pacific Northwest is seeing an early spring and heat stifled runners in the Los Angeles Marathon Sunday. Meanwhile, Boston has seen 108.6 inches of snow, more than has fallen there in a single season since 1872, and cities all around the Northeast are dealing with record-low temperatures of their own.

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Apple to launch streaming TV service Apple is reportedly in talks with programmers to offer about 25 channels, including CBS, ABC, Fox and FX, on an online streaming television service planned for later this year. According to The Wall Street Journal, the service, which could be announced as early as June and launch in September, would cost from $30 to $40 a month. It will work with all iOS devices, including Apple TV, and come with an on-demand library. "Everybody has been waiting for some sort of product like this from Apple," CNET senior editor Scott Stein told CBS News."For a while, people have wanted to cord cut in the sense that they feel they are paying too much for cable or they don't have the same selections," he said. "You already see the influence of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon in terms of being appealing to people but also bringing in new content, so I think it's a very big deal." Apple has talked for some time about creating a TV subscription service as part of co-founder Steve Jobs' dream of altering the way people use their TVs. The latest news appears to build on the announcement last week that Apple would cut the price of Apple TV and that it partnered with HBO to host its streaming HBO Now service starting next month. Still, the plans of Apple aren't without challenges.Its streaming service would enter a crowded market as companies search for ways to win over some of the 49 million cable customers who are hankering for cheaper alternatives. Among them is Dish Network's Sling TV, which launched last month. Customers pay just $20 a month for a selection of channels that includes ESPN, TNT, CNN, HGTV and the Disney Channel."You also see PlayStation launching its own TV service imminently," Stein said.Of course, while $15 a month for HBO, $20 a month for Sling and $40 a month for Apple TV streaming all sound like good deals compared with the massive cable bills many customers are faced with now, it should be remembered that you get fewer channels and still have to pay for Internet service, which may be more expensive outside of a bundled deal. And so while cable companies are directly threatened by new offerings, they actually could see some advantages in all these streaming services coming online. "In the end, you still have to use broadband and a lot of these cable companies are providing that," Stein said. "It's kind of like cell phones where you are talking on minutes and then switching over to using data plans. I think the equation will get modified so you will be emphasizing broadband services more than your TV package."

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Rare show for (some) solar eclipse watchers Some sky-gazers got a spectacular show while others weren't so lucky today as the moon completely blocked out the sun in a total eclipse only visible from land in two remote places. There were shouts and cheers in the Arctic where there was a perfect view in a clear sky as the moon's shadow was cast over Norway's remote archipelago of Svalbard. A blanket of clouds in the Faeroe Islands in the North Atlantic blocked thousands of people from experiencing the full effect of the total eclipse.And CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata said residents of Britain's capital were able to skip the solar safety glasses to view the eclipse, too -- what little they could see of it. Cloud cover, a familiar condition for the English, made the experience largely disappointing for those gathered on the lawns outside the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. About 20,000 visitors had traveled to the two remote island groups to watch the spectacle. Despite the clouds in the Faeroes, tourists and residents hooted and applauded as the daylight dimmed. A woman in the northern part of the Faeroes said birds there went silent and dogs started howling. The next total eclipse will be over Indonesia in March 2016. As D'Agata reports, the year after that should grant many Americans the same special show.

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Tesla leads the charge in Web-connected cars Remember when the Internet was something you tapped into from home, and your car was something that got you from here to there? Now, of course, you (or, we hope, your passenger) can update a Facebook page or check a portfolio while cruising the interstate.The market for Web-enabled electronics in cars is expected to skyrocket, and by 2017 more than 86 percent of the vehicles on the road will be connected, according to a forecast by IHS. By 2021, every new car sold in the U.S. will be connected."It's a sign of the times we live in where personal wireless connectivity is kind of a part of life," said Richard Wallace, director of Transportation System Analysis at the Center for Automotive Research, in an interview. "We just want to be able to get such data out of the cloud wherever we are and whenever we want it."While many automakers are well down that path, Tesla(TSLA) is far out in front. Yesterday it announced plans to allow customers to upgrade the software in their Model S, whose sticker price starts at $70,000, so they could add new features such as the one that would allow autonomous driving.Other carmakers, such as General Motors (GM) and Ford (F), have focused on providing Web-enabled infotainment features such as OnStar and MyFord Touch with mixed results. Most 2015 GM vehicles sold in the U.S. and Canadacome equipped with advanced 4G LTE connectivity and a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot.MyFord Touch has been especially problematic for Ford, which dropped Microsoft (MSFT)as the operating system for its next-generation infotainment system but will continue to support cloud services for Ford and Lincoln vehicles. Hybrids and electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt have also made advancements in these features.Tesla, which is run by its founder Elon Musk, has hired many engineers from Silicon Valley, where continuous updating of software is a ubiquitous part of the landscape, so it's moves in this area make sense.The company views this capability as a huge selling point. On its corporate blog it noted: "Most cars don't improve over time. By contrast, Model S gets faster, smarter, and better as time passes. With Tesla's regular over-the-air software updates, Model S actually improves while you sleep.""They are really the leader at doing this," said Egil Juliussen, an automotive technology analyst at IHS Technology, about Tesla. "Eventually, I am certain that everyone will need to do that, and I am certain that they will."Shares of Tesla, which have slumped more than 11 percent this year, rose 1.2 percent to close at $198.08 on Friday.Tesla's latest features are designed to address what's known as "range anxiety." The cars will now warn people if they're going out of range of a charging station and helps them reach their destination as quickly as possible.The Model S, which received the highest rating ever given to a vehicle by Consumer Reports, also added a slew of safety features, including one that will provide blind spot and side-impact warnings.Tesla can deploy these features more easily than other automakers because its cars are powered exclusively by electricity. "Tesla is in a very unique position given the design of their vehicles and the way that their system works," said Eric Lyman, vice president of industry insights atTrueCar.com. "Within five years we will see that pretty much across the board.... We will see more and more implementation of this technology."One of the biggest challenges in developing these technologies involves cybersecurity.Some experts have warned of the potential of hackers gaining control of people's cars."Today you don't really have to worry about it that much," Juliussen said."Over the long-term, it will be a very significant issue that all the automakers will have tosolve."

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Britain creates world's largest marine reserve The world's largest marine reserve has been created by the British government, offering unprecedented protection to more than 1,200 species of marine mammals, fish and sea birds in the South Pacific. The 322,138-square-mile reserve around the Pitcairn Islands is roughly three-and-half times the size of the United Kingdom and located in one of the world's most remote locations. It was announced as part of Chancellor George Osborne's pre-election budget following a proposal to create the reserve by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Geographic Society."With this designation, the United Kingdom raises the bar for protection of our ocean and sets a new standard for others to follow," said Matt Rand, director of Global Ocean Legacy, a project of Pew and its partners that advocates for establishment of the world's great marine parks. "The United Kingdom is the caretaker of more than 6 million square kilometers of ocean -- the fifth-largest marine area of any country. Through this designation, British citizens are playing a vital role in ensuring the health of our seas." A March 2012 scientific survey of Pitcairn's marine environment, led by the National Geographic Pristine Seas project in partnership with Pew, documented an untouched ecosystem that includes the world's deepest known living plant, a species of encrusting coralline algae found 1,253 feet below sea level. The reserve also protects one of the two remaining raised coral atolls on the planet as well as 40 Mile Reef, the deepest and most well developed coral reef known in the world. "Our first-ever scientific exploration of the area revealed entirely new species as well as an abundance of top predators like shark," said National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala, head of Society's Pristine Seas project. "It was like traveling to a new world full of hidden and unknown treasures, a world that will now be preserved for generations to come."In an effort to protect the area from illegal fishing and other criminal activities, the Bertarelli Foundation also announced a five-year commitment to support the monitoring of the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve as part of Pew's Project Eyes on the Seas. Using a satellite monitoring system, developed through collaboration between Pew and the U.K.-based company Satellite Applications Catapult, government officials will be able to detect illegal fishing activity in real time.It is the first time a reserve has been created that incorporates this level of monitoring and enforcement. And its formation adds to a growing push by Western governments to protect the oceans from overfishing, pollution and unchecked development. In April 2010, the British government created the Chagos Marine Reserve in the Indian Ocean -- until today the largest continuous, fully protected area of ocean in the world. Most recently, in September 2014, President Barack Obama significantly expanded the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument, first created by President George W. Bush, in the south-central Pacific.

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​How solar sailing could impact the future of space exploration In a laboratory, time lapse video shows a tiny satellite opening a huge sail that could carry it deep into space. Launched on a conventional rocket, the satellite will eventually be powered only by sunlight hitting a Mylar sail. The spacecraft was not developed by NASA but a non-profit group -- The Planetary Society."Our mission is to empower citizens to do things in space," said Jennifer Vaughn, the group's chief operating officer.The Planetary Society raised $4.5 million to build LightSail.LightSail's mission is made possible by a new generation of small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft called "CubeSats." About the size of a loaf of bread, they are making space exploration affordable to universities and businesses."Last year about 150 spacecraft this size were launched," said Rex Ridenoure. Ridenoure's company, Ecliptic Enterprises, built LightSail for the Planetary Society to test whether a spacecraft can be propelled simply by capturing light. Ridenoure says it'll be a first. "We really hope to kick-start a process where others now take the technology and make it better and really start pushing the boundaries," said Vaughn. " The test flight scheduled for early Maywill last just a few weeks but eventually LightSail could do what sailing ships once did on earth -- enable exploration of distant and mysterious places.

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Elon Musk thinks computers drive better than you do Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a driverless vision of the future. At a conference held by computer chipmaker Nvidia Tuesday, Musk said that one day, legislators "may outlaw driven cars because they're too dangerous." While in the near term, lawmakers will likely resist self-driving cars, he said, in the "distant future," we'll all be chauffeured around by them. "We'll take autonomous cars for granted in quite a short time," he said in a conversation with Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang. "I almost view it as a solved problem. We know what to do, and we'll be there in a few years."Musk drew an analogy to elevators, which were operated by people until engineers developed circuitry that could reliably get a lift to the right floor without human intervention. "Cars will be like that," he said. Musk seems to have a lot of faith in the artificial intelligence that will make autonomous cars a regular everyday thing. It is interesting given that in the past, he has likened A.I. to "summoning the demon," and has said that it's "potentially more dangerous than nukes."By transitive property, if human drivers are more dangerous than A.I. cars, and A.I. is more dangerous than nuclear weapons, then humans must be more dangerous than nuclear weapons, right? That sounds about right. But, although he cautioned about the increased threat of hacking as cars get more autonomous, he said the vehicles should be safer overall. "I don't think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that's sort of like a narrow form of A.I.," he reasoned, according to the Verge. Musk, for all his fears of A.I., has a vested interest in its success. He was at Nvidia's conference to talk about autonomous driving and the environment surrounding the company's just announced DRIVE PX self-driving car computer learning system. The computer is powered by Nvidia's Tegra processor, which also can be found in Tesla cars. Tesla introduced "autopilot" features for its S model sedan last fall that can autonomously steer and brake.Musk has said in the past that while Telsa has lagged in automation, it will eventually leapfrog other carmakers' capabilities.

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Burmese pythons are taking over the Everglades Burmese pythons are literally eating their way through the Everglades. With no natural predators, these invasive reptiles - imported from Southeast Asia as pets - appear to be wiping out most of the small mammals that once thrived in Everglades National Park. They are also chasing out other predators, who have to go elsewhere for a steady diet of rodents, mink, rabbits and raccoons. Scientists like Davidson College's Michael Dorcas have shown that the populations of mammals including raccoons, possums and deer has dropped dramatically in the Everglades. They strongly suspected the fast-breeding snakes were to blame, but it took a study out this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society to confirm the link. In an ingenious experiment, scientists put radio collars on marsh rabbits and placed them in areas known to be favorite haunts of Burmese pythons.Initially the rabbits thrived and even bred successfully. But after nine months, the researchers returned to find that pythons had eaten 77 percent of the rabbits. In control sites outside the park, pythons ate no rabbits. "All of us were shocked by the results. Rabbit populations are supposed to be regulated by factors other than predation, like drought, disease," study co-author Bob Reed, chief of the invasive branch of the United States Geological Society, told CBS News. "They are so fecund. They are supposed to be hugely resilient to predation," he said. "You don't expect a population to be wiped out by predation." University of Florida's Robert A. McCleery, another author on the paper, said the evidence against the python was pretty damning: The radio collars, along with the rabbits, were found in the snake's belly. "Every one (of the rabbits) we are saying was eaten by a python, we found inside a python," he said. "It wasn't like, 'I wonder what ate this.' You are looking for your rabbit and you find a python. The radio collar was transmitting from inside the python." Reed and the other authors said the findings raised the prospect that "pythons have replaced mammals" such as coyotes and bobcats "as the dominant predators on things like rabbits" in the Everglades. It is too early to know exactly what long-term impact pythons will have on one Florida's most important ecosystems. Some species like birds and turtles may benefit from the demise of mammals but Reed and the other authors warned the ecosystem as whole will most likely suffer if the snakes continue to increase their numbers. "There is a serious ecological problem in Everglades National Park that appears to be spreading," McCleery said."I know what mammals do. I know they change vegetation. I know they disperse seeds. I know they prey on other things," he said. "When you start taking these things out of the system, the vegetation could change. There could be outbreaks of things."Pythons were only seen sporadically as recently in the 1980s in the Everglades, a 10,000-square-kilometer freshwater wetland that covers much of southern Florida. But thanks to the pet trade, they started showing up in the 1990s and their numbers sharply escalated in the past 15 years to the point where Reed and others believe there could be as many as 10,000 there. With such a huge population, ridding them from the Everglades has proven almost impossible. Shooting or poisoning them, as has been done to rid rats from some South Pacific islands, is not practical in a crowded state like Florida. Trapping them has done little good and the use of dogs has not worked because most pythons are in swampy, inaccessible areas. Occasional hunts such as the annual Python Challenge have only put a minor dent in their numbers. "Right now, we do not have control tools that are likely to allow us to eliminate pythons from the Everglades," Reed said. "That means we may not see the recovery of mammal populations until some effective control tool is developed."The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has put eight large constrictor snakes including the Burmese python on a list that bars their importation into the country and trade across state lines. But for Reed, these types of measures are probably too late for the Burmese python. The best hope is containing them to the Everglades and preventing their spread to places like the Florida Keys. "For species already established in Florida, it's like closing the barn after horses have fled," he said of the federal measure. "But for the species not yet established, it really, really will reduce the chances of them entering the U.S. and establishing new populations." Dorcas agreed there are no control measures that show "any promise of suppressing the population across across its range." So the best hope,he said, is that the mammals themselves will adapt to survive against the new predatory threats. "One of the reason pythons have caused such dramatic declines in mammals is because mammals are naïve to pythons as major predators," he said. "So if that is the case and if there are mammals that do avoid pythons and that behavior is heritable, then we should see the fairly rapid evolution of mammals that would avoid pythons. Whether that will happen or not, we don't know."

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Scientists sip 170-year-old beer found in shipwreck When you're picking out a beer, what flavors do you look for? If hints of soured milk and burnt rubber, or a "goaty" taste sound delightful to you, then brews that were aged for 170 years at the bottom of the Baltic Sea might just be your thing. Scientists recently opened two bottles of beer from a shipwreck off the coast of Finland to get a profile of the 19th century brews. Some seawater had seeped into the bottles and decades of bacterial activity gave the beer some rather unpleasant notes. But enough compounds from the drinks survived that the researchers were able to tell that the beers' original flavors probably would have been quite similar to those of modern beers, according to a new report. [In Photos: Baltic Sea Shipwreck Yields 200-Year-Old Seltzer Bottle] The bottles came from 165 feet (50 meters) below the surface of the Baltic, from the wreckage of a schooner that sank near Finland's Aland Islands in the 1840s. In 2010, divers found 150 bottles of champagne at the wreck, as well as five beer bottles, though one did not survive the journey back to land. When that bottle broke in the divers' boat, it started to foam, and some gastronomically adventurous divers attested that the liquid indeed tasted like beer, according to the study authors, who published their findings in the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry last month. For a more scientific examination of the beers' flavor, the research team, led by John Londesborough of the Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT), uncorked two of the surviving bottles. The researchers were hit with a ripe mixture of smells: yeast extract, dimethyl sulfide (think cabbage), Bakelite (a fishy smelling retro plastic), burnt rubber, over-ripe cheese, goat and sulfur. These unsavory notes were likely the result of bacteria growing inside the bottles for decades, overpowering whatever fruity, malt or hop profiles the beer originally had, the researchers wrote. The beers were also "bright golden yellow, with little haze," and they may have been diluted by seawater by up to 30 percent, the researchers said. So the drinks might have been stronger than their current alcohol-by-volume levels of 2.8 to 3.2 percent. The scientists acknowledged that the beer had not been stored in ideal conditions, and there is little data on the chemical stability of beer over such a long time. Just from sipping the old beer, the researchers couldn't tell what the drinks may have originally tasted like. Yet, from their chemical analyses, they could speculate a few things. They found that yeast-derived flavor compounds were similar to those of modern beers. They also think the two bottles contained different beers, with one being hoppier (and thus more bitter) than the other. The less hoppy beer had a higher than normal amount of a chemical called phenylethanol, which may have given it roselike notes. There were unusually low levels of 3-methylbutyl acetate (a compound that gives beer notes of banana) in both bottles, but it's possible that the chemical's concentration plummeted over such a long period of aging, the researchers wrote.

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Oregon Republicans, driven by governor's scandal, urge ethics reform An Oregon Republican said she had proposed legislation to empower lawmakers to ask the attorney general to investigate the governor's office for alleged wrongdoing, a day before the state's top elected official is set to resign in a scandal.Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber has been dogged for months by allegations of a possible conflict of interest between fiancee Cylvia Hayes' role as an unpaid gubernatorial adviser and her consulting business contracts.Kitzhaber announced his resignation on Friday and Secretary of State Kate Brown, a Democrat, is to take up the job on Wednesday. "The deck's sort of stacked for the governor," said House of Representatives Republican Julie Parrish, who drafted the bills in collaboration with other Republicans.Under Oregon law, the governor alone can ask the state's attorney general to investigate the state's top elected office, which Kitzhaber himself did as he faced allegations that Hayes used her role in his office for personal gain. The governor also appoints the members of the state's ethics commission. Parrish would change that in a draft bill she introduced on Monday, with others to be proposed in coming days.Oregon is also the only U.S. state that lacks a gubernatorial impeachment process, according to the National Governors' Association, though this is not the subject of Parrish's proposals.Parrish hopes to seize upon the resignation of one of the highest-profile Democrats in Oregon history to push forward her proposals, which she says would improve campaign finance transparency and access to public records, among other things.Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said Kitzhaber's resignation would not affect an ongoing criminal corruption probe. The U.S. attorney for Oregon has filed subpoenas seeking records related to potential conflicts of interest concerning Kitzhaber, his office, Hayes, and more than a dozen state officials and agencies. Secretary of State Kate Brown, a Democrat from Portland, a liberal bastion, has touted her own work to create an online database for campaign donations.Separately, the state's attorney general said last week that Hayes, as a public official, must turn over by Thursday any emails requested by the Oregonian newspaper that relate to state business. The Attorney General's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Kepler space telescope marks 6 years of planet hunting NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, which has discovered more than half of all known planets beyond our solar system, just celebrated six years in space. The $600 million Kepler mission blasted off atop a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the night of March 6, 2009 (March 7 GMT). After a two-month commissioning phase, Kepler began searching for exoplanets -- and began etching its name into the history books. Kepler finds alien worlds by watching for the tiny brightness dips they cause when they cross the face of their host stars from the spacecraft's perspective. (During its original mission, Kepler stared at more than 150,000 stars simultaneously.) [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]This technique has been incredibly successful. To date, the sun-orbiting spacecraft has discovered 1,019 exoplanets, with more than 3,100 additional "candidates" awaiting confirmation by follow-up observations or analysis. Mission scientists expect that around 90 percent of these potential planets will end up being the real deal. To put Kepler's tally into perspective: Scientists have discovered a total of about 1,800 alien planets. (The number varies a bit depending upon which database is consulted.) But Kepler has never just been about raw numbers. The main goal of its original mission was to help researchers determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the Milky Way galaxy. And the spacecraft's observations suggest that worlds like our own are very common indeed: About one in five sunlike stars probably harbors an Earth-size planet in its "habitable zone," the range of distances that could support the existence of liquid water.Many more potentially habitable worlds circle red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that make up 70 percent of the Milky Way's stellar population. So our galaxy apparently teems with tens of billions of rocky, habitable-zone planets, researchers say. Kepler's original planet hunt ended in May 2013, when the second of the spacecraft's four orientation-maintaing reaction wheels failed, robbing Kepler of its ultraprecise pointing ability. But the telescope continues to study the heavens during a new mission called K2, which NASA approved in May 2014. K2 calls for a compromised Kepler to observe broader patches of sky for a variety of celestial objects and phenomena, including faraway supernova explosions, comets and asteroids in our own solar system -- and exoplanets. K2 has shown that Kepler can still find alien worlds with just two working reaction wheels: Researchers announced the new mission's first exoplanet in December 2014.

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Aussie girls recreate "Bohemian Rhapsody" car scene, this week on The Feed! This week's most popular viral videos include a lion opening a car door, a female comedy trio performing "Bohemian Rhapsody," micropigs sharing an apple, a flight attendant dancing, wrestling moves in the pool and a magic door prank.First up, Joshua Sutherland shared this scary video of a lion that's smarter than your average bear -- assuming your average bear doesn't know how to open car doors.The "Bohemian Rhapsody" car scene in Wayne's World is one of the most iconic movie scenes of all time, making it prime fodder for Internet parody. In this video, the Australian comedy trio SketchShe put their own twist on it and struck viral gold. WARNING: NSFW content.This week, Apple shared all the details of their new Apple Watch with the world. Meanwhile, and perhaps way more important, the world also got to watch these baby micropigs share an apple, courtesy of petpiggies micro pigs.Flight attendant Caralee Savage feels the way most people feel when the hit song "Uptown Funk" comes on -- she just can't help but dance. However, this former high school dance teacher's moves give the aisle a little more style.High-flying YouTuber Joe Weller tries out some punishing WWE moves on girls in a pool. Though it may seem dangerous, the two girls -- who happen to be fellow YouTubers the Merrell Twins -- seem to survive the entertaining mess just fine.And, in his latest video, magician and prankster Rahat bewilders park goers, utilizing a remote control door to nowhere.Want more of The Feed? Check out this playlist of every Feed ever!

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Fly-by-the-sun: "The adventure has started" With its wings stretched wide to catch the sun's energy, a Swiss-made solar-powered aircraft took off from Abu Dhabi just after daybreak Monday in a historic first attempt to fly around the world without a drop of fossil fuel. Solar Impulse founder André Borschberg was at the controls of the single-seat aircraft when it lumbered into the air at the Al Bateen Executive Airport. Borschberg will trade off piloting with Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard during layovers on a 21,700-mile journey. Some legs of the trip, such as over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, will mean five days and five nights of flying solo. Both pilots have been training hard for this journey, which will span 25 flight days over five months before this Spruce Goose of renewable energy returns to Abu Dhabi in late July or August."It is also exciting because you know, you simulate, you calculate, you imagine, but there is nothing like testing and doing it in real," Borschberg said just hours before takeoff. "I am sure we are all confident and hopefully we will be able to see each other here in five months." The Solar Impulse 2 aircraft, a larger version of a single-seat prototype that first flew five years ago, has a wingspan of 236 feet, larger than that of the Boeing 747. Built into the wings are 17,248 ultra-efficient solar cells that transfer solar energy to four electrical motors that power the plane's propellers. The solar cells also recharge four lithium polymer batteries. At around 5,070 pounds, the Si2 weighs about as much as a minivan or mid-sized truck. An empty Boeing 747, in comparison, weighs some 400,000 pounds. The Si2 is heading first to nearby Muscat, Oman, where it will land after about 10 hours of flight. A typical passenger jet takes just one hour to make the same journey. Piccard says the best speed for the lightweight Si2 -- made of carbon fiber -- is at about 25 knots, or 29 mph. Borschberg has been practicing yoga and Piccard self-hypnosis in order to calm their minds and manage fatigue during the long solo flights. They aim to rest a maximum of 20 minutes straight, repeating the naps 12 times over a 24-hour period. Goggles worn over the pilot's eyes will flash lights to wake him up. Neither pilot will be able to stand in the cockpit while flying, but the seat reclines for stretching and its cushion can be removed for access to a toilet. Armbands placed underneath their suits will buzz if the plane isn't flying level. The plane also does not have a pressurized cockpit so Borschberg and Piccard will be able to feel the changes in temperature. The pilot's blood oxygen levels constantly will be monitored and sent back to ground control. The plane will reach an altitude of around 28,000 feet during the day to catch the sun's rays and at night dip to around 5,000 feet when flying over the ocean. "You have to make the cockpit like your own house for a week in the air," Piccard said, telling The Associated Press he will keep a few small mementos from friends with him on the flight, though he declined to say what. Piccard is no stranger to aviation feats. In 1999, he and another man succeeded in the first non-stop balloon circumnavigation of the world. After two stops in India, the Si2 will head to China, where it will stay for a month until the days are longer to catch more of the sun's energy. It will also make stops in Myanmar, Hawaii, Phoenix, Arizona and New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The path across the Atlantic will depend on the weather and may include stops in southern Europe or Morocco. Those curious can follow the aircraft on Solar Impulse's website and track its battery status, energy consumption, location and flight path, as well as how much the pilot has slept and how much food and water he has left. There is also a live feed of the plane's Monaco-based control room with occasional footage from the cockpit. Borschberg and Piccard say the flight is to make the world "confront the Conference on Climate Change of the United Nations, which will define the new Kyoto protocol in December 2015 in Paris." All countries are supposed to present targets for a new global climate agreement at the meeting. Solar Impulse supporter Prince Albert of Monaco was present at the plane's control center during Monday's takeoff. The UAE-based Masdar, the Abu Dhabi government's clean-energy company, is a key sponsor of the flight. Additional sponsors include Omega, Google and Moet Hennessey, among others. As the plane waited on the runway, a brief electrical alarm threatened to delay takeoff, but it was quickly resolved, allowing the large plane to slowly lift off into the rising sun. "Everybody was just hoping the airplane will go," Piccard said. "Now the adventure has started."

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Hands-on with the new Apple Watch Apple's newly unveiled Apple Watch seems to have packed something for everyone into a couple of square inches. The powerful, elegant little device offers thousands of apps to help you connect to the world, communicate with your friends, pay your bills, track your health and control your smart home (not to mention tell time).But will it live up to the hype -- and the price tag?With an entry-level model starting at $349, mid-range stainless steel versions costing $549 to $1,049, and the 18-karat gold luxury edition topping out at $17,000, expectations deserve to be high. Selected tech journalists finally got their hands on the Apple Watch at a demo session following Monday's big press event in San Francisco. They were able to put the device through its paces and see how it worked, felt and responded to commands.Of course it remains to be seen how the watch will perform in real-world conditions or whether it can really live up to the promised 18 hours of battery life, but some first impressions were positive. CNET senior editor Scott Stein was at the demo and believes the Apple Watch will radically reshape the wearables market. "I think everything will change now that Apple's entered it," he told CBS News. But he recognized that would-be buyers face a dilemma: "You know Apple's going to want to upgrade this watch yearly, so what do you do? Do you buy this now? Do you wait a year?"Stein has also tested many of its competitors in the smartwatch market. He shared these thoughts after his first hands-on experience with the Apple Watch: Unlike the last time I saw Apple Watch [at its preview last fall], this time I could actually try its features myself. On my wrist, like before, the watch felt good: not too heavy, sleek, and a comfy band fit. You interact via tapping, swiping, and using the two side buttons: one's a sleek small button, the other's the Digital Crown, which is a button plus a scrolling wheel. Tapping activates the display, while swiping up brings Glances, which are like mini-apps showing everything from weather to stock info to where your Uber car is. Like Google's Android Wear cards, these can be tapped to launch the full app. Click on an Instagram photo, and you get a mini Instagram app. Double clicking the smaller second button brings up Apple Pay, which works like the version on the iPhone minus the TouchID sensor. Sometimes it was hard to figure out whether to click the crown or bottom button, or whether to swipe or tap. But the interface in the demo room generally ran smooth. Bringing up your "friend wheel" for communication is the most clever touch: if this watch can make instant chat easy, it'll leapfrog other smartwatches out there. Apple Watch is available for preorder on April 10 and ships April 24. We'll bring you more details as the reviews come in. Complete coverage of the Apple Watch on CNET.

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Bird thought long extinct is rediscovered in Myanmar A bird believed to have gone extinct more than 70 years ago has been rediscovered in the grasslands of Myanmar. The Jerdon's babbler (Chrysomma altirostre) had not been seen in the Southeast Asian nation since July 1941, where it was last spotted in the town of Myitkyo near the Sittaung River. But while surveying a site around an abandoned agriculture station in May 2014, the researchers from Wildlife Conservation Society, Myanmar's Nature and Wildlife Conservation Division and National University of Singapore (NUS) rediscovered a bird. The rediscovery was described in the recently published issue of Birding Asia, the magazine of the Oriental Bird Club."The degradation of these vast grasslands had led many to consider this subspecies of Jerdon's babbler extinct," said Colin Poole, director of WCS's Regional Conservation Hub in Singapore. "This discovery not only proves that the species still exists in Myanmar but that the habitat can still be found as well. Future work is needed to identify remaining pockets of natural grassland and develop systems for local communities to conserve and benefit from them." After initially hearing the bird's distinct call, the scientists played back a recording and were rewarded with the sighting of an adult Jerdon's babbler.Over the next 48 hours, the team spotted several more Jerdon's babblers and managed to obtain blood samples and high-quality photographs. British naturalist T. C. Jerdon initially described the small, brown bird, about the size of a house sparrow in 1862. At the beginning of the 20th century, the species was common in the vast natural grassland that once covered the Ayeyarwady and Sittaung flood plains around the country's commercial capital Yangon. Since then, its numbers declined as agriculture and communities gradually replaced most of these grasslands as the area has developed. Since the 1960s, Myanmar's military dictatorship shut itself off from the world including most environmentalists who studied birds and other species including elephants and tigers. But since moving to civilian rule in 2010, the country has opened up and that has been a boon to nature lovers leading to several finds, including the discovery of a spoon-billed sand piper population in 2008 and a new monkey species in 2010. The Jerdon's babbler in Myanmar is currently one of three subspecies found in the Indus, Bhramaputra, and Ayeyarwady River basins in South Asia. But after this rediscovery, the researchers are exploring whether this should be treated as a full species and will be doing further DNA analysis on it."Our sound recordings indicate that there may be pronounced bioacoustic differences between the Myanmar subspecies and those further west, and genetic data may well confirm the distinctness of the Myanmar population," said Frank Rheindt of NUS who was a key member of the field team and leader of the genetic analysis.

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Robert Downey Jr. gives young fan 3D-printed Iron Man arm If this video doesn't lift your spirits today, I don't know what will. Actor Robert Downey Jr. (RDJ), who plays Iron Man in the "Iron Man" and "Avengers" movies, has partnered with a maker of bionic limbs to give one lucky 7-year-old an amazing new arm. Alex, whom RDJ calls the "most dapper 7-year-old [he's] ever met," loves superheroes and riding his bike, and was born with a partially developed right arm. To give Alex a new arm, RDJ teamed with Albert Manero, a Fulbright scholar and doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the University of Central Florida who builds and donates low-cost 3D-printed bionic limbs to kids around the world through his volunteer group Limbitless Solutions.The arm cost just $350 (about £235, AU$455) in materials to make, as noted by Microsoft's The Collective Project, which is featuring stories of students making positive changes for their communities. That makes it far cheaper than the $40,000 (about £26,900, AU$52,000) it traditionally costs to make such limbs. Check out the video at the top of this post to see RDJ presenting a grinning Alex in a red bow tie with his new arm, and be sure to have a few tissues at the ready. Then click on the various links throughout this post to learn much more about this incredible project.

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NASA launches satellites to probe magnetic mystery Kicking off a $1.1 billion mission, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket streaked into space Thursday, boosting four NASA satellites into orbit to study interactions between Earth's magnetic field and the sun's, which generate the titanic energy discharges that drive auroras and play havoc with satellite navigation, communications and power grids. The hard-to-study mechanism underlying space weather is known as magnetic reconnection, and it is the focus of NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale -- MMS -- mission, a long-awaited project to reveal the underlying physics powering Earth's space environment. Carrying the four MMS satellites stacked one atop the other in a protective nose cone fairing, the Atlas 5 roared to life and climbed away from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:44 p.m. EDT (GMT-4). Thirteen minutes later, after the first of two Centaur second stage engine firings, the rocket and its satellite payload were safely in orbit.After a second Centaur engine firing, the satellites, built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., were released at five-minute intervals starting about one hour and 32 minutes after liftoff. "The spin rates, the attitude, it was essentially a flawless delivery of our four satellites," said Craig Tooley, NASA MMS project manager at Goddard. "They're all healthy and turned on." Each 3,000-pound, 12-foot-wide satellite features a suite of sensitive instruments and eight extendable antenna-like booms: four 197-foot-long radial wire booms and two 41-foot axial extensions for electric field sensors and two 16-foot booms carrying magnetometers. When fully deployed, each satellite's booms will sweep out an area the size of a baseball field as the spacecraft slowly rotate. All four satellites will be arranged in a pyramid formation, flying within about 6 miles of each other at their closest. The goal is to capture three-dimensional views of subtle magnetic interactions that occur very rapidly over very small regions of space. The payoff will be a better understanding of how the sun's magnetic field and solar winds interact with Earth's magnetic field, how similar processes play out around black holes and across entire galaxies and possibly shed light on how magnetic fields can be used to help sustain nuclear fusion reactions for power generation on Earth.The key is a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection, the sudden annihilation of interacting magnetic fields that explosively heat and accelerate charged particles to extreme velocities. "Magnetic fields exist throughout the universe and energy is often released by magnetic reconnection," said Jim Burch, MMS principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute. "In the sun's super-heated corona, magnetic fields create spectacular loops. The energy stored in these structures can release, creating explosive solar flares and coronal mass ejections. "Intense fluxes of energetic particles and giant clouds of ionized gas and magnetic fields are ejected from the sun and travel throughout the solar system. When these clouds impact other magnetic fields such as the Earth's, similar reconnection events occur and these cause intense magnetic activity and the auroral lights." At the same time, he said, magnetic reconnection accelerates electrically charged particles "creating a hazard to space travelers and spacecraft, even disrupting ground-based power grids." While scientists know magnetic reconnection occurs, they do not yet understand how or why. But they believe the answer will be found in the so-called "diffusion region" where events rapidly occur over very short scales. "Adjacent magnetic fields pointing in opposite directions tend to annihilate each other, releasing their magnetic energy and heating the charged particles in the surrounding environment," Burch said. "In this process, magnetic reconnection, the magnetic fields are torn apart and reattached to their neighbors. "The mysterious part is what goes on inside the box labeled 'diffusion region?' With MMS, we'll be able to probe the diffusion region for the first time with measurements down to the smallest scale of the plasma, the electron scale, to solve this mystery." Paul Cassak, an associate professor at West Virginia University, described previous efforts to probe magnetic reconnection as similar to watching a football game for one minute and then waiting an hour before watching another minute. "It would be really hard to figure out what's going on in the football game," he said. "These are the problems that have been plaguing researchers studying magnetic reconnection, we can't see the smaller scales and we can't process the data fast enough to really understand what happens right at the place where magnetic reconnection happens. This makes it difficult to see, for example, how particles get accelerated and heated during magnetic reconnection events." The MMS satellites represent a scientific assault on magnetic reconnection. Each satellite, with its booms extended, covers a volume measuring 94 feet thick and 369 feet across. Each solar-powered spacecraft is equipped with 11 instruments made up of more than two-dozen sensors. Sensitive Global Positioning System navigation gear and thrusters will be used to maintain relative position and orientation. The satellites will fly in two highly elliptical orbits that first will carry them through the magnetic reconnection zone on the Earth's day side, where the solar wind, CMEs and flare debris crash into the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field. The MMS spacecraft then will raise the high point of their orbit to study reconnection on the back side of the planet where Earth's magnetic field tapers away in the solar wind. That is where it's particularly interesting, Burch said, "where you have reconnection in the tail of the magnetosphere. This is what produces the aurora and the currents that carry the energy of magnetic storms." Burch said a better understanding of magnetic reconnection also could provide insights into long-standing problems that have prevented engineers from sustaining nuclear fusion reactions using magnetic containment. "People for 20 years or more have been trying to harness nuclear fusion by trapping particles in a doughnut-shaped magnetic field and heating these up to something like 100 million degrees when fusion starts happening," Burch said. "If you could maintain that, we will have solved the energy crisis. Trouble is, it always crashes, these temperatures always come down (because of) magnetic reconnection." "There are practical applications once you understand how magnetic reconnection works," he said.

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California nearly guaranteed to get major earthquake in next 30 years The probability California will experience a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next couple of decades has increased, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. CBS San Francisco reported the Third Uniform California Rupture Forecast, or UCERF3, sheds new light on where earthquakes will likely hit in California over the next couple of decades and how big they're expected to be."The new likelihoods are due to the inclusion of possible multi-fault ruptures, where earthquakes are no longer confined to separate, individual faults, but can occasionally rupture multiple faults simultaneously," said lead author and USGS scientist Ned Field. "This is a significant advancement in terms of representing a broader range of earthquakes throughout California's complex fault system." Compared to the 2008 assessment, earthquakes around magnitude 6.7 -- the size of the destructive 1994 Northridge quake -- has gone down by 30 percent with a frequency from an average of one per 4.8 years to about one per 6.3 years. The study also says the likelihood that California will experience a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next 30 years has gone up from about 4.7 percent to about 7 percent. One particularly ready fault is the Southern San Andreas, which geologists have long believed will be most likely to host a large earthquake. There's a lower chance for for the Northern San Andreas near San Francisco partly because of the relatively recent 1906 earthquake on that fault. Probabilities on two other Bay Area faults, the Hayward-Rodgers Creek and the Calaveras, actually rival or exceed those on the Northern San Andreas, mostly because they are both relatively ready.However, several strong earthquakes have rattled Northern California recently, including January's magnitude 5.7 quake off the Humbolt County coast and the magnitude 6.0 temblor in Napa in August 2014, which caused significant damage. The UCERF3 model is the first of its kind to indicate where and when the Earth might slip along the state's many faults. "The UCERF3 model provides our leaders and the public with improved information about what to expect, so that we can better," said Tom Jordan, Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and a co-author of the study. "We are fortunate that seismic activity in California has been relatively low over the past century," Southern California Earthquake Center director Tom Jordan told CBS Los Angeles. "But we know that tectonic forces are continually tightening the springs of the San Andreas fault system, making big quakes inevitable." The White House has allocated $5 million in federal funding for the Earthquake Early Warning system, which is being developed by Caltech, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington in conjunction with the USGS.The system can provide the public with up to a minute or more of warning before shaking hits. Test users at UC Berkley received 10 seconds of warning before the Napa quake. A few extra seconds can be critical, allowing doctors to pause surgeries, utilities to shut off the flow of natural gas, or train operators to brake before the shaking starts. A smartphone app to communicate the warnings is also in the works. The USGS is also watching increased earthquake activity in Oklahoma, which has experienced more than 3,600 quakes in the last five years -- 300 times more than in previous decades. Most of them have been between magnitude 3 and magnitude 4, but a new study finds the faults in the area are capable of producing a magnitude 6 earthquake.

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Scientists strive to save melting mummies The famous Chinchorro mummies, which have remained preserved in Chile for more than 7,000 years, are now under threat from increased levels of moisture. Humid air is allowing bacteria to grow, causing the mummies' skin "to go black and become gelatinous," said Ralph Mitchell, a professor emeritus of applied biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who examined the rotting mummies.The rapid deterioration began within the past 10 years, and has affected some of the 120 mummies that are housed at the University of Tarapacá's archeological museum in the northern port city of Arica, the researchers said. It was unclear why some of these mummies started degrading into black ooze, so Chilean preservationists asked Mitchell and his colleagues to study the microflora, or the bacteria, on the mummies' bodies. Tests showed that the bacteria aren't from ancient organisms. They are simply bacteria that normally live on people's skin, Mitchell said. He called the bacteria "opportunist" because "as soon as the right temperature and right moisture appeared, they started to use the skin as nutrients." [In Photos: Chilean Mummy Shows Signs of Arsenic Poisoning] Unless the mummies can be kept under the right temperature and humidity conditions, "the native microorganisms are going to chew these guys right up," Mitchell said. Skin-crawling experiment In their experiments, Mitchell and his team adjusted the air's humidity levels from dry to damp, looking at how each humidity level affected the skin of the mummies. The researchers did their initial experiments on pig skin, to limit the amount of mummy skin they needed to use.Humidity levels in the region of the museum have increased recently, Sepulveda said. Normally, Arica is arid -- it is located near the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world (outside of Earth's polar regions).Chile's changing climate may explain why the mummies are disintegrating, said Marcela Sepulveda, a professor of archaeology at the University of Tarapacá.They found that the skin began to fall apart after 21 days at high humidity. To save the mummies, the museum will need to keep the humidity in the room where the mummies are stored between 40 and 60 percent, the researchers found. Higher humidity could cause more degradation, and lower humidity could damage the mummies' skin, Mitchell said. "It hasn't rained in parts of that desert for 400 years," Mitchell said. But in the past 10 years, fog has come in off the Pacific, possibly because of climate change, Mitchell said. And "because there is more moisture around, the mummies have begun to disintegrate," he said. Ancient mummies Efforts to preserve the mummies are underway. The museum's researchers are measuring and adjusting the humidity, temperature and light in the room where the mummies are housed on a daily basis, Sepulveda said. The Chinchorro were a hunter-gatherer group of people who lived along the coast of modern-day Chile and Peru, and they mummified people from all levels of society. These measures could help preserve the Chinchorro mummies, which are at least 2,000 years older than Egyptian mummies. Radiocarbon dating puts the youngest mummies at 5050 B.C., making them the world's oldest man-made mummies, Mitchell said. (Some older human remains may have been mummified by natural processes.) "These aren't just kings, these are ordinary people," Mitchell said.

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Adorable pig blocks traffic in Maine, this week on The Feed! This week's most popular viral videos include a homemade luge track, a pig blocking traffic, an unskippable commercial, electrical wiring gone wrong, a fake Oscar winner and an incredibly talented archer.First up, winter weather has already dumped some serious snow. In some areas, enough to build a homemade luge track, like the one in this video from Joseph Colangelo.Jamie Smith captured this video of an adorable pig blocking traffic in Bradford, Maine. Warning: contains some NSFW language.GEICO Insurance is known for their humorous, quirky commercials. This extended cut of a 10 second commercial goes on for almost an entire minute. It's simply a dog eating a family's spaghetti dinner while they try to stay perfectly still, but it tickles the funny bone.Sometimes, when you don't know exactly how to solve a problem, it's best to hire professionals. AsDaniel Willey's sister and husband found out, electrical wiring is definitely one of those problems. Now, their hair dryer controls the lights in the room but doesn't actually blow out air.Mark David Christenson pulls off one heck of a prank in this video from NewMediaRockstars. He walks around Hollywood in a tuxedo with fake Oscar on the night of the Academy Awards. He then uses his fake achievement to get free movies, free drinks, free food, entrance to VIP parties and restricted areas at the actual awards -- even someone else's BMW!And, Destin, with the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay, introduces the world to Byron Ferguson, whom he calls the world's best archer. Mr. Ferguson puts his skill on display in this video, hitting a variety of seemingly impossible to hit moving targets -- the most impressive of which being an aspirin tablet.Want more of The Feed? Check out this playlist of every Feed ever!

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U.S. deciding whether to extend Obamacare enrollment Americans who have started enrolling for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act can still sign up, and the U.S. government is weighing whether to open a special enrollment period for those who missed Sunday's deadline, the health secretary said on Wednesday.So far, 11.4 million Americans have enrolled in private health insurance through the health reform law known as Obamacare during the open enrollment period that ended on Sunday, according to the White House. The Affordable Care Act requires most Americans to have health insurance or face a financial penalty. But some people may not realize they face a penalty for not having coverage until they file their tax returns in coming weeks. HHS will decide within the next two weeks whether to allow another special enrollment period for consumers, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell told reporters in response to a question about those consumers amid the looming April 15 tax-filing deadline. “We’re going to analyze it, we’re going to think about it, and we’ll be back. And we will be back quickly on it," she said at a news conference.Separately, Burwell said fewer than 150,000 people were "in line" as of Sunday to get health insurance coverage through the marketplace set up by the Affordable Care Act. They will have until Feb. 22 to complete their application, she said.Those applicants were in communication with the telephone call center for the federal exchange marketplace but could not complete their application before Sunday's deadline, according to HHS. They do not include people who had technical issues with the healthcare.gov website that prevented them from completing their enrollment, the department said.

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How can we stop losing airplanes? Of the many unanswered questions that linger one year after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on March 8, 2014, one puts the entire air travel industry in the hot seat: In today's high-tech, interconnected world, how can you lose a 240-foot-long jumbo jet? "The incident highlighted something that is very well known in aviation industry -- the technical limitations of the surveillance that air traffic controllers have to work with," said Cyriel Kronenburg, vice president of sales and marketing for air traffic surveillance company Aireon.Just as you lose cell phone service when you go from the city into the woods, ground control can lose track of planes as they venture over vast regions of the globe that lack radar towers, including the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed MH370 went down. "If you look at the technology of air traffic control, it is safe to say that not a lot has changed since 1940. We are still using radar as the primary means of seeing aircraft," he continued. "It's ironic: As a passenger you often have Wi-Fi onboard. Sometimes you actually have a better connection to the world than the pilot has." The key to preventing another MH370 is finding a better way to keep an eye on aircraft no matter how far they are from the nearest ground station. That's exactly what Aireon and another company, Rockwell Collins, are trying to do. Kronenburg admits his company wasn't trying to be altruistic when it started developing a system to track airplanes in near real-time from space. It wanted to sell a service to airlines that would help them save money. But in the wake of the Malaysia Airlines disaster, the plan took on a new level of importance. Air traffic controllers rely on radar towers on the ground to know a plane's location. But radar can't reach beyond about 200 nautical miles offshore, so planes on long haul trips over oceans or remote areas like Africa and the poles spend a lot of time outside radar range. To ensure aircraft remain at a safe distance from one another, controllers put them on set flight tracks, predetermined routes that keep them at least 80 or 100 miles apart. "In the North Atlantic, it can take an hour of extra flight time to take tracks, while direct routes between, say, London and Miami would be much faster," Kronenburg told CBS News. It would also save fuel -- and money. If you could keep an eye on planes as they travel across the three-quarters of the globe that radar can't reach, Aireon executives reckoned, you wouldn't have to rely on inefficient flight tracks.What if you tracked the planes from space, instead? Aireon partnered with satellite communications company Iridium, which was planning to replace the 72 satellites in its global network. Aireon essentially leased space on the satellites to hold receivers that could track the location of planes by a GPS-based successor to radar called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), which is being increasingly adopted across the aviation industry. ADS-B will be required in flights to and from the U.S. and Europe beginning in 2020, and is used in an estimated 90 percent of planes that do long-haul trips over the oceans. When the full satellite constellation is in place, "we will be able to trace every aircraft with ASD-B every eight seconds or so, including over Africa and the polar areas where there's currently no radar coverage," said Kronenburg. This amounts to a near real-time location tracking of any ASD-B-enabled aircraft. Aireon will sell the data to air traffic control customers via a monthly subscription. But in the case of an emergency such as the loss of contact with MH370, they will also offer it free of charge to any country in the world. "We will have this global dataset," he said. "It would be irresponsible to have the data and not do anything with it." Aireon will launch its first satellite later this year and plans to have the complete network in low Earth orbit in 2017.In the meantime, Rockwell Collins will be watching ASD-B from the ground -- along with radar, an automatic reporting standard called ADS-C, high-frequency data link and any other type of positioning data it can get its hands on. By pulling together "all the information that is available now and additional sources that may be available soon," explained Dave Poltorak, Rockwell Collins vice president of aviation and network services, they can create "the most complete picture possible" of where any plane is at any time, anywhere in the world. "In today's global aviation environment, no single source of data is sufficient to track aircraft globally," said Jeff Standerski, the company's senior vice president of information management services. "By merging multiple data sources, many of which airlines already receive, we can automatically select the right combination of data feeds to allow airlines to pinpoint an aircraft's location anywhere in the world, in the most economical way." Rockwell Collins, which already works with 125 airlines around the world, launched its ARINC MultiLink global flight tracking service Monday with half a dozen corporate customers. Poltorak described it as a "very affordable solution" for big and small airlines alike. A key part of the system will be the ability to send out alerts the moment a plane ceases to transmit the data it is expected to send.Part of what confounded air traffic controllers and search-and-rescue responders looking for MH370 was that the plane's beacon, which is supposed to indicate its location, had been mysteriously shut off. A report released Sunday found that the beacon's battery may have expired a full year before the flight left the ground. "A key piece of information we would normally rely on wasn't available to us because the beacon had been turned off," Simon Hill of Esri, a company that provided Geographic Information System (GIS) services to many of the agencies involved in the search for MH370, told CBS News. "We had one arm tied behind our back ... and had to do complex analysis we wouldn't normally have had to do" to figure out where the plane might have ended up. If a system like ARINC MultiLink had existed at the time, it could have sent a notification to Malaysia Airlines as soon as the first position report expected from the beacon failed to come through, putting officials on alert right away. Said David Poltorak, "More information could have made all the difference in the world."

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Drama as space station crew returns to Earth Three space station fliers -- the outgoing NASA commander and two Russian cosmonauts -- undocked and returned to Earth Wednesday, ending a 167-day stay in space with a nail-biting communications blackout that left the crew out of contact with Russian flight controllers during much of the trip home. The cause of the communications dropout was not immediately known, but during a brief exchange with recovery crews during the final stages of the descent, spacecraft commander Alexander Samokutyaev reported all three crew members were in good shape. The craft then proceeded to an on-target touchdown on the snowy steppe of Kazakhstan. Landing was expected around 10:08 p.m., but low clouds and icy fog blocked a clear view of the touchdown and it took another nine minutes or so before Russian recovery crews confirmed the descent module was on the ground and in a vertical orientation. An exact landing time was not immediately known. As always with Soyuz landings, Russian recovery forces and a team of U.S. and Russian flight surgeons were standing by near the landing zone to help the returning station fliers -- Samokutyaev, flight engineer Elena Serova and Barry "Butch" Wilmore -- out of the cramped descent module for initial medical checks and satellite calls home to friends and family. Carried to recliners near the descent module and quickly bundled in blankets, all three crew members appeared healthy and in good spirits, smiling and chatting with recovery crews before they were hustled away to a nearby medical tent for more extensive checks. Before leaving the space station, Wilmore said he looked forward to re-entry aboard the Soyuz. "It's not many jobs that you have the opportunity to return from work in a 17,000-mile-an-hour fireball," Wilmore, a fighter pilot with a shuttle mission to his credit, joked a few days ago. "This is one of those opportunities! To be honest, I'm not a thrill seeker by any means, but a unique experience like that, I do look forward to it, literally coming back in a fireball." At touchdown, Samokutyaev had logged a combined 331 days in space during two space flights. Wilmore's total, including one shuttle flight, stood at 178 days while Serova, completing her first mission, had logged 167 days aloft. All three planned to fly by helicopter to Karaganda before splitting up for separate trips home. Wilmore will board a NASA jet and fly back to Houston while Samokutyaev and Serova will head for home in Star City, near Moscow, for debriefing. Left behind aboard the space station were Expedition 43 commander Terry Virts, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. During a change-of-command ceremony Tuesday, Wilmore thanked his crewmates for a successful stay in space. "I can't say enough about our crew on board," he said. "What a blessing to have this group of people assembled together. The joy, the fun that we've had together, the work that we've done together has just truly been amazing." Virts thanked Wilmore for "the amazing job you've done as commander." "You have been a perfect example for us, you're exactly what a space station commander should be, and it's been a real blessing to have you," he said. Virts and his crewmates will have the lab to themselves until March 27, when another Soyuz, TMA-16M, carries veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko to the lab complex. Padalka, who has logged 711 days in space during four previous flights, plans to return to Earth in September, becoming the world's most experienced spaceman in the process and pushing his total time to 877 days. Kelly and Kornienko plan to spend nearly a full year aboard the laboratory, serving as test subjects for a variety of medical experiments to learn more about the long-term effects of the space environment, from prolonged weightlessness to higher levels of radiation. While four cosmonauts flew for a year or longer during the Mir era, Kelly and Kornienko will set a new duration record for the International Space Station while Kelly will set the endurance mark for U.S. astronauts. Asked if he might one day be interested in a year-long flight like Kelly's, Wilmore said he wasn't so sure. "My wife, my family would say go, but I've got a seven year old and a ten year old, and I've got to think about them as well," he said. "So, yeah, part of me says I'll go, but there'd be a lot of discussion and a lot of decisions made within my household before I could actually sign up for something like that." The Soyuz TMA-14M return to Earth began with undocking from the lab's Russian Poisk module at 6:44 p.m. After moving about 12 miles away from the lab complex, Samokutyaev monitored a computer-orchestrated deorbit rocket firing to drop the ship out of orbit. The "burn" was expected to last four minutes and 41 seconds, slowing the ship by about 286 mph, but communication was cut off about 90 seconds after ignition. Twenty-three minutes later, with the crew still out of contact with Russian flight controllers, the three modules making up the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft separated as planned and the central descent module, carrying the returning station fliers, oriented itself heat-shield-first before slamming into the discernible atmosphere about 62 miles above the south Atlantic Ocean. Intermittent communications were restored well after atmospheric entry began and Samokutyaev reported the crew was in good shape a few minutes before touchdown. There was no immediate word on what caused the communications blackout, but whatever it was, it had no apparent effect on the re-entry as the spacecraft made a near bulls-eye landing. Wilmore's crew helped kick off a busy year aboard the station as NASA carries out a major reconfiguration of the lab complex, installing new docking mechanisms, wiring and antennas needed by commercial crew capsules being built by Boeing and SpaceX. Seven U.S. spacewalks are planned, including three carried out earlier this month by Wilmore and Virts. The crew also accepted delivery of two Russian Progress cargo ships, a SpaceX Dragon supply capsule and carried out dozens of experiments. And along the way, Wilmore, a diehard SEC football fan, enjoyed watching the Tennessee Volunteers in games beamed up from mission control. But Wilmore's top priority was the science. "Much of what we have done, preparing the station for the future, that's a lot about what Expeditions 41 and 42 have been about," he said. "We've done some cutting-edge science, initial rodent research and dealing with zebra fish and various other animals up here, also capillary flow experiments, combustion science, vegetation growth. "And it's all looking to the future, to prepare ourselves to go farther, beyond low-Earth orbit into the far reaches, perhaps one day, of the solar system." While he looked forward to experiencing landing aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, Wilmore said he was particularly eager to see his family and friends. "That's one of the great things that NASA affords us with IP phone, email and other things that are pretty much real time up here, and it's to share the experience with those we care about and those we love," he said. "And that's been very special. To be able to do that face to face, I'm really looking forward to that."

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Is artificial intelligence threat looming? In the last several months, top tech heavyweights including Bill Gates and Elon Musk and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking warned of threats artificial intelligence (AI) could pose. Along with a collection of intellectuals who signed a Future of Life Institute letter in January, the three leading innovators support development of AI to benefit society, but are wary of the potential dangers. "They said this is one of the largest existential threats facing humanity. They worry that you're going to have robots that are more intelligent than humans, that will have their own volition and that will have hugely negative effects on society," CBS News contributor and NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson said Monday on "CBS This Morning." Robots like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Chappie from the recently released sci-fi film of the same name, employ their underestimated sentient capabilities to cause problems for their human counterparts -- Hollywood fantasies spurring real-life concerns. "The larger, long-term concern is that humanity will be shunted aside and that's what people think about, but they can't really conceptualize and can't really see exactly what's happening, but that's where angst comes from," Thompson said. Robots outside the big screen are not yet as sophisticated, but engineers are making big strides. Boston Dynamics developed a velociraptor-inspired robot that outran Usain Bolt; a 6-foot 2-inch, 330-pound humanoid named ATLAS; and a "cheetah" robot that uses less power than a microwave.Engineers at DeepMind, a British start-up acquired by Google, recently pitted its creation in an Atari-style battle of the minds against a human competitor -- and won. "It can't master Halo, but it can do the earlier video games," Thompson said. While the computer's game-playing success came from self-taught techniques, Demis Hassabis, AI intelligence researcher at DeepMind, said at a news conference in February: "We are decades away from any technology we need to worry about." Thompson would agree. "It's so far down the line, I don't think we can think about it logically right now," he said. Thompson did describe a not-so-far-fetched affect of intelligent robots -- the impact on the job market. "There will be big job problems. There will be a lot of people who will lose their jobs, who will be displaced. That's serious. That's something we're going to have to deal with," Thompson said. Instead of worrying about futuristic calamities, he believes scientists and engineers should direct their attention toward practical benefits for humans and minimize robots' disruptive capabilities. "We should be thinking about how we can integrate robots into our society in a way that makes the world more productive, more just, more moral, helps people in hospitals, and to the extent it displaces people, we figure out ways to help them get new jobs," Thompson said. "That's the problem we have to deal with right now." Films like "WALL-E" and "Big Hero 6" depict such possibilities -- from machines with an eye for the environment to portable health care bots."I think it's the medical ability, the ability for a robot to really take care of people, to take care of end-of-life, that which we're seeing a lot more of in Japan," Thompson said. "That's a real issue in society as we get older, 'How are you going to have enough health care workers to make the last year of life fulfilling and calm and beneficial?"

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Apple Watch, new MacBook unveiled; Apple joins forces with HBO Now The time has finally come for the Apple Watch.Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the wearable -- the company's first entirely new product line in five years -- Monday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco.After talking about a number of other updates, Cook called Apple Watch "the most personal device we have ever created" and "the most advanced timepiece ever created." And it will be by far the most expensive smartwatch ever created -- at least for the 18-karat solid gold version, which will be priced from $10,000 up to $17,000 depending on the size, color and band options. The basic version starts at $349 for the Sport, and between $549 and $1,049 for the midrange stainless steel model, depending on size and choice of watchband. Preorders for Apple Watch begin April 10 and they will ship starting April 24.Calling the new device a comprehensive health and fitness companion, Cook gave a brief summary of the health and fitness capabilities of Apple Watch, like tracking your movement throughout the day, giving you weekly reports and targets for next week, and reminding you when you've been sitting to long and ought to get up and move around. A video featuring model and women's health advocate Christy Turlington Burns showed her talking about how Apple Watch fitness apps help her train for races like an upcoming marathon. Developers have been creating thousands of new apps for the wearable, which is designed for quick bursts of use -- just a few seconds at a time. Cook ran through some of the various ways Apple Watch can connect to social media, such as the Facebook app, and described how it can be used to keep track of news right when it happens. VP of Technology Kevin Lynch, who has been overseeing the software on Apple Watch, demonstrated how you can press the crown to start Siri and get readouts on the watch face. He also showed how to pay with Apple Pay on the watch, to a round of applause. He answered a phone call from Bow Wow Meow on the watch on stage and ordered himself an Uber. Showing off how the watch can be used while traveling, Lynch illustrated how Passbook can get get you through airport security, and let you skip check in at a W Hotel, so you can go straight to your door and unlock it with your wrist. He also used an app from alarm.com to unlock the garage door at his home. Cook came back out on stage to explain the Apple Watch's app store section where you can see, browse and download apps, view how to videos, and learn about the watch even before you get one. Apple Watch will work in tandem with iPhone 5, 5C, 6 and 6 Plus running iOS 8.2, a software update which is available for download Monday. Apple Watch communicates with Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth so when your phone is out of Bluetooth range you can still get calls and notifications on the watch.Perhaps allaying concerns about the device's lifespan, Cook avowed that it would have "all day battery life across a range of activities. During a typical day you can expect 18 hours and at the end off the day there is a simple and elegant way to charge it that only Apple would come up with," he said. A magnetic charger clicks into place on the back. The aluminum Sport model will come in silver or space gray with colorful plasticized bands. Of course, Cook said, it's "not your usual run of the mill aluminum." The three "collections" are all based on the same curved-edge rectangular-screen design. The face will come in two sizes -- 42mm and 38mm.As previously reported, the Sport will start at $349 for the 38 mm face. It will cost $50 more for 42 mm model.The midrange collection (which the company refers to as simply "Apple Watch") will have the widest variety of bands -- three leather bands, sport bands, a linked bracelet and a metal mesh Milanese loop. It will have a stainless steel case (special stainless steel, naturally) with a traditional finish or in space black. The stainless model will run from $549 to $1,049 for the smaller size, depending on the selection of watch band. Again, it will be $50 more for 42 mm size. Apple Watch Edition is, Cook said, "unbelievably unique and very special." The cases are made from 18-karat solid yellow or rose gold and they come with "beautiful custom designed bands with details like elegant clasps and buckles also made of solid gold." They will be sold in "limited quantities" at select stores and will be priced from $10,000 to $17,000. Before unveiling the wearable, Cook made fans wait just a little longer as he took the stage and opened the event with a video of Apple's new store in China. "We've got a few more reasons for you to visit those stores today. And I'm going to start with Apple TV," he said. He invited HBO CEO Richard Plepler to introduce HBO Now, the cable network's streaming service, which will launch exclusively with Apple TV. Cook announced that the company is lowering the price of Apple TV to $69, from $99.He also highlighted the success thus far of the mobile payment system Apple Pay, which he said has seen the number of locations accepting it triple in the three months since its launch. Cook touted the fact that Coca Cola plans to have 100,000 vending machines that take Apple Pay by the end of the year as a sign that the NFC payment system is "forever changing the way we pay for things."Cook brought out Jeff Williams to talk about HealthKit and the new ResearchKit for medical research. The five few apps will launch immediately for breast cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma and Parkinson's, and starting next month the whole thing will launch -- and it will be open source, so it can be used on non-Apple devices. Then onto the MacBook. "We challenged ourselves to reinvent the notebook -- and we did it," said Cook. The new model-- powered by the 1.1 GHzIntel Core M -- weighs just two pounds. It's the lightest Mac ever, and the thinnest, 24 percent thinner than the MacBook Air.Apple's head of marketing Phil Schiller said this makes "a huge difference." It has a full sized keyboard that goes all the way to the edge of the all-metal body. Besides being larger, the keyboard is also thinner with larger, more stable keys for more accurate typing. The 12-inch Retina display is "truly is the best display we've ever built onto a Mac," with 2,304 by 1,440 pixel resolution -- a total of nearly 3.3 million pixels. It will also consume 30 percent less energy.The new "Force Touch" trackpad has force sensors to move beyond just touch-to-click and full click. The trackpad will respond differently to the force of your press, for instance fast-forwarding faster the harder you press while watching a video. And fans will love this: The MacBook is now fan-less, making it much quieter.The company says it will be able to deliver all-day battery life -- enough for 9 hours of wireless web surfing, or 10 hours of iTunes movie watching -- by creating contoured batteries to fit into the new slimmer body design. The contouring allows 35 percent more battery than the typical rectangular shape. The new MacBook will begin to ship April 10. The 8GB model will start at $1299, and $1,599 for 512 GB. MacBook Air will get faster processors and faster memory starting today. MacBook Pro will get the Force Touch trackpad and increased speeds, as well, including another hour of battery life, upping it to 10 hours. B But the main attraction at the event was the Apple Watch. First revealed in its prototype phase alongside the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus at Apple's September media event in Cupertino, Calif., the Apple Watch is the company's highly anticipated entrance into the wearables market. Leaks and rumors have fueled months of excitement for the smartwatch.It is also Apple's first foray into a new product market since it released the iPad in 2010. Then, the company sold an impressive sold 7.5 million tablets in the first six months. Reports have said that Apple ordered an initial run of between 5 and 6 million Apple Watches. That's more than the aggregate number of smartwatches shipped in all of 2014, which according to Strategy Analytics, totaled 4.6 million. CNET reports that Strategy Analytics predicted Apple will ship 15.4 million Apple Watch units in 2015, giving the company 54.8 percent of the global smartwatch market and bumping Samsung to number two. "Apple's bet is that 5 percent of Apple users that have iPhone will buy the watches," said CBS News business analyst Jill Schlesinger. "That would translate into 15 million people buying Apple Watches, or 55 percent of the smartwatch market." Other industry analysts are less optimistic, with sales projections ranging from 8 to 10 million units in their first nine months on the market.Given that the cheapest model will start at $349, the cost might be a hurdle for some consumers."This is a higher price point than other smartwatches," Schlesinger noted. "$300 is really what the market has; Apple is coming in at $349." Complete coverage of Apple on CNET.

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Amazon's Echo tries to put Siri in your home Last year, Amazon (AMZN) introduced Echo, a cylinder about the size of a thermos that includes a speaker, microphone and access to the cloud. It's essentially Siri -- the voice-assistance service on Apple (AAPL) phones -- for your home. Just ask Echo questions from anywhere in the room and it responds. Amazon is starting to ship to pre-order customers, and you can sign up to get on the waiting list now. At first blush, it seems like there are all sorts of things Echo can do. You can ask it for the weather, for example, or ask it a free-form question like "What is the capital of Texas?" Echo will even tell you a joke if you ask for one. And Echo is connected to Amazon, so it can play music from Amazon Prime Music. You can shop for and purchase items from Amazon by speaking, if you so desire. For brick-and-mortar shopping, you can add items to a shopping list, and Echo dutifully remembers them. When you leave the house, you can see your list on your mobile device.Unfortunately, most people who plunk down $100 for Echo (that's the price for Amazon Prime members; non-Prime customers pay $200) may grow bored with Echo fairly quickly.The central problem is that Echo, at least in its current state, just doesn't do very much. Some of the handiest queries you can throw at Echo include the weather and unit conversions, as in "how many tablespoons are in a cup?" It can also run a timer for you, another common kitchen task, as well as play a "flash briefing," which is a news report composed of the categories you are most interested in.But Echo's vocabulary is limited. Echo couldn't tell me an easily Googled fact like, "What's the world's largest cat." That's probably because Echo doesn't Google, or Bing, for that matter. If it can't get the answer in Wikipedia, you simply hear that the answer couldn't be found. And you'll hear that a lot. When you do stumble onto something Echo can tell you -- typically, a straightforward fact such as, "What is John F. Kennedy's birthday"-- it'll feel like a minor victory.Indeed, Siri and Google Now (on Android) are more helpful, and they're already in your pocket, begging the question of why you need Echo to begin with.For a device that promises to tech up your home, Echo isn't particularly flexible. Amazon originally pitched the product by saying you could name anything you wanted -- important, because it's that trigger word that the device is listening for when you ask a question. Unfortunately, that feature appears to have fallen by the wayside. Echo only responds to the names "Alexa" or "Amazon." Strangely, you can't even call it "Echo," which is actually its name.Echo also can't tie into any tech already in your home. It can't control your Nest, for example, or interface with Sonos. Those are some real missed opportunities, especially when you see how much fun it is to control music verbally with Echo.On the plus side, Echo hears you pretty accurately, even in a noisy room. The device also comes with a simple remote that you can use to control its music and as a handheld microphone to command Echo when you're too far away for it to hear you reliably. The remote smartly sticks to magnetic surfaces, like a refrigerator door. And initial setup is a snap -- it takes less than five minutes using just your phone. It's also kind of cool the way everything you do with Echo is captured in the mobile app, and you can let the app perform a Bing search for things you asked Echo (and Echo invariably couldn't answer).The bottom line is that Amazon Echo is a classic first-generation product. It takes a good idea, but fails to deliver on the product's potential.

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Rare tiger family caught on camera in Siberia Maybe male tigers aren't quite the loners they were thought to be. A new collection of camera trap photos from the Wildlife Conservation Society's Russia Program shows an adult male Amur tiger, also known as a Siberian tiger, leading his family through the snow in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve and Udegeiskaya Legenda National Park. It is the first time, scientists said, that a tiger dad was shown in a family setting, rather than their stereotypical role as a solitary cat. The male tiger is seen in a series of 21 photographs leading a female and three cubs through the snow. "We have collected hundreds of photos of tigers over the years, but this is the first time we have recorded a family together," Svetlana Soutyrina, a former WCS Russia employee and currently the Deputy Director for Scientific Programs at the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve. "These images confirm that male Amur tigers do participate in family life, at least occasionally, and we were lucky enough to capture one such moment." The photos resulted from a 2014-2015 project establishing a network of camera traps across both Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve and Udegeiskaya Legenda National Park (adjacent protected areas). The goal of the effort is to gain a better understanding about the number of endangered Amur tigers in the region.The exact population size of Amur tigers is difficult to estimate. Every ten years an ambitious, range-wide survey is conducted that involves hundreds of scientists, hunters and volunteers. The results of the most recent of these surveys, undertaken in February, will be released by this summer. In 2005, the last time a range-wide survey was conducted, it was estimated there were just 430 to 500 Amur tigers remaining in the wild. Along with the Amur tigers, camera traps in Russia have been used to track another endangered cat - the Amur leopard. The latest images showed that the world's rarest leopard has more than doubled its numbers in the past eight years.

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Climate change could be good news for gray whales The gray whale may turn out to be one of the winners in a warmer world. Until a few hundred years ago, gray whales thrived in the Atlantic ocean, but then mysteriously went extinct. A new study published Tuesday suggests that rising sea temperatures due to climate change could help them return to their old habitat once again. "Today, gray whales are found only in the Pacific. But our research indicates that they may move back into the Atlantic, where they could have transformative impacts on existing ecosystems," said Elizabeth Alter, lead author of the study and professor of biology at the Graduate Center and York College, City University of New York. In their paper in Molecular Ecology, scientists from the City University of New York, Potsdam University and the Wildlife Conservation Society used ancient DNA sequences to show that gray whales migrated between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans during warmer periods of the late Pleistocene and Holocene, when the Bering Strait was open and sea-ice was thinner. As Arctic sea-ice melts, sea levels rise and once-obstructed waterways open up, the thinking is that whales may move back to the Atlantic. Two recent sightings of gray whales in the Atlantic suggest this movement may already be starting. "Unfortunately, the complete disappearance of the Atlantic gray whale is the only instance of a whale extinction from an ocean basin during the historical era," said Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Ocean Giants Program and co-author of the study. "Time will tell if the recent few gray whale occurrences in the Atlantic become something more than the sighting of a lifetime."

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7-foot-long prehistoric lobster surprises scientists A 480-million-year-old fossil is giving paleontologists new insights into a sea-monster-like creature called an anomalocaridid, which is an ancestor of modern-day arthropods such as lobsters and scorpions, a new study finds. The 7-foot-long (2 meters) fossil reveals that the extinct giant had two sets of legs, not one, as researchers previously thought. It also had a filter-feeding system that likely allowed it to consume plankton, the researchers found. The researchers named the species Aegirocassis benmoulae after its discoverer, Mohamed Ben Moula, who found the fossil in southeastern Morocco in 2011. [See photos of anomalocaridid fossils and illustrations] The fossil was "dirty and dusty" when the study's lead researcher, Peter Van Roy, a paleontologist at Yale University, got it into the lab. Van Roy was cleaning the specimen when he realized it had two sets of flaps on each body segment -- indicating that the creature had two sets of legs. "I was totally shocked" to see the two sets of legs, Van Roy told Live Science. "For a week on end, I actually went back to the specimen every day just to look at it again, to make sure that I wasn't seeing things." The fossil has helped researchers place the anomalocaridid within the arthropod family tree because it gives researchers an unfettered view of the beast, whose anatomy has stumped paleontologists for ages, he said. Puzzling fossils Researchers first identified anomalocaridid fossils in the 19th century, but the creature is so odd-looking -- with a whale-like head, bristly appendages and a segmented body covered in flaps -- that some people thought the fossilized body parts belonged to several different animals, instead of just one, Van Roy said. Researchers finally pieced the animal together in a 1985 study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions B. But parts of its anatomy remained a mystery. "Anomalocaridids seemed to lack front limbs," Van Roy said. "Being an arthropod -- being a joint-legged animal -- and not having legs, it's kind of embarrassing." The new fossil helps show that anomalocaridids had two separate sets of flaps per body segment, the researchers said. The upper flap is analogous to the upper limb of modern arthropods, and the lower flaps resembled modified legs that were adapted for swimming. [Cambrian Creatures: Photos of Primitive Sea Life] "We didn't know these animals had two sets of flaps (an upper one and a lower one) because the fossils we had were all so flattened," said Greg Edgecombe, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the study. Van Roy and his colleagues looked back at older anomalocaridid fossils and found they did have the upper and lower flaps seen in the new fossil -- showing that researchers had overlooked these limbs in the past. The finding shows anomalocaridids arose very early in arthropod evolution, Van Roy said. Filter feeders The A. benmoulae fossil also shows that the animal was a filter feeder, an animal that strains plankton and other food from the water, much like a modern baleen whale or sponge. Other anomalocaridids from earlier eras were predators that caught prey with their spiny head limbs, the researchers said. The animal's great size suggests that the oceans had ample plankton during that time, Van Roy said. The findings are "fantastic," said Javier Ortega-Hernandez, a research fellow in paleobiology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who was not involved with the study. "A little over a decade ago, it would have been nearly laughable to think that almost 500-million-year-old arthropods could have reached more than 2 meters in size, and had an ecology similar to that of modern whales," Ortega-Hernandez wrote in an email. "Fortunately, we now have the fossils, and they almost speak for themselves." The study was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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Jupiter's moon Ganymede has vast underground ocean NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, monitoring subtle shifts in auroras flickering around Jupiter's moon Ganymede, has confirmed the presence of a deep salt-water ocean 95 miles below the icy crust of the solar system's largest moon, scientists said Thursday. Larger than the planet Mercury, Ganymede is one of four moons discovered by Galileo in 1610, easily visible in small telescope and large binoculars. The subsurface ocean confirmed by Hubble is believed to be at least 60 miles thick, containing more water than all of Earth's ocean's combined. As such, Ganymede joins a growing list of planets and moons in Earth's solar system, including Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, that are known to harbor vast reservoirs of liquid water. The latest findings using the Hubble Space Telescope build on earlier observations by NASA's Galileo spacecraft that showed Ganymede has a magnetic field generated by an iron core and two bands of aurora that are created when electrically charged particles captured in the field crash into the moon's extremely thin oxygen atmosphere. "If someone could be standing on Ganymede looking up into the night sky, it would appear as a red aurora to you, and it would be just visible even with the naked eye," said Joachim Saur, professor for geophysics at the University of Cologne in Germany. Saur used Hubble to make extended observations of Ganymede's aurora to measure subtle shifts in latitude caused by the influence of Jupiter's much more powerful magnetosphere.The lighthouse-like changes in Jupiter's magnetic field influence the auroral bands on Ganymede, causing them to rock up and down periodically. "Without an ocean, the aurora changes by six degrees within five hours," Saur said. "However, when there is a salty and thus electrically conductive ocean present, this ocean counterbalances Jupiter's magnetic field influence and reduces the rocking of the aurora to only two degrees." Looking at the aurora in ultraviolet light, Hubble was able to confirm that two-degree shift "exactly like predicted when there is an ocean present," Saur said. "So this confirms the existence of an ocean and simultaneously rules out the absence of an ocean." Heidi Hammel, a veteran Hubble observer and a senior executive with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, said Saur's observations represent "a really great example of using a remote sensing technique, using a telescope in orbit around the Earth, to study a moon that's in orbit around Jupiter and yet be able to make inferences about the interior of that moon just by looking at it from the outside." She said future, more powerful telescopes may be able to use similar techniques to confirm the presence of oceans on planets orbiting other stars. But in the near term, closer to home, the Hubble findings add to steadily mounting evidence that water is abundant in Earth's solar system. "Every observation that we make, every mission that we send to various places in the solar system is taking us one step further to finding that truly habitable environment, a water-rich environment in our solar system," Hammel said. "As far as we can tell, almost everywhere we look there's water. Water, water, everywhere in our solar system. "This result today is (more) solid evidence of the strong presence of water, and we will be certainly continuing to study Ganymede and learning more about the environment there."

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Milky Way may be 50 percent bigger than we thought Rings of stars thought to surround the Milky Way are actually part of it, according to new research, meaning the galaxy is bigger than previously believed. The findings extend the known width of the Milky Way from 100,000 light-years across to 150,000 light-years, said Yan Xu, a scientist at the National Astronomical Observatories of China and former visiting scientist at Rensselaer who was the lead author of a paper detailing the discovery in Astrophysical Journal. "Going into the research, astronomers had observed that the number of Milky Way stars diminishes rapidly about 50,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy, and then a ring of stars appears at about 60,000 light-years from the center," Xu said. "What we see now is that this apparent ring is actually a ripple in the disk. And it may well be that there are more ripples further out which we have not yet seen." An international team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Heidi Jo Newberg, came to this conclusion after revisiting astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and finding that the galactic disk of the Milky Way is actually contoured into several concentric ripples."In essence, what we found is that the disk of the Milky Way isn't just a disk of stars in a flat plane -- it's corrugated," said Newberg, a co-author of the paper. "It's very similar to what would happen if you throw a pebble into still water -- the waves will radiate out from the point of impact." But in this case, the pebble could be a dwarf galaxy passing through the disk. "It would gravitationally pull the disk up as it comes in, and pull the disk down as it goes through, and this will set up a wave pattern that propagates outward," she explained. "As it radiates outward from the sun, we see at least four ripples in the disk of the Milky Way."She added that although the data only looks at part of the galaxy, it can be assumed that the pattern continues throughout. The new research builds upon a 2002 paper in which Newberg established the existence of the "Monoceros Ring," an "over-density" of stars at the outer edges of the galaxy that bulges above the galactic plane.At the time, Newberg noticed evidence of another over-density of stars, between the Monoceros Ring and the sun, but was unable to investigate further. With more data available from the Sloan survey, researchers recently took another crack at it. "I wanted to figure out what that other over-density was," Newberg said. "These stars had previously been considered disk stars, but the stars don't match the density distribution you would expect for disk stars, so I thought, 'Well, maybe this could be another ring, or a highly disrupted dwarf galaxy.'" Newberg said the findings support recent research, including a theoretical finding that a dwarf galaxy or dark matter lump passing through the Milky Way would produce a similar rippling effect. In fact, the ripples might ultimately be used to measure the lumpiness of dark matter in our galaxy.

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Draft U.S. rules on commercial drones keep some limits on use The U.S. aviation regulator proposed rules on Sunday for commercial drone flights that would lift some restrictions but would still bar activities such as the delivery of packages and inspection of pipelines that have been eyed by companies as a potentially breakthrough use of the technology.The long-awaited draft rules from the Federal Aviation Administration would require unmanned aircraft pilots to obtain special pilot certificates, stay away from bystanders and fly only during the day. They limit flying speed to 100 miles per hour (160 kph) and the altitude to 500 feet (152 meters) above ground level.The rules also say pilots must remain in the line of sight of its radio-control drone, which could limit inspection of pipelines, crops, and electrical towers that are one of the major uses envisioned by companies. The FAA acknowledged the limitation but said those flights could be made possible with a secondary spotter working with the pilot of the drone. "This rule does not deal with beyond line of sight, but does allow for the use of a visual observer to augment line of sight by the operator of the unmanned aircraft," FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said in a conference call with reporters on Sunday.The draft rules, nearly 10 years in the making, still must undergo public comment and revision before becoming final, a process expected to take at least a year.If they survive in their current form, they would be unlikely to help Amazon.com in its quest to eventually deliver packages with unmanned drones, since they require an FAA-certified small drone pilot to fly the aircraft and keep it in line of sight at all times - factors not envisioned in the online retailer's plan.Huerta also said, "We don't consider or contemplate in this rule carrying packages outside of the aircraft itself."Amazon's vice president of global public policy, Paul Misener, said the proposal would bar the company's delivery drones in the United States. Misener also urged the FAA to address the needs of Amazon and its customers as it carried out its formal rulemaking process. "We are committed to realizing our vision ... and are prepared to deploy where we have the regulatory support we need," Misener said in an emailed statement. Other countries have taken a more permissive stance towards delivery drones. In September, logistics firm DHL said its use of drones to drop off packages to residents of a German island was the first such authorized flight in Europe."The United States cannot afford to lag behind other countries in technological innovation because of regulatory foot-dragging," U.S. Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, said in an emailed statement. RULES EXPECTED TO EVOLVEHuerta, who said the agency had tried to be "flexible" in writing the rules, said they set a framework and would evolve based on discussions with industry and technology developments.The rules continue current restrictions against filming of crowds by news organizations, but Huerta said he expected those procedures to be developed as part of discussions with news groups.Separately, President Barack Obama issued a memo outlining principles for government use of drones, covering such issues as privacy protections and oversight of federal drone use.The FAA's draft rules appeared less onerous in some aspects than the industry had been worried about. There had been concern, for example, that they would require drone operators to attend a flight-training school and obtain a certification similar to that of a manned aircraft pilot.Commercial drone operators would need to be at least 17 years old, pass an aeronautical knowledge test and be vetted by the Transportation Security Administration. But they would not need to undergo the medical tests or flight hours required of manned aircraft pilots."I am very pleased to see a much more reasonable approach to future regulation than many feared," said Brendan Schulman, a lawyer who works on drone issues at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel in New York.The proposal would benefit U.S. farmers and ranchers as it would enable them to scout fields more efficiently, said R.J. Karney, director of Congressional relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation.The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), also praised the draft. The group's president, Brian Wynne, called it a "good first step in an evolutionary process."But privacy advocates were concerned there were not enough limits on when law enforcement agencies would be permitted to use drones for surveillance. The proposal "allows the use of data gathered by domestic drones for any 'authorized purpose', which is not defined, leaving the door open to inappropriate drone use by federal agencies," said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel at the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, in an emailed statement.

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Google's "security princess" targets bugs, "boys club" rep The tech industry may finally be tackling its "boys club" reputation. At Google, one employee is a rising female star and has what may be the most unusual job title in the field, CBS News' John Blackstone reports. In the heartland of high-tech, where women often struggle to get to the top, Parisa Tabriz has become a role model. Even before dawn, Tabriz can be found pulling herself up a climbing wall at Google's Silicon Valley campus. At any other company she might be called "security manager," but at Google she's known as the "security princess.""It's a self-appointed title," she said. As princess, she presides over a team of 30 hackers. "Managing 30 hired hackers is fun, exciting. You get something new every day," Tabriz said. Although her team works for Google, they spend their days trying to break into Google's software. "I try to find bugs in Google's products and then remove those so that people who are criminals can't take advantage of them and then harm users," Tabriz said. The goal is to beat a growing number of criminal hackers at their own game. In recent years, hundreds of millions of people have been victimized by cyber-attacks on companies ranging from major retailers to financial institutions to tech giants to the entertainment industry. Even at some of the world's biggest companies, it takes just a single person and one wrong click for hackers to break in. "For better or worse, humans are the weak link in security," Tabriz said. To show how easy it is to be that weak link, she walked through the kind of devious email hackers often use.Even if a user tries to open the link, Tabriz said, "we actually prevented you from going to this malicious site." That's because of the protective software Tabriz and her team built into Google's Chrome browser. You could also argue Tabriz is doing another kind of hacking. "A majority of the people working in information security are guys, but I'm hoping to change that," she said. In Silicon Valley, women make up only 11 percent of executives and just 23 percent of the entire tech work force. When Tabriz addressed a conference of young hackers last year, part of her goal was to urge the girls there to stick with it. The attendance was 50-50 girls and boys, and all of the girls were as active in participating in the activities, as confident in answering questions. Tabriz told both girls and boys that you don't have to grow up building computers to master computer programming. "I'm someone who didn't learn how to program until my first year of college," she said. And, she said, you don't have to be a geek -- at least not all the time. She has had enough adventures to prove it, from meeting camels in Morocco to making gelato in Italy.On her days off, you are more likely to find her staring at a rock face than at a computer screen. In an industry dominated by men, Tabriz has succeeded by never being intimidated. "I have two brothers that I bullied ... so maybe, at an early age I knew that it was a bully or be bullied," she said. That's a lesson that is helping Google's security princess get to the top.

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HBO teams with Apple to launch standalone streaming service HBO is partnering with Apple to launch its standalone streaming service -- and you can get it in time for the new season of "Game of Thrones." The network announced Monday that HBO Now will be available to iPhone, iPad and Apple TV users beginning next month. The service will cost $14.99 per month, but those who sign up through April will get a free 30-day trial period. "We loved HBO," Tim Cook said at Monday's Apple event. "Over the years they have created groundbreaking shows, really become a part of our culture and shaped our culture." "All you need to get HBO Now is a broadband connection and an Apple device," HBO CEO Richard Plepler added, according to CNET. "You can watch on [the] big screen or iPhones and iPads. If you subscribe in April, you'll get the first month free and have it in time for the premiere of 'Game of Thrones.'" "Thrones" debuts its fifth season on April 12. A new trailer for the upcoming episodes was also unveiled Monday (which you can watch here).

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Phablets are huge: Use grew 148 percent in 2014 Phablets are big. New data released by Flurry Analytics Thursday shows that while tablet usage slowed 20 percent in 2014, phablets -- large-screened devices like the iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note that straddle the line between phone and tablet -- are up an astonishing 148 percent.Looking at the amount of time users spent in apps from January 2014 to January 2015, the Flurry report found that the rise in phablet use far outpaced any other mobile device, including medium (read: regular-sized) phones, which saw a 38 percent increase, and small tablets, which grew 14 percent. Phablets' meteoric growth made up for declines in both small phones and full-sized tablets like the iPad, which has been a weak spot for Apple. "While this is only one year's worth of data, the numbers are impressive, leading us to believe that the mobile industry has found a killer form factor, combining the tablet's bigger screen and ease of navigation with the true mobility of the phone," wrote Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf in a blog post. And what are people doing on their giant phones? Watching sports, apparently. Flurry found that while the use of sports apps on phones and tablets increased a solid 30 percent in 2014, it jumped 158 percent on phablets.

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Massive leatherback turtle to be released after rescue Officials say Yawkey, a nearly 500-pound leatherback sea turtle, is set to be released soon following its recovery at the South Carolina Aquarium. Yawkey was found washed up on shore Saturday at the Yawkey South Island Reserve in Georgetown. Hospital crews say the 4.5-foot-long turtle was pretty cold when they first checked it out, though blood tests indicated nothing out of the ordinary, and officials didn't find any external trauma.On Tuesday afternoon, officials gave an update on Yawkey saying the sea turtle was much healthier than when it first arrived. Yawkey is expected to head back into the ocean within a day or two, aquarium officials told CBS affiliate WCSC in South Carolina. Yawkey is the aquarium's largest rescue to date. It took seven people to move the juvenile turtle, which aquarium staff said weighed in at 475 pounds. Leatherbacks are among the largest reptiles in the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says incidental capture in fishing gear is a primary threat to them. Last year, rescuers came to the aid of an 800-pound leatherback entangled in fishing gear off the coast of New Jersey. The South Carolina Aquarium's Sea Turtle Rescue Program staff is working with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources to determine the best place to release Yawkey.Those at the hospital say this sort of find is a huge step in their research. "This is only one of maybe five or six leatherbacks that have been stranded alive in North America," said Kelly Thorvalson, manager of the Sea Turtle Rescue Program. "So for us to be able to possibly save it's life, and get it back out into the ocean, it's a really big deal and it's very exciting."

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Nine pint-sized galaxies found orbiting Milky Way Scientists have identified nine celestial objects they believe could be dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. This is the most found at one time, and the first new ones spotted in a decade. The team of researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom believe the galaxies could hold the key to understanding dark matter and shed light on how larger galaxies - which are collections of gas, dust and billions of stars held together by gravity - are formed. "The discovery of so many satellites in such a small area of the sky was completely unexpected," Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy's Sergey Koposov said. "I could not believe my eyes." Researchers with the Dark Energy Survey, headquartered at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and an independent group from the University of Cambridge jointly announced the discovery. Both teams used data taken during the first year of the Dark Energy Survey, a five-year effort to photograph a large portion of the southern sky in unprecedented detail.It mainly uses the Dark Energy Camera, which - at 570 megapixels - is the most powerful digital camera in the world, able to see galaxies up to 8 billion light-years from Earth. Built and tested at Fermilab, the camera is now mounted on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes Mountains in Chile."The Dark Energy Camera is a perfect instrument for discovering small satellite galaxies," said Keith Bechtol of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, who helped lead the Dark Energy Survey analysis. "It has a very large field of view to quickly map the sky and great sensitivity, enabling us to look at very faint stars. These results show just how powerful the camera is and how significant the data it collects will be for many years to come." Satellite galaxies are small, celestial objects that orbit larger galaxies, such as the Milky Way. They are difficult to spot and these new objects are no exception. They are a billion times dimmer than the Milky Way and a million times less massive. The closest of them is about 100,000 light-years away. Scientists have previously found more than two dozen satellite galaxies around our Milky Way. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the precursor to the Dark Energy Survey, discovered about half of them in 2005 and 2006.While more analysis is required to confirm any of the observed celestial objects as satellite galaxies, researchers believe their size, low surface brightness and significant distance from the center of the Milky Way makes them excellent candidates. And while they work to confirm these galaxies, scientists are hopeful that could find as many as 30 more of them in the future. These tiny galaxies often with fewer than 100 stars are considered crucial to understanding dark matter - a mysterious material that has mass but cannot be seen. It makes up a quarter of the universe, but so far experiments in space and on Earth have failed to confirm its presence.Dwarf satellite galaxies are considered dark matter-dominated, meaning they have much more mass in unseen matter than in stars. Among the theories is that dark matter might consist of particles that annihilate each other and release gamma rays."Dwarf satellites are the final frontier for testing our theories of dark matter," said Vasily Belokurov of the Institute of Astronomy, one of the study's co-authors. "We need to find them to determine whether our cosmological picture makes sense. Finding such a large group of satellites near the Magellanic Clouds was surprising, though, as earlier surveys of the southern sky found very little, so we were not expecting to stumble on such treasure."

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Wind could power one-third of the country by 2050 Wind power could provide more than a third of the nation's electricity by 2050. That is the bold projection from the U.S. Department of Energy's analysis of America's wind energy industry, released Thursday."We can do this and save you money by doing it," Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in response to the report. "This definitive report provides the wind industry with aggressive targets for the growth of wind energy in America, and we stand ready to meet them," he said. "It starts with getting common-sense policies in place, so we can double U.S. wind energy in the next five years." Already ranking first worldwide in wind power generation, the report found that the United States has increased the amount of electricity it gets from wind threefold since President Obama took office and predicts that further grown could go a long way toward combating climate change by taking a bite out of global greenhouse gas emissions.But make no mistake, wind turbines will not replace coal-fired power plants overnight. While it has grown, wind still only provides 4.5 percent of electricity in the United States. The report projects wind generation will reach 10 percent by 2020, 20 percent by 2030 and 35 percent by 2050. And while wind wouldn't be competitive without incentives, the report projects the cost of new wind power generation will be below the national average of new and existing fossil fuel plants within the next decade. "With continued investments in technology innovation, coupled with a transmission system that can provide access to high resource sites and facilitate grid integration reliably and cost-effectively, the scenario is an ambitious yet viable deployment scenario," the report said of the projections. Still, not everyone appears to buy into the rosy projections. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, said America would be better off increasing its dependence on nuclear power which already produces 20 percent of electricity and 60 percent of "our clean energy." "Relying on windmills to produce that electricity when nuclear power is available is the energy equivalent of going to war in sailboats when nuclear ships are available," he said in a statement. "After 22 years of billions of dollars in subsidies, wind still produces only 4 percent of our electricity and the windmills work only about 30 percent of the time." Until now, the growth of wind has been driven by federal investments and tax credits - which recently expired - that offered 2.3 cents for each kilowatt hour of power generated. In the future, it should also benefit from the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan. It calls for states to cut the amount of electricity generated from coal at least 30 percent by 2030, replacing it with renewables like wind and other cleaner sources of energy as part of an effort to reduce the country's emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. The report found that wind's expansion doesn't depend on "disruptive technology" like that of other renewables. But it does rely on more efficient systems including taller towers to take advantage of higher wind speeds, overall plant efficiency improvements through advanced controls and "improved plant designs enabled by deepened understanding of atmospheric physics." Without continued innovation, the report warned, the United States would lose its position as a leader of wind power. It could also miss out on a range of environmental and health benefits, the report found, including the ability to avoid 12.3 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050 or about a third of the global emissions produced annually, as well as $108 billion saved and 21,700 premature deaths avoided due to cleaner air.

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Google street view, now on Mt. Everest Forget the endurance training and oxygen deprivation. A veteran sherpa will lead you on a trek through the mountains of Nepal via Google Maps. Google expanded its Street View to include interactive images of Nepal's Khumbu region, from expansive views of the mountains and towns around Everest, to inside a monastery and a German bakery selling raisin bread and apple strudel.The company partnered with a veteran Nepalese sherpa who guided the company through capturing the sights of his home. "Our region is famous for being home to Everest, but it's also the home of the Sherpa community and has been for centuries," Apa Sherpa wrote on Google's blog. "The region has much more to offer than just the mountain. So last year, I guided the Google Maps team through my home region to collect Street View imagery that improves the map of our community. Now you can find Thame on the map and explore other communities nestled at the base of Everest, like Khumjung and Phortse." You can start your trek above 13,000 feet here.

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Best and brightest compete at elite science fair President Obama will meet Wednesday with some of the country's brightest young minds at the Intel Science Talent Search in Washington. Forty high school seniors vied for a $150,000 top prize for their experiments and discoveries, but their contributions may be priceless, reports CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews.The end of the competition was like the final round of a reality show, except that the finalists on the stage were not singers, they were scientists; America's very best high school scientists.Seventeen-year-old Andrew Jin of California won a $150,000 award for a method he developed to scan DNA for genetic mutations, including the genetic source of deadly diseases."Hepatitis, or influenza, or even HIV," Jin said.For years studies have said that American teenagers lag behind students in other countries in science and in math, but that's an average. These are America's elites. Almost every one of these finalists has invented a breakthrough idea.Kalia Firester developed a tomato plant resistant to pests, Jesse Zhang found a new way to predict the polar vortex and 17-year-old Kriti Lall invented a kit that removes arsenic -- which poisons almost 140 million people every year -- from water."In terms of saving people's lives and improving the quality of life, I think it really has huge implications and I'm really excited about that," Lall said.The competition and all the pageantry is part of the annual Science Talent Search, which for 17 years has been sponsored by the Intel Corporation. The company's President Renée James said she was amazed at this year's level of innovation, and hopeful about the future."These kids are thinking about things, not just little science projects, they're thinking about global issues and solving environment and medical -- I mean big world kinds of things," James said.On any other day these students are teenagers -- high school kids involved in sports teams, concerts and student government. But on that special night, they trade textbooks for tuxedos, experiments for evening gowns and are recognized for their research and ideas.America's got talent all right, in the form of a generation that will reinvent everything.

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Virtual reality headsets put you in the video game Thanks to the emergence of virtual reality headsets, video games are starting to feel much more realistic. Headsets took center stage this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where startups and tech giants were showing off new devices coming this year. With 3D content playing on a screen inches from your eyes, virtual reality headsets are designed to make players feel like they're in the game."The virtual guy in the world gestured toward me and I have to say I kind of flinched a little bit," said Eric Franklin, a senior editor at CNET.com after playing a game while wearing VR goggles. "It was that immersive." Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., said "adding VR as an option for game developers to create totally immersive experience will create more variety of game experiences."Sony showed off the latest version of its Morpheus headset and controllers that get your hands in the game. "It does let you kind of reach out into the world and directly interact with it," Richard Marks, a senior researcher at Sony Computer Entertainment, told CNET.com's Kara Tsuboi. Other big tech players are also helping to bring virtual reality to the mainstream. Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion last year, boosting confidence in the technology. Google is also getting into virtual reality with Cardboard. Its do-it-yourself kit folds into a headset. Insert your Android or iPhone, download some virtual reality apps and then you can view a virtual reality world. The HTC Vive has sensors that allow you to walk around an entire room without hitting a wall. "Even though I was blinded from it, a ghost wall would appear in my virtual experience," said Scott Stein, a senior editor with CNET.com Microsoft has its own headset: the Hololens, which projects 3D images over the real world.The new virtual reality headsets are expected to hit the market by the end of this year and into early 2016.

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Warm winter forces Iditarod dog sled race to move north Much of the start of the world's most famous sled dog race is covered in barren gravel, forcing Iditarod organizers to move the start farther north where there is snow and ice. A weather pattern that buried the eastern U.S. in snow has left Alaska fairly warm and relatively snow-free this winter. "If I have one more person say to me to move the Iditarod to Boston, I'm going to shake my head," said race director Mark Nordman. The nearly 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race starts Saturday with a ceremonial run through Anchorage. But the official start two days later has been moved 225 miles north, over the Alaska Range, to Fairbanks to avoid the area that left many mushers bruised and bloodied last year. Iditarod officials said the conditions are worse this year.The race's chief executive officer, Stan Hooley, called the conditions "pretty miserable." And last year was no picnic. A rescue helicopter picked up one musher last year after making it through the treacherous Dalzell Gorge only to hit his head on a tree stump. Knocked unconscious for at least an hour, Scott Janssen got back on the trail after waking up. But shortly after, he broke his ankle while walking on ice trying to corral a loose dog. "As an outdoorsman, to have to be rescued from the trail isn't a wonderful thing," Janssen said. This year's race will feature 78 mushers, including six former champions and 20 rookies. The winner is expected in Nome in about 10 days. Alaskans can thank the jet stream, which has been delivering warm air from the Pacific, said Dave Snider, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage. It is "allowing a lot of cold air to flow out of the Arctic into the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard, (but) we're locked into the warmer part of that pattern," he said.Anchorage gets about 60 inches of snow in a normal year, but only about 20 inches have fallen this year. The new route, which puts mushers on river ice for about 600 miles, could level the playing field. "Nobody has a plan," said Nordman, the race director. "You're not going to be stopping and putting your snow hook into the same tree you had the last 20 years. It's a whole new ballgame." Brent Sass of Eureka, Alaska, is running his third Iditarod, and is coming off a win in last month's 1,000-mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. "It doesn't hurt a guy like me who has only run the race a couple of times," he said of the route change. "For the guys that have run the race 20 times, it's not just the normal routine, so it might throw them off a little bit." Among the veterans in this year's race is defending champion Dallas Seavey, and 2014's bizarre finish will be remembered as much as the poor trail conditions. A sudden blizzard blew four-time champion and race leader Jeff King out of the race when he was about 25 miles from the finish line. Aliy Zirkle, who was solidly in second place, waited out the storm at the last checkpoint, 22 miles from Nome. She got back on the trail when Seavey blew through the checkpoint, but lost the race by two minutes, 22 seconds. It was her third straight runner-up finish with no wins. The route change eliminates the mountainous terrain and treacherous gorge, but it could present mushers with a whole new set of problems with a flat trail on unpredictable river ice. Plus, because it's an entirely new route, mushers say they can't rely much on information, even something as simple as the mileage between village checkpoints, provided by Iditarod officials. By removing the Alaska Range, mushers may assume it will be a very fast race, Seavey said. "Just because it's a flat trail does not mean your dogs can all of a sudden do 10 times what they've been able to do in the past," said Seavey, a two-time champion. "In the end, this race will not be won on tricks or gimmicks. It will be won on good dogmanship," he said.

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U.S. lawmaker sees fast-track trade power soon in step towards trade pact The chairman of a U.S. congressional committee responsible for trade said on Thursday he expects passage of legislation to fast-track trade deals soon, a vital step towards a Pacific trade pact covering a large chunk of the global economy. Negotiators from 12 Pacific nations hope to conclude talks on a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) within months, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said legislation known as trade promotion authority (TPA) should pass soon, easing a major hurdle."We're very close, we're in the 11th hour of negotiating the final pieces of TPA," Ryan, in Tokyo with a Congressional delegation for negotiations, told a news conference ahead of a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. "Once those negotiations are wrapped up we anticipate moving ... fairly quickly, and that's really this spring," he said.Ryan said he hoped the TPP could then be concluded soon after the TPA was passed. Dave Reichert, a lawmaker who is also a member of Ryan's committee, said they hoped to clinch a deal by the end of the year.The TPP pact would link 12 countries from the United States to Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and cover nearly 40 percent of the world economy. Disagreement on farm exports between the United States and Japan, the pact's two biggest economies, has hindered progress.Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari said on Wednesday concluding an agreement by Japan's initial target of as early as March was becoming difficult.Japan is keen on protecting sectors such as beef, sugar and dairy, although Japanese media has reported the government is considering concessions.Under U.S. trade promotion authority, the executive branch under President Barack Obama negotiates trade agreements with input from Congress. But once an agreement has been concluded, TPA means it cannot be changed by Congress and is subject to simple votes in the House and Senate.

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Would Apple buy Tesla? Reports say that when two separate investors asked Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier this week about the potential for the company to acquire electric carmaker Tesla, Cook shrugged it off with quips and pointed "non-answers." But that has only fueled speculation as to whether just such a deal could be possible, likely or already in the works. Leave it to Apple to create such buzz in the rumor mill with two simple sentences that it can steal the spotlight from the company's massive unveiling Monday of the new Apple Watch, a completely redesigned MacBook and an unprecedented partnership with HBO.What do we know? We know that Apple is working on something car-related, but we don't know exactly what. Following Silicon Valley sightings of "the Apple Car," people have guessed that they're making a driverless vehicle, or an electric one, or that they're testing some sort of in-car technology.The last idea seems like an obvious one, especially after Apple's announcement at its media event Monday that its CarPlay dashboard technology will be in 40 new models starting this year. So does the second one, given that Apple has poached a sizable amount of talent from Tesla's brain trust, and was sued for steeling experts from a Michigan battery manufacturer. And "people with knowledge of the matter" told Bloomberg in February that an electric car was on the way within five years. But that still leaves as many questions as it does answers. "I don't really know if they even want to build a car," Michael Santoli, senior columnist at Yahoo Finance, told CBS News. "I could see why they want to experiment. The car is the one place ... a media or gadget company doesn't reach you very easily."There's a lot of potential there, certainly. A recent Morgan Stanley report estimated that "if Apple were to corner just 25 percent of the value of the car, it would be equivalent to the entire smartphone industry today." But that doesn't have to mean making actual cars. That could be captured -- at least in part -- through in-vehicle technology, such as CarPlay. "People say in-car systems are out of date," said CNET senior editor Dan Ackerman. "Even in new cars." And Apple isn't alone in trying to cash in on bringing it up to speed; Google is working on it, too. For that, Apple wouldn't need to acquire Tesla, and in the grand scheme of things, Santoli said, "Apple isn't a company that tends to go out and spend a lot of money to import innovation."Not that it couldn't afford to. Tesla is valued at around $25 billion. Apple is sitting on more than $170 billion in cash. The bigger question is simply whether it would want to. "This is a story that keeps coming back," said Ackerman.And what about Tesla's take? "Is that a company that is looking to sell? That 's the other half of the equation," he added. "I don't know if Tim Cook would give [Elon Musk] six months or a year off to build a rocket ship."

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Who are happier, liberals or conservatives? Republicans may be running the show in Congress but it seems it's the Democrats who are happier. That's the finding from a wide-ranging study published in Science Thursday examining the happiness of conservatives and liberals. As part of the study, the researchers examined 432 million words in the Congressional Record over the past 18 years as well the "smiling behavior" of politicians in their publicly available photographs from 2013. Liberal members of Congress used a higher ratio of positive words, such as "interested," "excited," "enthusiastic" and "proud" to negative words, such as "afraid," "upset," "distressed" and "irritable." Those with more conservative beliefs, meanwhile, were less likely to be found beaming in their portraits. "Conservatism predicted significantly less intense facial action in the muscles around the eyes that indicates genuine happiness," the study found, adding that liberal politicians "smile more intensely and smile more genuinely." The study expanded beyond politicians to look more broadly at the happiness of conservatives and liberals. Examining 47,257 Twitter status updates from conservatives and liberals as well as 457 photos from LinkedIn, they found a similar pattern. "Together, our studies found that political liberals exhibited more frequent and intense happiness related behavior than political conservatives," the authors wrote. "Although the effects in these studies were small, they consistently revealed greater happiness-related behavior among liberals, rather than conservatives." The findings run contrary to earlier studies, mostly from surveys, in which conservatives reported they were happier than liberals. Scientists in those studies credited the upbeat nature of conservatives to their optimism, a sense they are in control of their lives and their "transcendent moral values." In the latest research, the authors said their findings reflected the limitations of self-reporting in the earlier work. But they also were careful to say that the expressions of happiness they found didn't mean one group of politicians or their supporters were any happier than another nor that this so-called happiness had anything to do with specific events, such as the tenure of President Obama. "We are quite explicit that we are not arguing that liberals or Democrats are happier - or especially that becoming one will make you happier," the University of California, Irvine's Peter Ditto, a co-author on the study, told CBS News. Rather, the authors suggest their findings "illuminate the contradictory ways that happiness differences can manifest across behavior and self reports.""In order to measure happiness correctly, we need to know what it is," Ditto said. "But what is happiness?Is it whether or not you say you are happy, or is it that happy is as happy does?What do you do if someone says they are happy but it doesn't reveal itself in their behavior?If someone says they are happy, are they really happy?Or is it possible that someone can state quite genuinely that they are happy, but not really be happy?" David Azerrad, the director of the Simon Center for Principles and Politics at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said it was absurd to even consider measuring happiness. "Are we meant to believe that tweets and pictures on LinkedIn are meant to capture something as profound as happiness? I don't think so," Azerrad said. "There are moments of happiness but that isn't the same thing as happiness. I don't think these things get quantified." Azerrad also took exception to the idea that you could judge whether someone was happy simply based on their political ideology, saying it is much more complicated and has to do with a range of other factors including income or their religion. "Can you imagine how George Washington or Abraham Lincoln would have reacted to a study like this?" he said. Still, other researchers said they did see value in the study. Oscar Holmes IV, an assistant professor of management at Rutgers who has examined political orientation and wellbeing, said the study design "was very clever and is among the first of my knowledge to look at systematically examining behavioral representations of happiness in relation to political orientation." Holmes said the latest study echoes his earlier work which found citizens in liberal countries tended to exhibit more happiness than those living in conservative nations. "Taken together, our research and this study lends more support toward the idea that liberal political orientations and policies have a more positive impact on the wellbeing of citizens than conservative political orientation and policies," he said.

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Mars has lost an Arctic Ocean's worth of water Scientists have known for a while that Mars was once wet, but just how wet remained a mystery. Now, NASA scientists for the first time have calculated that the Red Planet held more water than the Arctic Ocean. Using powerful telescopes to measure signatures of water in the planet's atmosphere, they estimated that in its youth, the planet would have probably had an ocean more than a mile deep covering almost half of its northern hemisphere. The scientists, writing in Thursday's issue of Science, said there would have been enough water to cover the entire surface of the planet in a liquid layer about 450 feet (137 meters) deep. "Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space," said Geronimo Villanueva, first author of the paper and a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars." NASA's Michael Mumma, the second author on the paper, said their work builds on the earlier findings from NASA's Curiosity rover that Mars was contained water 1.5 billion years ago, and extends the timeline further back on account of the new findings. "With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than previously thought, suggesting the planet might have been habitable for longer," Mumma said. To unravel the water mystery, NASA scientists used the world's three major infrared telescopes - one at the W.M. Keck Observatory, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and the Very Large Telescope - to study water molecules in the Martian atmosphere."From the ground, we can actually take a snapshot of the whole hemisphere of the planet on a single night," Mumma said.They looked at two slightly different forms of water - H2O and HDO, a naturally occurring variation in which one hydrogen is replaced by a heavier form, called deuterium. Unlike normal hydrogen, which is lost to space, the deuterium remains trapped in the Martian atmosphere. The team was especially interested in regions near the north and south poles because the polar ice caps are the planet's largest known reservoir of water. The water stored there is a window onto the history and evolution of Mars' water from the wet Noachian period, which ended about 3.7 billion years ago, to the present. "Now we know that Mars' water is much more enriched than terrestrial ocean water in the heavy form of water," Mumma said. "Immediately that permits us to estimate the amount of water Mars has lost since it was young." They found the atmospheric water in the near-polar region was enriched with deuterium, indicating that Mars had lost a tremendous quantity of water. Mars must have lost a volume of water 6.5 times larger than the present polar caps to provide such large enrichment.Based on their calculations, the scientists estimate that Mars has lost 87 percent of its ancient ocean to space and that the remaining 13 percent is likely stored in the polar ice caps.Taking into account the surface of Mars today, a likely location for this water would be in the Northern Plains, which has long been considered a good candidate because of the low-lying ground. An ancient ocean there would have covered about 20 percent of the planet's surface. By comparison, the Atlantic Ocean occupies 17 percent of Earth's surface. "This ocean had a maximum depth of around 5,000 feet or around one mile deep," Villanueva said. "It's deep - not as deep as the deepest points of our oceans, but comparable to the average depth of the Mediterranean Sea." By combining the Martian topography with the estimates of water loss, the researchers were able to simulate an ancient ocean on Mars and its escape into space.As Mars lost its atmosphere over billions of years, the researchers believe it lost the pressure and heat needed to keep water liquid. That caused the ocean to shrink and recede northward, with the remaining water condensing and freezing over the north and south poles and giving Mars the ice caps seen today.

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Winter was warmer than average despite brutal cold in East It may be hard to believe if you've been suffering through brutal winter weather in parts of the country, but temperatures across the United States this winter were above average, as the warmth in the West trumped the frigid cold in the East. The average temperature in the lower 48 states was 34.3°F, or 2.1°F above the 20th century average, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, making this the 19th warmest winter on record. The month of February bucked the trend, however, with an average temperature of 33.1°F, or 0.7°F below the 20th century average. The big chill in the East was borne out by the NOAA numbers, which showed many Northeastern states had their second coldest February on record. Several individual cities also endured record cold temperatures, while snowfall records were set in many places. Boston had its snowiest month in history, with 64.8 inches piling up in February.It couldn't have been a more different story out West, which was engulfed in record warm temperatures this winter. Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Washington each had their warmest winter on record. In California, the winter temperature beat the previous seasonal record that occurred just last year by 1.5°F. An additional five states, from the Rockies to West Coast, had one of their 10 warmest winters on record.It was also a drier-than-average winter nationwide, with precipitation totals 0.67 inches below average, making it the the 27th driest on record. Even with all that snow in places like Boston, no state had winter precipitation totals that ranked among the 10 wettest on record. The drier conditions have added to concerns about long-term drought in the West, which NOAA said has been compounded by a lack of mountain snowpack.California is in the midst of a historic drought that has dried up lakes, hit struggling farmers and prompted authorities to institute draconian water restrictions in some places. According to the March 3rd U.S. Drought Monitor report, 31.9 percent of the contiguous U.S. is in a drought, up from 28.4 percent at the beginning of February. Conditions worsened across parts of the Central Rockies, Southern Plains, and central Gulf Coast. Drought conditions improved in parts of the West, Southern Rockies, Midwest, and Ohio Valley. Abnormally dry conditions developed across central parts of Alaska. The NOAA report comes in the wake of 2014 temperatures which proved to be the hottest on record. These warming trends for the most part have been blamed on climate change, largely caused by the continued burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.

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​Can Uber's 1-million-jobs-for-women plan fix its image? Uber says it wants to go the distance to help solve the world's gender equity problems. The question is whether the effort will help consumers forget Uber's own gender issues. The ride-hailing app said it's working with the United Nations to create 1 million jobs for women as drivers on its platform by 2020. In a statement on its blog, Uber called the vision a way to accelerate economic opportunity for women.While that's a praiseworthy goal, the cynically minded critics may note that Uber has a lot at stake, given its own troubled track record with ensuring the safety of its female passengers and drivers. With sexual assault allegations against some drivers, including charges that led to Uber's ban in Delhi, the company has faced controversy over whether it provides suitable safety measures for workers and customers.In response to the criticism, Uber has created a panic button for passengers in India, although that isn't available outside that country. Its women drivers have also encountered problems, such as harassment by male passengers through its lost-and-found service, which allows them to track down drivers.Uber general counsel Salle Yoo told Buzzfeed that the company is committed to safety, describing it as Uber's "number-one priority." Yoo added, "We continue to learn and evolve ... women drivers bring a lot of real life experience. As a company, [listening to women is] where we should start." The plan could help women across the world achieve parity with men, providing a career path that offers flexibility and even higher pay than other industries might offer. One challenge, however, will be simply convincing women to sign up as drivers, given that the taxi industry is heavily dominated by men.In the U.S., the taxi industry is one of the country's most male-dominated industries. In New York City, a city where low car ownership means many residents rely on taxis, only 1 percent of its roughly 50,000 taxi drivers are women, according to a 2014 report from the city's Taxi & Limousine Commission.One reason for that gender divide is that taxi driving is a dangerous profession. Taxi drivers are more than 20 times more likely to be murdered while working than other workers, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.Some innovations are making it safer for all drivers, regardless of gender. Uber, for instance, takes cash out of the equation, with passengers paying via an account linked to their payment cards. By taking cash out of the cab, that might drive down the rate of violence incurred by drivers and help encourage more women to take the driver's seat. There's good money to be had, according to a recent report commissioned by Uber. Their drivers make an average of $19.04 an hour, even after paying the company's commission, compared with the average hourly wage of $12.90 for all U.S. taxi drivers.

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​Apple Watch knockoffs beat the real thing to market Apple Watch doesn't go on preorder for a month. And it won't ship for another two weeks after that. But you could snag a passable lookalike on the streets of China today -- or order one online.As the South China Morning Post reports, Shenzhen, China's commercial hotbed of high-tech counterfeits, is already teeming with smartwatches designed to look a whole lot like Apple's new wearable.Take, for example, the Zeaplus Watch G2. It has a square face with rounded corners (like Apple Watch), a touchscreen with customizable full color display (like Apple Watch), activity tracking (like Apple Watch). It's also Bluetooth compatible with iPhone and will give you call and message notifications. But unlike Apple Watch, it's available online now, and for the low, low price of just $69, versus Apple's $349 to $17,000 range.According to the company website, the next Zeaplus Watch, coming soon, boasts a SIM card slot so you can actually make and receive calls from the watch -- another advantage over the Apple Watch, which needs an iPhone to function. Alibaba.com is rife with other cheap options, many of which, like Zeaplus Watch, work with both iOS and Android. A few pull off a pretty decent facsimile of the Apple Watch design, if you squint a little.Wholesalers in China appear to be at the ready, so keep an eye out for knockoffs in a Chinatown near you.

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German archaeologists find world's oldest pretzel It's a good thing the baker overcooked them. Archaeologists say two pretzels unearthed during a dig on the banks of the Danube in the German city of Regensburg could be more than 300 years old - and very similar to the doughy product available in the state's famous beer halls today. The pretzels, along with three small cakes and a fragment of another pastry, were found as researchers were digging on the current location of the Museum of Bavarian History before it was built between 2012 and 2014.For generations, the site had been a bakery. And it appears these delicacies had been discarded because they were badly burned. But the positive result was that the charring kept them preserved for centuries."Imagine how the baker angrily threw away the charred pretzels and rolls, not realizing that they now provide significant insights into the past," said Mathias Pfeil, head of the Bavarian Office for Historical Conservation. Dorothee Ott, spokeswoman for the office, said Thursday the pretzel fragments went on display this week at the Regensburg Historical Museum.How do the pretzels of the 18th Century compare to today's? Taking into account about 15 percent shrinkage, Ott says, "It's a normal pretzel, maybe a little smaller than today." Perhaps it would go well with this recently discovered 170-year-old beer.

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​Chameleons' color-changing secret revealed The chameleon's uncanny ability to change color has long mystified people, but now the lizard's secret is out: Chameleons can rapidly change color by adjusting a layer of special cells nestled within their skin, a new study finds. Unlike other animals that change color, such as the squid and octopus, chameleons do not modify their hues by accumulating or dispersing pigments within their skin cells, the researchers found. Instead, the lizards rely on structural changes that affect how light reflects off their skin, the researchers said. To investigate how the reptiles change color, researchers studied five adult male, four adult female and four juvenile panther chameleons (Furcifer pardalis), a type of lizard that lives in Madagascar. The scientists found that the chameleons had two superposed thick layers of iridophore cells -- iridescent cells that have pigment and reflect light. [See photos of color-changing chameleons] The iridophore cells contain nanocrystals of different sizes, shapes and organizations, which are key to the chameleons' dramatic color shifts, the researchers said. The chameleons can change the structural arrangement of the upper cell layer by relaxing or exciting the skin, which leads to a change in color, they found. For instance, a male chameleon might be in a relaxed state when it's hanging out on a branch, and in an excited state when it sees a rival male. "When the skin is in the relaxed state, the nanocrystals in the iridophore cells are very close to each other -- hence, the cells specifically reflect short wavelengths, such as blue," said study senior author Michel Milinkovitch, a professor of genetics and evolution at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.On the other hand, when the skin becomes excited, the distance between neighboring nanocrystals increases, and each iridophore cell (which contains these nanocrystals) selectively reflects longer wavelengths, such as yellow, orange or red, Milinkovitch told Live Science in an email.But chameleons aren't always blue. The lizards' skin also contains yellow pigments, and blue mixed with yellow makes green, a "cryptic" color that camouflages them among trees and plants, Milinkovitch said. The "red skin hue does not change dramatically during excitation, but its brightness increases," the researchers wrote in the study. Furthermore, the researchers found a deeper and thicker layer of skin cells that reflect a large amount of near-infrared sunlight. While these cells do not appear to change color, it's possible that they help the chameleons reflect heat and stay cool, the researchers said. The researchers used a number of methods to study the iridophore cells. They filmed the chameleons' color changes using high-resolution videography and made numerical models that predict how the nanocrystals should reflect light. "The results are a perfect match with what we observe [in real life]," Milinkovitch said. The researchers also manipulated the cells by subjecting them to solutions of varying concentrations, which caused the cells to swell or shrink. These modifications changed the distances between the nanocrystals, and altered their visible colors, just as the researchers predicted they would, Milinkovitch said. However, only adult male chameleons change color, especially when they see a rival male chameleon they want to chase away, or a female to attract, Milinkovitch said. Females and young chameleons are dull-colored and have a very reduced upper layer of iridophore cells, he said. The findings may help engineers and physicists replicate the chameleon's color-changing capacities in new technology, such as appliances that eliminate reflection, Milinkovitch said. The study was published online Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

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Mega rocket booster put through fiery test Locked down in a massive test stand, an upgraded five-segment solid-fuel booster thundered to life in Utah Wednesday in a spectacular test firing, generating 3.6 million pounds of thrust during a two-minute "burn" that generated a 5,000-degree torrent of flame and a towering plume of exhaust visible for miles around. The shuttle-heritage booster, intended to help push NASA's planned Space Launch System super rocket out of the dense lower atmosphere, ignited with jarring rush of fire at 11:30 a.m. EDT (GMT-4), shattering the early morning calm at Orbital ATK's Promontory, Utah, manufacturing facility. Cheered on by Orbital ATK employees and NASA officials watching from a viewing area a safe distance away, the 177-foot-long 1.6-million-pound booster fired for a bit longer than two minutes as planned before exhausting its load of solid propellant. As the propellant burned away inside the rocket, television cameras showed nearby vegetation and rocks steaming in the radiated heat as a towering column of exhaust climbed into the sky. As the last of the propellant was consumed, a swing arm rotated into the smoking nozzle, injecting 31 tons of carbon dioxide into the body of the booster to quench any lingering flame and "to preserve the state it was in during the test," said a NASA spokeswoman. "This allows the team to get the best data on how it will perform during flight." In addition, nozzles facing the lower side of the booster began spraying 2,300 gallons of water per minute on the rocket's casing to lower temperatures from around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to just 300 degrees, preventing any heat-related damage to the structure. Space shuttles relied on two four-segment boosters to get of the launch pad while the huge SLS rocket will use two upgraded five-segment SRBs, each one generating 3.6 million pounds of thrust. The SLS first stage also will use four leftover space shuttle main engines burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellants. The test firing Wednesday marked the fourth ground test of the new five-segment booster and the first qualification motor, or QM, firing, testing the rocket's hydraulic steering system, fuel mixture, insulation performance and a redesigned nozzle. Some 531 channels of telemetry were recorded from hundreds of sensors."These motors have 25 percent more energy than the motors we used to get the shuttle off the ground," he said. "QM-1 is the first of two tests that will used to qualify the motors for flight. We're actually already building the pieces of the second qualification motor. This is a really exciting time for all of us." Engineers will tear the QM-1 booster apart to inspect its internal components and carry out an exhaustive review of data collected during the test firing to make sure the booster performed as expected. In the meantime, "it looked really clean, we're very excited," said Charles Precourt, a former space shuttle commander who now serves as Orbital ATK's vice president and general manager for propulsion systems. "It's a great result," he said. "You could feel the pressure coming off the motor, you could see the plume and watch the (nozzle steering system) vectoring. It all looked great. We'll be looking for the quick-look data, but a really nice result."

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Did Apple invent a new gold for its luxury watch? Gold investors have been positively giddy ever since Apple (AAPL) announced it planned to make a high-end watch with 18-karat gold casing. With Apple's sales might, the company could end up using as much as 30 percent of the world's annual gold production, some speculated. It turns out that Apple probably won't upend the world's gold supplies. The company has been creating custom blends of gold to make its watches tougher and more resistant to scratches. But those recipes may not call for as much gold as people think. Among the three Apple Watch collections Apple unveiled Monday, the priciest one, the high-end "Edition," costs between $10,000 and $17,000 and is made from custom alloys of rose or yellow 18-karat gold.What exactly is in that custom alloy? That's a mystery Internet sleuths were trying to solve this week. Apple's team of metallurgists has been busy tinkering with gold blends, and even filed a patent application in December for a new type ofblend that uses "as little gold as possible."Generally, 18-karat gold is 75 percent gold by mass, with the remaining 25 percent made of nickel, copper, zinc or other metals. Pure gold is too soft for jewelry -- and certainly for a watch -- so the other metals help make 18-karat gold more durable. Apple needed to find a way to make its 18-karat gold extremely tough. Its patent application describes an 18-karat metal matrix composite formed by blending gold and ceramic powders into a mixture that is compressed and then heated. The ceramic powders could take many forms, according to the patent, including diamond, garnet, sapphire powder, zirconia and tungsten carbide. The blend could change depending on the color or density desired.But is the gold described in Apple's patent the same gold blend used in its pricey Edition watch? The company did not return a request for comment. But it did post a video on its website saying that the Edition watch alloys include silver, copper and palladium. Apple doesn't say if other ceramic materials are also used. Apple's design guru, Jonathan Ive, explained in a Financial Times interview that the molecules in Apple gold are closer together, which creates more hardness than standard gold. That claim was met with some skepticism online. "Has Apple finally left a reality-based existence behind it?" asked Ars Technica. Over at Slate, Jordan Weissman suggested that the technology could mean that in Apple watches, gold makes up 75 percent of the mass but just 28 percent of the volume. In other words, when Apple pours the gold blend into a mold to form the watch's shell, the non-gold ingredients take up most of the space."Apple gets to use less gold per cubic centimeter and still call it 18-karat," Weissman wrote. "It gets to stretch its gold out further than, say, Rolex would, to make a watch this size and shape." Whatever's inside the gold, it's clear that for all its technological innovations, Apple still prizes a science that dates back thousands of years. "New Apple products give metallurgists street cred," gushed metals engineering group ASM International last fall.

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Bloomberg boosts funding of UK politics A company owned by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has almost doubled its political donations in the UK over the past four years, records of electoral donations show. Bloomberg TradeBook, a British-registered financial markets broker and research firm owned by U.S. financial information giant Bloomberg LP, gave money to all three traditional leading parties, an approach that is unusual in the UK.Since January 2011 the company has given 240,000 pounds ($369,000) to the Labour Party, 210,000 pounds to the Liberal Democrats and 100,000 pounds to the Conservatives. The company is one of the 10 biggest corporate donors to the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, the data shows, and among the top 50 to Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives. Including gifts in kind, TradeBook has almost doubled its political donations in the last four years to 640,704 pounds, compared with 369,567 pounds in the four years to 2010, when the last general election was held.  Bloomberg declined to comment.Britons vote this May in an election that polls indicate may yield no clear winner. Political funding is in the spotlight. The Conservative Party, dominant partner in the ruling coalition, has been criticized for relying on big donations from wealthy financiers. Labour, the main opposition party, receives much of its funding from unions. British law bars donations from foreigners or foreign corporations, but locally registered subsidiaries of foreign firms can donate.Spokespeople for the Labour and Conservative parties said the Bloomberg donations comply with Electoral Commission rules.A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats declined to comment.Funding the UK political system in a non-partisan way makes sense for Bloomberg, said one analyst."Bloomberg needs London almost as much as NYC and needs a successful financial system to be sustainable," said Claire Enders of research company Enders Analysis. But Alex Runswick at Unlock Democracy, a pressure group, said that corporate donations to multiple parties risks “reinforcing the perception that politicians listen to donors and lobbyists but not voters."Michael Bloomberg has been both a Democrat and Republican, but is now a registered independent. In 2013 and 2014, he gave almost $10.9 million to U.S. political parties, 95 percent of it to Democrats and liberal candidates and 5 percent to Republicans and conservatives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a U.S. watchdog.      Reuters is a competitor to Bloomberg LP. Both companies provide news, data and information to business and media clients. Parent company Thomson Reuters does not donate to political parties, according to a company spokesman. ACROSS PARTY LINESWhile companies in the United States often support multiple parties, such an approach is rare in Britain. Only two other firms have given substantial cash donations to all three main UK parties since 2011, the data shows.Canary Wharf Group, a property management firm, has given 173,265 pounds in total. “Canary Wharf Group aims (to support political parties) in an even-handed way, as part of promoting democracy and the political system,” a spokesman said.Peak Scientific, which manufactures generators used in scientific laboratories, has given 40,000 pounds in total, which it said was to support a campaign to keep Scotland within the UK.  Bloomberg, whose ex-wife is from England, has in the past called Britain his second home. The government gave him an honorary knighthood last October in recognition of his "prodigious entrepreneurial and philanthropic endeavors."   ($1 = 0.6568 pounds)

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NASA to study Earth and sun's explosive interplay NASA is launching four satellites in a $1.1 billion mission to study the high-speed interactions between Earth's magnetic field and the sun's to learn more about the mechanisms responsible for the titanic energy discharges that drive auroras and play havoc with satellite navigation, communications and power grids. The hard-to-study mechanism underlying space weather is known as magnetic reconnection, and it is the focus of NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale -- MMS -- mission scheduled for blastoff Thursday evening atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. Carrying the four MMS satellites stacked one atop the other in a protective nose cone fairing, the Atlas 5 was scheduled for takeoff from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:44 p.m. EDT (GMT-4). Forecasters predicted a 70 percent chance of acceptable weather. If all goes well, the satellites, built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will be released at five-minute intervals starting about one hour and 32 minutes after liftoff. Each 3,000-pound 12-foot-wide satellite features a suite of sensitive instruments and eight extendable antenna-like booms: four 197-foot-long radial wire booms and two 41-foot axial extensions for electric field sensors and two 16-foot booms carrying magnetometers. When fully deployed, each satellite's booms will sweep out an area the size of a baseball field as the spacecraft slowly rotate. All four satellites will be arranged in a pyramid formation, flying within about 6 miles of each other at their closest.The payoff will be a better understanding of how the sun's magnetic field and solar winds interact with Earth's magnetic field, how similar processes play out around black holes and across entire galaxies and possibly shed light on how magnetic fields can be used to help sustain nuclear fusion reactions for power generation on Earth. The key is a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection, the sudden annihilation of interacting magnetic fields that explosively heat and accelerate charged particles to extreme velocities. "Magnetic fields exist throughout the universe and energy is often released by magnetic reconnection," said Jim Burch, MMS principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute. "In the sun's super-heated corona, magnetic fields create spectacular loops. The energy stored in these structures can release, creating explosive solar flares and coronal mass ejections. "Intense fluxes of energetic particles and giant clouds of ionized gas and magnetic fields are ejected from the sun and travel throughout the solar system. When these clouds impact other magnetic fields such as the Earth's, similar reconnection events occur and these cause intense magnetic activity and the auroral lights." At the same time, he said, magnetic reconnection accelerates electrically charged particles "creating a hazard to space travelers and spacecraft, even disrupting ground-based power grids." While scientists know magnetic reconnection occurs, they do not yet understand how or why. But they believe the answer will be found in the so-called "diffusion region" where events rapidly occur over very short scales. "Adjacent magnetic fields pointing in opposite directions tend to annihilate each other, releasing their magnetic energy and heating the charged particles in the surrounding environment," Burch said. "In this process, magnetic reconnection, the magnetic fields are torn apart and reattached to their neighbors. "The mysterious part is what goes on inside the box labeled 'diffusion region?' With MMS, we'll be able to probe the diffusion region for the first time with measurements down to the smallest scale of the plasma, the electron scale, to solve this mystery.""It would be really hard to figure out what's going on in the football game," he said. "These are the problems that have been plaguing researchers studying magnetic reconnection, we can't see the smaller scales and we can't process the data fast enough to really understand what happens right at the place where magnetic reconnection happens. This makes it difficult to see, for example, how particles get accelerated and heated during magnetic reconnection events." The MMS satellites represent a scientific assault on magnetic reconnection. Each satellite, with its booms extended, covers a volume measuring 94 feet thick and 369 feet across. Each solar-powered spacecraft is equipped with 11 instruments made up of more than two-dozen sensors. Sensitive Global Positioning System navigation gear and thrusters will be used to maintain relative position and orientation. The satellites will fly in two highly elliptical orbits that first will carry them through the magnetic reconnection zone on the Earth's day side, where the solar wind, CMEs and flare debris crash into the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field. The MMS spacecraft then will raise the high point of their orbit to study reconnection on the back side of the planet where Earth's magnetic field tapers away in the solar wind. That is where it's particularly interesting, Burch said, "where you have reconnection in the tail of the magnetosphere. This is what produces the aurora and the currents that carry the energy of magnetic storms." Burch said a better understanding of magnetic reconnection also could provide insights into long-standing problems that have prevented engineers from sustaining nuclear fusion reactions using magnetic containment. "People for 20 years or more have been trying to harness nuclear fusion by trapping particles in a doughnut-shaped magnetic field and heating these up to something like 100 million degrees when fusion starts happening," Burch said. "If you could maintain that, we will have solved the energy crisis. Trouble is, it always crashes, these temperatures always come down (because of) magnetic reconnection." "There are practical applications once you understand how magnetic reconnection works," he said.

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​Planting a future for monarch butterflies A modest campaign to preserve a colorful but fragile creature is taking flight -- tight in photographer Joel Sartore's back yard:I have a confession to make.A few years ago, on a farm I own in eastern Nebraska, I took 44 acres out of production, on purpose.Though the new plantings helped stabilize the soil in steep areas the previous owners should have never have plowed in the first place, I took some heat for my little "prairie patches.""Must be nice to be able to leave money on the ground like that," one farmer told me. "What a WASTE."If only he knew what I really had in mind ... butterflies!You see, a few years ago I'd had a near-religious experience on a mountaintop in central Mexico. I'd arrived before dawn, on a rented mule. There, standing silently in the mist, were ancient fir trees so laden with Monarch butterflies their bows literally bent under the weight. Can you even imagine how many butterflies it takes to make a tree branch sag?When the sun finally came up, millions of brilliant orange spots burst from the trees, rising and falling and swirling around me like a great living blizzard.And for a few moments at least, I felt like I was five years old, and in heaven.But now we're told this wonder of the world may be coming to an end.How could this possibly happen?It's not terribly hard to figure out, actually. Monarchs only spend the winter in Mexico; then in March, they begin their yearly migration northward. They glide right up the center of our continent, where they need plenty of nectar-bearing plants to feed on, and especially milkweed to lay their eggs.With more acreage than ever planted to crops they can't eat, plus insecticide sprayed with abandon, it's no wonder the Monarchs have been flying steadily downhill.But of course there is hope.Come springtime, we can all embrace native plants. Think how lovely your home, office, school or garden would look with purple coneflower and asters, vervain and black-eyed Susans. And above all, think milkweed. That's the one plant that Monarch babies just can't live without.Find a nursery that sells the native plants that grow where you live, and get a variety of species that take turns blooming from April all the way through October.And if we don't manage to save the one insect we so adore? Now THAT will truly be the biggest waste of all.For more info:

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Space station trio to return after 167 days in orbit Three space station fliers -- the outgoing NASA commander and two Russian cosmonauts -- are returning to Earth Wednesday after more than five months in orbit, reducing the lab's crew to three in a brief lull before launch of three fresh crew members at the end of the month, including two who plan to spend nearly a full year aboard the outpost. Soyuz TMA-14M commander Alexander Samokutyaev, flanked on the left by flight engineer Elena Serova and on the right by shuttle veteran Barry "Butch" Wilmore, plan to detach their ferry craft from the space station's upper Poisk module Wednesday, at 6:44 p.m. EDT (GMT-4), to set the stage for re-entry and landing in Kazakhstan. After moving a safe distance away from the lab complex, Samokutyaev and Serova plan to monitor a four-minute 41-second deorbit rocket firing, starting at 9:16 p.m., slowing the ship by about 286 mph to drop the far side of its orbit deep into Earth's atmosphere. If all goes well, the capsule will settle to a jarring parachute and rocket-assisted touchdown near the town of Dzhezkazgan around 10:07:53 p.m. to close out a 167-day five-hour voyage that began with blastoff last Sept. 25 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Forecasters are predicting temperatures in the mid 20s with fresh snow in the wake of a passing frontal system. "It's not many jobs that you have the opportunity to return from work in a 17,000-mile-an-hour fireball," Wilmore, a fighter pilot with a shuttle mission to his credit, joked from orbit. "This is one of those opportunities! To be honest, I'm not a thrill seeker by any means, but a unique experience like that, I do look forward to it, literally coming back in a fireball." He said said he was particularly looking forward to landing when "the Soyuz capsule does a lot of rocking and rolling." "Eventually, the main chutes come out and, of course, you've got the separation of the (heat shield) on the bottom of the capsule and so many different events," he said. "And finally, the soft landing jets fire -- they're not so soft, I'm told -- and then, of course, the touchdown. "It's going to be wintertime in Kazakhstan, a lot of snow, so maybe we'll hit a nice fluffy snow bank. And as the hatch opens, that fresh air coming in, it'll be chilly, I look forward to that as well." As always with Soyuz landings, Russian recovery forces and a team of U.S. and Russian flight surgeons will be standing by near the landing zone to help the returning station fliers out of their cramped descent module for initial medical checks and satellite calls home to friends and family. At touchdown, Samokutyaev will have logged a combined 331 days in space during two space flights, Wilmore's total, including one shuttle flight, will stand at 178 days while Serova, completing her first mission, will have logged 167 days aloft. All three will fly by helicopter to Karaganda before splitting up for separate trips home. Wilmore will board a NASA jet and fly back to Houston while Samokutyaev and Serova head for home in Star City near Moscow for debriefing. Left behind in orbit will be Expedition 43 commander Terry Virts, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and Soyuz TMA-15M commander Anton Shkaplerov, who arrived at the station last November. "I can't say enough about our crew on board," Wilmore said during a change-of-command ceremony. "What a blessing to have this group of people assembled together. The joy, the fun that we've had together, the work that we've done together has just truly been amazing." Virts thanked Wilmore for "the amazing job you've done as commander." "You have been a perfect example for us, you're exactly what a space station commander should be, and it's been a real blessing to have you," he said. Virts and his crewmates will have the lab to themselves until March 27 when another Soyuz, TMA-16M, carries veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko to the lab complex. Padalka, who has logged 711 days in space during four previous flights, plans to return to Earth in September, becoming the world's most experienced spaceman in the process and pushing his total time to 877 days. Kelly and Kornienko plan to spend nearly a full year aboard the laboratory, serving as test subjects for a variety of medical experiments to learn more about the long-term effects of the space environment, from prolonged weightlessness to higher levels of radiation. While four cosmonauts flew for a year or longer during the Mir era, Kelly and Kornienko will set a new duration record for the International Space Station while Kelly will set the endurance mark for U.S. astronauts. Asked if he might one day be interested in a year-long flight like Kelly's, Wilmore said he wasn't so sure. "My wife, my family would say go, but I've got a seven year old and a ten year old, and I've got to think about them as well," he said. "So, yeah, part of me says I'll go, but there'd be a lot of discussion and a lot of decisions made within my household before I could actually sign up for something like that." He was busy enough during his five-and-a-half months aloft. Wilmore's crew helped kick off a busy year aboard the station as NASA carries out a major reconfiguration of the lab complex, installing new docking mechanisms, wiring and antennas needed by commercial crew capsules being built by Boeing and SpaceX. Seven U.S. spacewalks are planned, including three carried out earlier this month by Wilmore and Virts. The crew also accepted delivery of two Russian Progress cargo ships, a SpaceX Dragon supply capsule and carried out dozens of experiments. And along the way, Wilmore, a diehard SEC football fan, enjoyed watching the Tennessee Volunteers in games beamed up from mission control. But Wilmore's top priority was the science. "Much of what we have done, preparing the station for the future, that's a lot about what Expeditions 41 and 42 have been about," he said. "We've done some cutting-edge science, initial rodent research and dealing with zebra fish and various other animals up here, also capillary flow experiments, combustion science, vegetation growth. "And it's all looking to the future, to prepare ourselves to go farther, beyond low-Earth orbit into the far reaches, perhaps one day, of the solar system." While he looked forward to experiencing landing aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, Wilmore said he was particularly eager to see his family and friends. "That's one of the great things that NASA affords us with IP phone, email and other things that are pretty much real time up here, and it's to share the experience with those we care about and those we love," he said. "And that's been very special. To be able to do that face to face, I'm really looking forward to that."

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Oklahoma could be in danger of strong earthquakes For residents in Oklahoma, thousands of tiny earthquakes in the past five years have mostly been annoying. But a new study in Geophysical Research Letters suggests the future could be more dire, with the state possibly seeing larger temblors. It found that the same fault lines that have triggered earthquakes of between 3 and 4 magnitude are capable of producing events as high as 6. The study, led by Dan McNamara, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, found that there were 3,639 earthquakes in Oklahoma between late 2009 and 2014, which was 300 times more than in previous decades. Several of these earthquakes caused damage and many were felt, with over 153,000 individual reports for 474 separate earthquakes entered at the USGS. Many of those quakes occurred on average 3 miles underground along the Nemaha and Wilzetta fault zones, broad cracks in the Earth's crust in central Oklahoma that were originally formed 300 million years ago during what was then called the Pennsylvanian period or the late Carboniferous period. Until recently, the faults in Oklahoma had largely been quiet so the huge increase initially puzzled scientists.Several studies have traced the increase of earthquakes in Oklahoma as well as Ohio to the oil and gas industry's increased use of injection wells to bury huge amounts of wastewater underground. Resulting from enhanced hydrocarbon extraction operations, scientists believe the wastewater may increase the pressure on the rocks enough to cause seismic events. A paper in Science last year concluded that four of the highest-volume disposal wells in Oklahoma are likely behind 20 percent of hundreds of quakes since 2008 east of the Rocky Mountains. And a 2013 study in the journal Geology concluded that a 2011 earthquake in the tiny remote town of Prague - a 5.6 magnitude temblor that was the largest in Oklahoma's history - was due to the injection of wastewater underground.It, along with several others above 4, resulted in more than a dozen homes destroyed. "If a similar size earthquake were to occur in Oklahoma City or near Cushing oil facility, you can image there would be a lot more damage and higher costs," said McNamara. The study, which also identified several faults where earthquakes were occurring that had not been described before, will be used to develop a new earthquake-hazard map for Oklahoma that the USGS is planning to issue later this year. This will mark the first time the state's earthquake hazard maps will include suspected human-induced earthquakes, which will "aid in adapting building codes to ensure that structures can withstand more damaging earthquakes." The USGS study was primarily done to track the location of the earthquakes, which faults were activating and the regions with potential to produce large earthquakes. Still, the study acknowledged that a "fundamental change in the earthquake triggering process may have occurred" and, of particular concern, is "whether wastewater injection by the oil and gas industry is influencing seismic activity." "It's hard to image what else it would be," McNamara said. "Such an increase of seismic activity you only really see in volcanic regions or some place with very active tectonics like California or Alaska. It's very unprecedented to have such an increase in activity without something as crazy as a volcano happening and everyone knows there is no volcano happening in Oklahoma. If it's natural, it's unexplained." The oil and gas industry initially insisted that fracking played no part in the earthquakes. But it recently has come to accept it may be partly to blame and embraced several measures being tried in Oklahoma to better monitor the earthquakes. Among those is a "traffic light" system instituted in December 2013 where Oklahoma has the authority to shut down wastewater disposal wells when they appear to be linked to a flurry of earthquakes. It has twice take action, most recently shutting down several wells near the town of Cherokee after three magnitude 4 quakes occurred within a week.Katie Brown, a spokesperson for the oil and gas advocacy group Energy In Depth, also said state regulators and geological surveys have formed an induced seismicity working group, as part of the State Oil and Gas Regulatory Exchange, to share science and develop best practices. "Effectively addressing this issue requires a site by site approach, taking into account the fact that geological conditions are not uniform and similar wells in different areas may or may not have any nearby seismicity," she said by email. Beyond the increased monitoring, McNamara also said it would help for the industry itself to be more transparent, a challenge when much of the oil and gas data is proprietary."Working with the industry a little more would be great," he said. "If we could get some of the information on their fault system, any detail they have on injection volumes. More data sharing would help."

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Microsoft joins Google, Apple in fixing "FREAK" security flaw Microsoft has joined Apple and Google in fixing the "FREAK" security flaw that may have left millions of people vulnerable to hacking while surfing the web on their devices. There's no evidence so far that any hackers have exploited the weakness, which companies are now moving to repair. Researchers blame the problem on an old government policy, abandoned over a decade ago, which required U.S. software makers to use weaker security in encryption programs sold overseas due to national security concerns. The weaker software could make it easier for hackers to break the encryption that's supposed to prevent digital eavesdropping when a visitor types sensitive information into a website. "It's basically an old vulnerability that was able to make devices more susceptible to hacking because of lower encryption," CNET senior editor Jeff Bakalar told CBS News. "Hackers could in theory sort of force feed devices and browsers lower encryption and therefore leave those devices vulnerable for attack." Microsoft on Tuesday released a Windows update to address FREAK. Google said it put a fix in an update last week, while CNET reports that the iOS update Apple announced at its Apple Watch event Monday -- iOS 8.2 -- squashes the bug. A number of commercial websites are also taking corrective action after being notified privately in recent weeks, Matthew Green, a computer security researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told The Associated Press. Some experts said the problem shows the danger of government policies that require any weakening of encryption code, even to help fight crime or threats to national security. They warned those policies could inadvertently provide access to hackers.

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NASA identifies short circuit that downed Mars rover NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is expected to resume probing the Red Planet as early as next week, after it was stalled by a short circuit. Now, engineers have identified the short in the probe's drill. A fluctuation in current on Feb. 27 triggered a fault-protection response in the rover and halted the robot arm science operations. Work by instruments on the rover's mast along with environmental monitoring by its weather station have continued."Diagnostic testing this week has been productive in narrowing the possible sources of the transient short circuit," said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The most likely cause is an intermittent short in the percussion mechanism of the drill. After further analysis to confirm that diagnosis, we will be analyzing how to adjust for that in future drilling." The sample-collection drill on Curiosity's robotic arm uses both rotation and hammering to penetrate into Martian rocks and collect pulverized rock material that is analyzed by instruments inside the rover. After testing the drill's percussion action, engineers found that an apparent short circuit occurred for less than one one-hundredth of a second as it began 180 up-and-down repetitions. Though only fleeting, they concluded that it would have been enough to trigger the fault protection.The $2.5 billion Curiosity successfully landed in Gale Crater in August 2012. Since then, it's been slowly making its way to the base of Mount Sharp, a towering mound of layered terrain in the center of the crater, stopping frequently to examine interesting soil and rocks. The rover has already accomplished the mission's primary goals, detecting organic compounds like those necessary for life as it is known on Earth and showing Mars once featured a habitable environment. A major long-range objective is to climb up the lower slopes of Mount Sharp to reach a transition zone that might hold clues about what caused the red planet to dry out.

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Apple event Monday: What to expect and how to watch it Apple fans will be watching Monday as the company holds a major press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. The star of the show is expected to be the long-anticipated Apple Watch. A prototype of the coveted wearable device was first unveiled in September at the launch event for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. However, the watch remained in development, and a number of promised features such as health tracking reportedly have been changed or eliminated since then. The watch is expected to go on sale in April; Apple has not yet announced the exact date. It will be Apple's first major new product introduction since the iPad came out in 2010.Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed last fall that the Apple Watch will come in three models: the aluminum and glass Apple Watch Sport, starting at $349; a stainless steel model with interchangeable bands; and a top-of-the-line 18 karat gold version, whose price is still a closely guarded secret. Although the Apple wearable still has cachet, it is facing increased competition in the smartwatch category from brands like Samsung and the startup Pebble, whose Pebble Watch has been a hit on Kickstarter. If you want to watch Apple's event, you can see a live stream on Apple's website Monday beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific. The live stream can only be viewed on an Apple device running the following software: Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X 10.6.8 or later, or Safari on iOS 6.0 or later. To view on Apple TV you'll need a second- or third-generation device with software version 6.2 or later. No matter what kind of device you have, you can follow CNET's live blog of the Apple event here. "Preshow" coverage starts at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, 8:30 a.m. Pacific. (And don't forget, it's daylight saving time!)

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Two pet goldfish get surgeries totaling $750 For some people, the price of a pet's health is never too high: A team of veterinarians in Scotland performed a set of operations on pet goldfish that cost nearly $750. The team -- from Inglis Veterinary Hospital in Fife, Scotland -- removed the blind, cancerous eye of a goldfish named "Star." They also operated on another fish named "Nemo" to remove a lump. The complex operations, which cost $747 U.S. (500 British pounds), involved an exotic consultant surgeon, a vet to keep the fish anesthetized and a nurse to monitor their heart rates, hospital staff wrote in a Facebook post."This is a highly specialist field -- using anesthetic on a goldfish carries a very high risk --and I'm delighted for the owner that everything went OK and the owners are happy," said exotic-animals expert Brigitte Lord, according to the post. "The financial value of a goldfish may be quite small, but I think the fact that someone should have paid that much for an operation reflects the true value of the bond between pets and humans." [Photos: Giant Goldfish & Other Freaky Fish] Abby Gordon, 21, a student in Glasgow, won the fish, named Star, at a fairground stall 12 years ago, by throwing a Ping-Pong ball into a goldfish bowl. (Goldfish have an average lifespan of several decades with the proper diet and living conditions; the world's oldest goldfish lived a whopping 43 years, according to Guinness World Records.) Abby's mother, Jane Gordon, "didn't want Star to be lonely," the hospital staff said, so she bought another fish, Nemo. When a cancerous growth developed on Star's eye, the owners sought to have it surgically removed. During the operation, the vets listened to the fish's blood flow by pulsing it using Doppler ultrasound equipment. They kept the animal asleep by spraying it with a syringe containing oxygenated water and an anesthetic.After the procedure, the doctors kept Star in a bucket of oxygenated water. They held the fish's mouth open and gently moved it around for 8 minutes to mimic a swimming action, before the animal regained consciousness. Nemo, the fish that shares a tank with Star, had a relatively easy surgery to remove a lump. This isn't the first time a goldfish has gone under the knife. Last year, a goldfish named George underwent an operation to remove a life-threatening tumor from his head at the Lort Smith Animal Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. As for Star and Nemo, both fish are now "happily reunited," according to the veterinary hospital's Facebook post. Star is swimming around happily and is getting antibiotics, Jane Gordon said. "I know it seems like a lot of money to spend on an operation for a goldfish, but what was the alternative?" Gordon said, according to hospital staff. "I think [we have] a social responsibility to look after our pets, and I know my daughter would have been distraught if anything had happened to the goldfish," she added.

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NASA's Dawn spacecraft reaches dwarf planet Ceres NASA's Dawn spacecraft slipped into orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres Friday, setting the stage for unprecedented close-range observations of the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, an enigmatic world featuring heavily cratered terrain, smooth plains and mysterious bright spots. The solar-powered spacecraft, launched in 2007, was captured by Ceres' gravity at about 7:39 a.m. EST (GMT-5). An hour later, radio signals from Dawn confirmed the spacecraft was in good health as it moved into orbit and that's its low-thrust ion propulsion system was firing as expected. "Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director, said in a NASA statement. "Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres home." Launched in 2007, Dawn flew past Mars for a velocity boosting gravity assist in 2009 and entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta in July 2011. After 14 months of unprecedented exploration, The spacecraft's ion propulsion system fired up to boost the probe out of orbit and onto icy Ceres, a 900-million-mile voyage that took two-and-a-half years to complete. At the moment of capture, Dawn was about 38,000 miles from Ceres. Over the next several weeks, the spacecraft will slowly spiral inward, reaching an altitude of about 8,400 miles by April 23 to begin close-range science operations. By the end of the year, it should be orbiting at an altitude of just 235 miles, a bit lower than the International Space Station orbits Earth. Unlike more typical planetary missions that use chemical rockets requiring make-or-break maneuvers to achieve orbit or descend to the surface, Dawn's arrival at Ceres was a much more sedate affair, thanks to its low-thrust ion engine and Newton's law of gravity."If you had been in space watching the event ... it would not have looked much different from the 1,885 days of ion thrust that had preceded it," Rayman said in a blog posting. "The spacecraft was perched atop its blue-green pillar of xenon ions, patiently changing its course, as it does for so much of quiet cruise." The ion propulsion system uses electricity generated by two huge solar panels to accelerate xenon ions, imparting a gentle push that, over many months, can boost the spacecraft to enormous velocities. "In this phase of the mission, the engine expends only a quarter of a pound (of xenon fuel) per day, or the equivalent of about 2.5 fluid ounces," Rayman wrote. "So although the thrust is very efficient, it is also very gentle. If you hold a single sheet of paper in your hand, it will push on your hand harder than the ion engine pushes on the spacecraft at maximum thrust." At the current throttle setting, he said, it would take Dawn "almost 11 days to accelerate from zero to 60 mph." "That may not evoke the concept of a drag racer," he added. "But in the zero-gravity, frictionless conditions of spaceflight, the effect of this whisper-like thrust can build up. Instead of thrusting for 11 days, if we thrust for a month, or a year, or as Dawn already has, for more than five years, we can achieve fantastically high velocity. Ion propulsion delivers acceleration with patience." As a result, Dawn's arrival at Ceres was a decidedly low-key affair. There was no question the spacecraft would be captured by the dwarf planet's gravity, thanks to the months of thrusting it took to get to this point. "So the flight team was not tense. They had no need to observe it or make a spectacle out of it," Rayman wrote. "The drama is not in whether the mission will succeed or fail, in whether a single glitch could cause a catastrophic loss, in whether even a tiny mistake could spell doom. Rather, the drama is in the opportunity to unveil the wonderful secrets of a fascinating relict from the dawn of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago." Dawn, the centerpiece of a $473 million mission, is the first spacecraft to orbit more than one body, the first to visit a dwarf planet -- Ceres -- and the first operational science probe to rely on ion propulsion. Discovered in 1801, Ceres was the first -- and largest -- body ever found in what is now known as the asteroid belt, a heavily cratered, roughly spherical world measuring 606 by 565 miles. "One of the first things you notice is how round Ceres is," Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator, said Monday. "And Ceres' roundness is one of its planetary characteristics. We also know that Ceres is much lighter than the rocky planets and so we know it retained a lot of water and light volatile elements that were present in the solar nebula when Ceres was formed. In contrast, bodies like the moon and Vesta suffered melting from major impacts that caused the water and other light elements to boil away, "leaving them dry and rocky," Raymond said. "One of the prime motivations of the Dawn mission is to examine these building blocks of the planets, Vesta and Ceres, which are two intact proto-planets from the very dawn of the solar system," she said. "They're literally fossils that we can investigate to really understand the processes that were going on at that time." One major mystery is what might be the source of two brilliant spots of light seen in a crater on Ceres during Dawn's approach. "Suffice it to say, these spots were extremely surprising to the team, and they have been puzzling to everybody who's seen them," Raymond said Monday. "The team is really, really exited about this feature because it is unique in the solar system." The bright spots presumably are reflected sunlight, possibly from ice or salt deposits that may have been uncovered by a recent impact. Other, less likely, scenarios include the action of ultra-low temperature "cryovolcanism." But for now, no one knows. And given their unusual brightness, interest is high. "We will be revealing its true nature as we get closer and closer to the surface," Raymond said. "So the mystery will be solved, but it is one that's got us on the edge of our seats."

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Mystery solved! #TheDress is blue and black This might not make you feel any better if you're staunchly in the white/gold camp, but a U.K. retailer has come out on Twitter to confirm that the dress that's blowing up the Internet is, in fact, blue and black.Roman Originals posted an image of the Lace Bodycon Dress on Twitter early Friday, affirming that it is blue with black lace, not white with gold lace as about half of the Internet-connected world -- including actress Anna Kendrick -- is convinced it is. The controversy over "The Dress" began on a Tumblr page where a user asked others to help her decide the true color of the dress. The debate dominated online discussion. It racked up more than 20 million views on Buzzfeed, became the number one trend on Twitter and drew a deep divide.The dress is available on the Roman website for $77. It also comes in white -- with black lace.

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U.S., Cuba to meet February 27; senators see path for end to embargo The United States and Cuba will hold a second round of talks in Washington nest week aimed at restoring diplomatic relations, the State Department said on Tuesday, as U.S. Democratic senators visiting Havana said there may be enough support among Republicans to lift a trade embargo on Cuba."The talks will be held on the 27th (of February) here at the State Department," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a daily briefing for reporters.The sides held historic negotiations in Havana last month and the next round is seen by U.S. officials as critical to fleshing out details on re-establishing ties. In particular, the United States wants to reopen the U.S. embassy in Havana before Cuba is officially removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. It also wants travel restrictions on U.S. diplomatic staff in Cuba lifted.Cuba made clear in last month's talks that it first wants to be removed from the terrorism list and wants Washington to halt support for Cuban political dissidents, a step the United States has firmly rejected.The two countries agreed on Dec. 17 to begin the process of restoring ties after more than five decades of hostility. U.S. President Barack Obama has already started to lift barriers to trade and travel.While renewing diplomatic relations could happen quickly, the process to normalize, including removing the U.S. trade embargo, will take far longer.Republican and Democratic senators have introduced two separate bills to lift travel restrictions on Americans going to Cuba and to repeal the 53-year-old embargo.Although both bills face serious opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives, they do have some Republican support from legislators such as Senator Jeff Flake, lead sponsor of the travel bill.Democratic senators Claire McCaskill, Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar concluded a four-day visit to Cuba on Tuesday and said they were optimistic about building bipartisan support for an end to the embargo.McCaskill said largely Republican agricultural interests in the Midwest supported lifting the embargo as "they really want to sell rice down here.""So it is the business community and agricultural community who I think might have the most influence on helping us make this effort more bipartisan," she said.Advocates for ending the embargo need 60 of 100 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House, where there are pockets of strong, mostly Republican opposition to Obama's new Cuba policy.But McCaskill said opposition to other bills has been overcome when House Speaker John Boehner has allowed the entire House to vote on them."This could be one of those times, especially if the Chamber of Commerce and the commodities groups and the Farm Bureaus of the world really start putting political pressure on their own party," McCaskill said.The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has long opposed the U.S. trade embargo as a violation of the principle that government should not impede free enterprise, also a tenet of the Republican Party.

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Third successful spacewalk after water leak concern Astronauts Terry Virts and space station commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore ventured back outside Sunday for their third spacewalk in eight days to complete initial preparations for upcoming dockings by commercially developed Boeing and SpaceX crew ferry ships. When the spacewalk ended, Virts took a moment to mention the 50th anniversaries of the first Russian and U.S. spacewalks by cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, on March 18, 1965, and Ed White, on June 3. White's flight, aboard the Gemini 4 capsule, was the first to be managed from the mission control center at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're coming up on some pretty amazing anniversary milestones this year," Virts said. "It's amazing it's been 50 years, and to see how far we've come since the very first steps outside to being able to do six-plus hours of work like we do nowadays (is) truly amazing. "It's going to be an eventful next few months celebrating these milestones," he said. "Hopefully, the next 50 years will be even more exiting and we'll go even farther." Floating in the space station's Quest airlock compartment, Virts and Wilmore switched their spacesuits to battery power at 6:52 a.m. EST (GMT-5) to officially begin EVA-31, the 187th spacewalk devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began in 1998 and the third of seven U.S. excursions planned for 2015. Running ahead of schedule throughout the day, the spacewalkers mounted antenna booms on both sides of the station's long solar power truss, installed laser reflectors needed for new navigation systems and ran about 400 feet of cabling to connect each set of antennas to a power and data patch panel at the Destiny laboratory module. The equipment is part of new Common Communications for Visiting Vehicles, or C2V2, equipment that will be used for communications and navigation as Boeing CST-100 and SpaceX Dragon crew capsules approach and depart the International Space Station starting in 2017. "You guys have done an outstanding job," veteran station astronaut and spacewalker Sunita Williams radioed from mission control. "Even for two shuttle pilots." While six-and-a-half-hours was budgeted for the spacewalk, Wilmore and Virts finished their tasks nearly a full hour ahead of schedule, closing out a 5-hour 38-minute excursion at 12:30 p.m. when they began repressurizing the Quest airlock. A few minutes later, Virts reported a small amount of free water floating in his space helmet, slightly less than a water intrusion noted after his previous spacewalk Wednesday. "I'm having the same issue that I had the last time as far as water in the helmet," he said. "It's not a big deal, just a small film on the visor." He said he could not feel any dampness in a water absorption pad at the back of his helmet and flight controllers did not order any major changes to the crew's post-spacewalk procedures. Engineers believe the water noted Wednesday and Sunday is caused by condensation in the suit's cooling system after airlock repressurization. It does not pose any danger. The spacewalks have kicked off the most extensive station reconfiguration since the shuttle fleet was retired in 2011 with seven U.S. EVAs planned this year, installation of two new docking mechanisms and the relocation of a storage module and a docking port extension. During spacewalks a week ago Saturday and last Wednesday, Virts and Wilmore installed 340 feet of cabling to provide power and route data to and from new docking mechanisms, known as International Docking Adapters, or IDAs. They also made preparations for robotically moving a storage compartment, known as the Permanent Multipurpose Module, or PMM, from the Unity module's Earth-facing port to the forward port on the nearby Tranquility module this summer. A docking port extension known as Pressurized Mating Adaptor No. 3, or PMA-3, then will be moved from Tranquility's outboard port to the space-facing port of the forward Harmony module. The first IDA, scheduled for launch this summer aboard a Dragon cargo ship, will be installed on the PMA-2 extension attached to Harmony's forward port where shuttles once docked. The other IDA will be launched in December and attached to PMA-3 atop Harmony. Boeing and SpaceX crew ferry craft will be able to dock at either port. After the Permanent Multipurpose Module is attached to Tranquility, unpiloted cargo ships will be able to berth at the Earth-facing ports of Harmony and the Unity module.

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Did climate change cause the Syrian civil war? Climate change sparked a historic drought in Syria that contributed to the long-running civil war in the country, according to new research out Monday. In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists laid out a case that the drought triggered a series of events that started with 1.5 million impoverished farmers being forced off their land. They headed to cities, already overburden with Iraqi refugees, where they set up illegal settlements. These became havens for unemployment, crime and eventually political uprisings over government indifference that led to the war. "There was a huge population shock," Colin Kelley, a climatologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the lead author on the study, told CBS News. "It's difficult to quantify the relative importance of all the factors involved," he said. "But what we are trying to say is that climate change made the recent drought more severe. Then, the drought had a catalytic effect. It kind of played on the vulnerability that already existed." He was careful not to suggest the drought alone was behind the conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced millions since it started in March 2011 as part of the Arab Spring uprising. Using existing studies and their own research, the authors showed that since 1900, the area has undergone warming of 1 to 1.2 degrees Centigrade (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit), and about a 10 percent reduction in wet-season precipitation. They found it matched models of human-influenced global warming, and thus could not be attributed to natural variability. Global warming, the researchers found, weakened wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean, reducing precipitation during the usual November-April wet season. The higher temperatures also have increased evaporation of moisture from soils during the usually hot summers. Together, these factors caused a series of droughts in the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s that culminated with the worst on record from 2006 to 2010. "By February 2010, the price of livestock feed had increased by three fourths and the drought nearly obliterated all herds," the researchers wrote. "There was a dramatic increase in nutritional-related diseases among children in the northeast provinces, and enrollment in schools dropped by as much as 80 percent as families left the region." The findings build on work last year from Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick whose paper in American Meteorological Society journal Weather, Climate, and Society found that water shortages and climatic conditions played role in the economic conditions that preceded the war. And like PNAS paper, Gleick argued there were multiple factors behind the conflict "including long-standing political, religious, and social ideological disputes; economic dislocations from both global and regional factors; and worsening environmental conditions." Gleick said the latest paper and his demonstrate the potential threats of climate change, which scientists project will only worsen droughts, bring increased flooding and cause rising sea levels that will swamp island nations and coastal cities in the decades ahead. "It adds growing evidence to the role that water problems can play in disrupting economic and social stability and contribute to conflict," he said in an email interview.Until now, scientists had mostly seen the disruptive role of climate change in the historical record.Examining such things as tree rings, they have found proof that changes in climate have been linked to the fall of civilizations, including the decline of the Anasazi, or Ancient Pueblo Peoples, in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century. It also was found to have contributed to the spread of plague in Medieval Europe. More recently, it has been more difficult to prove a link.There was talk that the Darfur conflict was caused by climate change but the science hasn't held up. But with a growing body of research showing that extreme weather, including high temperatures and drought increases violence, most scientists expect that as the Earth keeps warming mostly due to burning of fossil fuels, climate change will play increasing disruptive role in society. "There has definitively been a lot of studies done talking about ancient civilizations and how abrupt climate change could have really contributed to the demise or the downfall of these civilizations," Kelley said. "I would make the distinction that what is happening in the 20th and 21st century is that this climate change is taking place faster than it has in the past," he said. "The rate these emissions have increased over the 20th century is far beyond anything we have seen in a very long time. So that is disturbing. With that in mind, Kelley said he hopes his paper generates greater "long-term thinking on these kinds of issues" from government officials and policy makers in countries already made vulnerable by such things as poverty, hunger and disease.

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Poison dart frog inspires new way to deice planes Among the hazards of winter flying is being stuck on a plane as it's being sprayed down with antifreeze to prevent ice build-up on the wings. While this removes the ice and snow, it can be expensive and wasteful, as well as being harmful to the environment. A mix of a chemical called glycol and water is sprayed on in bulk, causing travel delays especially when airports have run out, as happened at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris in December. Now, a researcher from Arizona State University believes he has found a more economical way to fight the problem. Writing in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces, Konrad Rykaczewski and his colleagues describe how they have come up with a system that would allow a plane to prevent ice build while in the air. The system, which was tested out in a lab setting, works on two levels. The first includes superhydrophobic coatings that make freezing raindrops bounce off the surface of the wing instead of forming ice and sticking. But should that system fail, as it might with excessive frost, a backup system releases antifreeze to ensure the wings stay ice-free. "The results were quite impressive," Rykaczewski said. "Ice accumulation was delayed ten times longer on our samples than on superhydrophobic or lubricant impregnated-surfaces in all the icing scenarios. Furthermore, we also saw about a ten-time delay in ice accumulation during freezing rain when compared to surfaces flooded with antifreeze."Rykaczewski says his inspiration for the concept had little to do with cold weather. Rather, he began to envision a two-tiered system after seeing a poison dart frog while on a vacation in Panama with his wife. He returned to the United States and began examining just how the frog releases toxin through its skin. He found one layer is in contact with the outside environment and an inner layer contains the toxin that it releases when threatened."This was exactly the functionality that we wanted from the anti-icing surfaces," he said. "We wanted to secrete antifreeze only in response to the presence of ice on the surface, irrelevant of form - frost, glaze." If used with airplanes, Rykaczewski envisions the two layers as thin as paper being sprayed onto the wing of the airplane. The first layer would be infused with the antifreeze while a second layer on top would be exposed to the atmosphere and contain the superhydrophobic layer to repel the rain droplets. "When the surface starts icing over, e.g. due to frost, the pores fill up with condensate or ice and make contact with the antifreeze," he said. "Due to the contact, the antifreeze starts melting ice and diffusing. This is quite nice since in a way it is passive - the release of antifreeze happens by itself and does not require any external input from an operator." For larger planes or longer flights, Rykaczewski said a syringe with a pump could be added to ensure there is enough antifreeze for the journey. Other experts who study deicing said Rykaczewski's approach holds promise, though, like all innovative ideas, it still needs to be proven commercially feasible. "The work in this paper is very elegant and novel," said Neelesh A. Patankar, the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the study. "Taking inspiration from nature, this team has demonstrated a clever approach where they combine the advantages of anti-freeze sprays and textured surfaces," he told CBS News. "This idea is new and in my opinion seems to be the most promising among various approaches presently being explored by the research community. " Washington State University's Xianming Shi called the approach "new and innovative." But he also said it could be improved upon, including finding a way to continuously replenish the antifreeze reservoir.He also warned the cost would likely be higher than conventional methods and additional work needed to be done to ensure the system wouldn't cause problems for the plane itself. "This study takes things one step further but it certainly isn't the silver bullet yet," he said. "The idea is intriguing but there are practical constraints. One of them is the cost and this would also significantly manipulate the surface (of the wing) so there might be some unintended consequences." Rykaczewski acknowledged that it would take time before his method could find its way the commercial runway. Until then, he hopes to try it out on a smaller scale with possible candidates being wind turbines in cold weather climates or drones that fly in regions like the Arctic. "The benefit of the drones is that you don't have a person on board but it has the same physics with flying," Rykaczewski said. "When you build up ice on the wing, it changes lift and changes shape."

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Sen. Jim Inhofe denies climate change, tosses snow ball in Congress While the rest of Washington spent Thursday trying to avert a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor during a speech questioning the science behind climate change. "Do you know what this is? It's a snowball," Inhofe said, holding the snowball aloft. "It's just from outside here, so it's very, very cold out ... very unseasonable." "Mr. President, catch this," he said, tossing the snowball away. An Inhofe aide told National Journal the projectile was caught by a congressional page.Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has long argued that climate change is a "hoax," and he's opposed the Obama administration's efforts to reduce carbon emissions. He brandished his snowball prop on Wednesday during a broader speech questioning global warming."We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, but now the script has flipped," Inhofe said. NASA has determined that 2014 was, in fact, the warmest year since modern recording began in 1880.

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Oldest human fossil adds 400,000 years to our history The oldest fossil of the human genus Homo has been unearthed in Ethiopia, a groundbreaking discovery that pushes the history of human evolution 400,000 years further into the past. Found at a site known as Ledi-Geraru, the fossil of a jaw with five teeth still intact predates the previously known fossils of the Homo lineage and shows that our ancestors lived amid grasslands, shrubs and forest some 2.8 million years ago. "What is special about this jaw is not only the date, which is much older than any specimen of Homo known until now, but that is has a unique combination of traits, from the height of the mandible to the shape of the teeth, that makes it clearly transitional between Australopithecus and Homo," said Brian Villmoare, of the University Of Nevada Las Vegas and one of the co-authors on two studies announcing the discovery in Science. This "helps us narrow the time of transition" from the more primitive Australopithecus t0 the more modern Homo "and suggests that the transition itself was relatively rapid," he said. For decades, scientists have searched for African fossils that would demonstrate the earliest phases of the Homo lineage. But gaps in the fossil history have led to widespread disagreement on the time of origin of the lineage that ultimately gave rise to modern humans. "One of the most important time intervals for understanding the emergence of our evolutionary lineage, Homo, is the period between 3 and 2 million years (ago)," William H. Kimbel, the director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and a co-author on one of the papers, said. "Ironically, it is one of the least well known time periods in the human fossil record." Prior to 3 million years ago, Kimbel explained,"we have a good fossil record" of early Australopithecus, such as Lucy's species in eastern Africa, A. afarensis, a small-brained upright biped, which is often considered a remote human ancestor. And around 2 million years ago, "we have a multiple overlapping species" of early Homo, including H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, and early H. erectus - species with larger brains, slimmed down jaws and teeth, and stone tool technology.Another paper released in Nature Wednesday concluded Homo habilis was older than previously thought. Based on a virtual reconstruction of a partial skull researchers now believe it may have originated as far back as 2.3 million years ago. "One of paleoanthropology's research goals has been to fill the temporal and evolutionary gap between these early and later species," Kimbel said. "Although there are several sites in eastern Africa that cover the 3 to 2 million year time period, fossils from them have pointed tantalizingly to an ancient origin for the Homo lineage, but they are relatively scarce and often not well preserved." The researchers dated the Ledi-Geraru fossil mandible, known by its catalog number LD 350-1, by analyzing various layers of volcanic ash or tuff using argon40 argon39 dating, a method that measures the different isotopes of argon and determines the age of the eruption that created the sample. "We are confident in the age of LD 350-1," said Penn State's Erin N. DiMaggio, an author on one of the Science papers. Researchers hope it can offer clues to evolutionary changes that took place among hominids and other mammals around that time, as well as what the African habitat may have looked like. Other fossils found in this area include those of prehistoric antelope and elephants, a type of hippopotamus, crocodiles and fish. These fossils fall within the 2.84-to-2.54-million-years-ago time range. "The fossils that we have recovered at the time of the Ledi Homo indicate an extremely open environment, similar to that of the Serengeti Plains today - a region with grasses as far as the eye could see," said Kaye Reed, another Arizona State University research who took part in the study. Arizona State's Chris Campisano, another author on the paper, thinks it is possible that this means Homo could have emerged due to rapidly changing climate in Africa. "Various lines of research suggest African climate and climate variability changed between about 2.5 and 3 million years ago, specifically towards more open and likely arid habitats," Campisano said. "Our data from Ledi-Geraru may fit with hypotheses linking climate change to the appearance of Homo, but it does only represent one particular time and place." "What we cannot say until we have more sediments in the time period before 2.8 million and after 2.95 is whether there was a trend toward this more open and likely arid habitat that is present during the time of our earliest Homo," Reed said. "What we do know is that early Homo could live in this fairly extreme habitat, and that apparently Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, could not."

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​The most endangered animal you've never heard of In honor of World Wildlife Day, March 3, let us pay tribute to the lowly pangolin, the world's most trafficked mammal. A scale-covered mammal found in Asia and Africa, all eight species of the pangolin are threatened with extinction due to high demand in East Asia for their meat, which is considered a delicacy, and their scales, which are used in traditional medicine.According to the U.S. Department of State, despite legal protection, between 40,000 and 81,250 pangolins were killed for illegal trade in 2013. Experts say that over a million pangolins have been taken from the wild over the past decade. "The very real possibility exists that they're going to be eaten to extinction," said animal behavior expert Heidi Quine.World Wildlife Day was established in 2013 to help raise awareness of tales like this, of animals threatened by poaching, illegal trade and other forms of "wildlife crime."In 2014, 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa, a record high, and 21 percent more than more than the previous year despite stepped up efforts against poaching. Around the continent, 25,000 elephants are lost to poachers each year due to the high demand for their tusks. Though conservationists worldwide have far to go in the fight to stop poaching and other illegal activities, their campaigns are gaining international interest and some countries are making concerted moves to show their dedication. Kenya has imposed stricter penalties for poaching and Tuesday burned 15 tons of ivory and promised to destroy all of its stockpile this year, Reuters reports. And China recently imposed a first-ever one-year ban of ivory imports. "Illegal trade in wildlife has become a sophisticated transnational form of crime, comparable to other pernicious examples, such as trafficking of drugs, humans, counterfeit items and oil.It is driven by rising demand, and is often facilitated by corruption and weak governance," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement."Illegal wildlife trade undermines the rule of law and threatens national security; it degrades ecosystems and is a major obstacle to the efforts of rural communities and indigenous peoples striving to sustainably manage their natural resources.Combatting this crime is not only essential for conservation efforts and sustainable development, it will contribute to achieving peace and security in troubled regions where conflicts are fuelled by these illegal activities." He then invoked the World Wildlife Day credo: "It's time to get serious about wildlife crime."

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Microbes could help clean up after fracking As fracking has exploded across the country, so have toxic ponds of salty and contaminated water that litter places like North Dakota and Texas. Now, a team of researchers may have come up with process they believe will treat this wastewater, helping address one of the industry's biggest headaches.Writing in the journal Environmental Science Water Research & Technology, the University of Colorado Boulder scientists described their invention of a way to remove both salts and organic contaminants from fracking wastewater using microbes that gobble up the latter, leading to a chemical reaction that does away with the former. The process takes advantage of the fact that the contaminants found in the wastewater contain energy-rich hydrocarbons, the same compounds that make up oil and natural gas. The scientists introduce microbes into the waste, which eat up the hydrocarbons, producing an electric current that removes the salt. "The beauty of the technology is that it tackles two different problems in one single system," said Zhiyong Jason Ren, a CU-Boulder associate professor of environmental and sustainability engineering and co-author of the paper."So far, we have been able to clean up the water so that it can used in irrigation, toilet flushing," Ren told CBS News. "It can be used for anything except drinking at this level. If we can use reuse the water, the companies don't need to buy new water and they could even make money from selling it to other users like farmers." Fracking - the process of injecting a slurry of water, sand and chemicals into wells to remove oil and gas - has expanded to 33 states and is used in over 90 percent of new oil and gas wells. The process uses huge amounts of water, which has raised alarm bells as places like California are hit by drought. The process also produces 100 billion gallons to as much as 800 billion gallons of wastewater a year. The EPA has responded by launching a nationwide study to examine the impacts of the wastewater - which can contain total dissolved solids, fracturing fluid additives, metals, and naturally occurring radioactive materials - on sources of drinking water. Until now, the industry hasn't come up with a fool-proof way to treat the water. Along with storing the wastewater in ponds, much of it is treated to be reused in the field. But that treatment process typically requires multiple steps - sometimes up to a dozen. Other times the wastewater is injected deep underground, which has been blamed for setting off minor earthquakes in Ohio and Oklahoma. Ren's breakthrough has gotten rave reviews from the industry, in part because it is a one-step process and in part because rather than consuming energy to function, it actual ends up with a net gain of energy, as the microbes release the energy stored within the hydrocarbons as they break them down. This helps turn the wastewater into a sort of battery that can be used to power on-site machinery and help make up for the higher cost of the process. "This waste water treatment method is an exciting example of how researchers are driving technological innovations that will enhance the development of our energy resources and even develop a new source of energy as a byproduct," Randy Hildreth, the Colorado director of Energy In Depth said. "This kind of solutions-driven research is an important contrast to the political campaign being waged against energy development by 'ban fracking' groups, who routinely make exaggerated claims about water use in the West to scare the public." Stanford's Rob Jackson, an environmental scientist who has done extensive research on fracking and wastewater, said the idea was interesting but he doubted it could be deployed on a large scale. "Call me skeptical that we'll be treating a trillion gallons of oil and gas wastewater a year in the U.S. using approaches like this," he said. "It's too expensive, when companies can deep inject wastewater for a few dollars a barrel. It would definitely not be cost-effective on a site specific basis." Jackson also said the other challenge would be disposing of the waste that comes from treating all this wastewater. "What you do with concentrated waste materials? Where do the salts go, the brines left over from the treatment?" Jackson asked. "Do they go to a landfill? They have to be taken somewhere."To tackle some of those concerns, Ren and his colleague Casey Forrestal co-founded a startup company called BioElectric Inc. a year-and-a-half ago.They are now exploring how to scale up the technology while keeping costs down. One boost could be the fact that several states are considering legislation requiring oil and gas companies to reuse their wastewater. They said much of the waste could be reused on site and that their integrated approach will be much cheaper than those used currently, which use separate processes to treat the salt and the other toxins. "This reduces the capital costs," Ren said. "For operational cost, our system doesn't consume external energy but produces some extra energy through electrochemical reactions. We also are working on making the system automatic and remotely controlled, saving labor costs."

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Samsung Galaxy 6S and Galaxy 6S Edge first look Samsung unveiled the newest additions to its flagship Galaxy smartphone line Sunday in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge elevate the phones to a more luxury feel, putting them more in line with the Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The changes bring some awesome new features, and a couple notable losses. First and foremost what you notice about the S6 is the new body design, which replaces the old plastic frame with Gorilla Glass front and back and metal around the sides. It looks slick and feels "thin and fluid in the hand," CNET's Jessica Dolcourt reports from Barcelona. It's the more premium feel that consumers love in the iPhone. The downside: It means no more removable back, which means no more removable battery. It also cuts out the microSD slot for additional memory.Samsung makes up for these tradeoffs by offering 32-, 64- and 128-gigabyte models and by including baked-in wireless charging -- something the iPhone doesn't.The shiny, almost iridescent handset is available in four colors. Both the S6 and the S6 Edge come in sapphire black, white pearl and platinum gold. The S6 also comes in topaz blue, and the Edge will be available in emerald green. The screen size on the S6 is the same as the previous model and right between the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus -- 5.1 inches -- as is the S6 Edge. But the latter adds a little extra on either side: The screen wraps over the right and left edges of the phone, creating two extra strips of screen for notifications, messages, etc. The design doubles down on the one-sided Galaxy Note Edge, which the company released in November. The phones also keep the same AMOLED display, but ramp up the resolution from the S5. The 16 megapixel rear-facing camera is better, too, taking better pictures in low-light conditions. Finally, one of the biggest features of note is the redesigned fingerprint reader, which now works more like Apple's Touch ID and will connect to Samsung Pay, Samsung's (obvious) answer to Apple Pay. It will launch in the second half of this year on the back of the acquisition of mobile payment tech company LoopPay last month.Samsung says the payment system will "be compatible with more locations than any competing offering in a single application." That's because it uses both NFC (Near Field Communication) like Apple Pay and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST), which means it will work with a store's standard credit card swipe reader. The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge will be available starting April 10. For a full hands-on review of the new Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, head over to CNET.com.

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Meet two spider species: Skeletorus and Sparklemuffin Two gorgeous new species of peacock spiders nicknamed "Skeletorus" and"Sparklemuffin" have been discovered in Australia, according to a new report. Peacock spiders are so-named because of their bright colors and their dancelike, courtship rituals. The two new species were found in southeast Queensland by Madeline Girard, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley who studies peacock spiders, and a friend who went with her into the field. Girard affectionately gave the nickname Sparklemuffin to one of the species, Maratus jactatus, which has bluish and reddish stripes on its abdomen. She nicknamed the other species Skeletorus for its white markings on a black background, which make it look a bit like a skeleton. Sparklemuffin looks similar to three previously discovered species in this group of peacock spiders, whereas Skeletorus looks very different from all the other known species in the group. In fact, Skeletorus, officially named Maratus sceletus, "looks dramatically different [from] all other peacock spiders known to date, making me think that this group is perhaps much more diverse than we had thought," said Jürgen Otto, an entomologist who specializes in photographing the arachnids and who co-authored the report. [Incredible Photos of Peacock Spiders] "Despite the large number of species we have discovered just in the last few years, I can't help feeling that we may have just scratched the surface of this most exciting group of spiders, and that nature has quite a few more surprises in store," Otto told Live Science. The first peacock spider was discovered in the 1800s, said study co-author David Hill, the editor of the journal Peckhamia, which published the new report on Jan. 20. But then, "for more than 100 years, almost nobody looked at these animals," until Otto started photographing them and recording their courtship displays, Hill said. The spiders are very small, measuring between 3 and 7 millimeters (0.1 to 0.3 inches) long, he added. Both Sparklemuffin and Skeletorus, along with the three other known species that belong to the calcitrans peacock spider group, share certain similarities, some of which have a lot to do with the way the arachnids perform their characteristic mating dances. For instance, the males display a flap-like body part called a fan that is adorned with a pattern of bold, transverse stripes, according to the report. They also raise a single leg, displaying it to the female. Otto said he watched Skeletorus perform its mating dance. "When [the male] got within a few centimeters of the female, he exploded into a firework of activity," he told Live Science. "The spinnerets were extended and flicked around at an amazing speed, one of the legs was flexed like he wanted to show off his muscles, and he moved constantly from one side of the grass blade to the other." Otto admitted that because Sparklemuffin was somewhat similar to other peacock species he had seen before, he was not too excited about it at first, but then he became fonder of it. "It was in particular its docile nature and soft teddy bearlike appearance that really charmed me," he said. "It was a fun spider to work with."

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