Cassini Takes First-Ever Pictures of Earth from Spacecraft Orbiting Saturn

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Thousands of astronomy fans looked to the heavens and posed for a unique picture on Friday afternoon – a shot of planet Earth from Saturn.

The first photos are are just being transmitted back now – but anyone who participated in the ‘Day the Earth Smiled’ shouldn’t hope to see their face. This was, after all, a 898million-mile photo op.


The photos, some of which have been enhanced by astronomers, show Earth as a tiny dot – only a little bigger than the North Star appears in our sky – illuminating the skies beyond Saturn.

The images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting the ringed giant since its arrival in the Saturn system in 2004.


The Earth has only been pictured in images from outer space on two other occasions. The first was in 1990, when Voyager 1 captured an image from 3.7 billion miles away. The second occasion was when Cassini took a photo in 2006 from 926 million miles away.

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High-End Stores Use Facial Recognition Tools To Spot VIPs

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesWhen a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.

“I hadn’t watched The Office,” Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.

This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.

The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a “face template,” and checking it against a database.

In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.

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Nuclear Doomsday is Coming Today. You’ll Want to See This.

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Photo Credit: APIt’s Thursday, July 18, and nuclear Armageddon is upon us. Or at least you might be excused for thinking so when you glimpse on your colleague’s computer monitor a compelling simulation of a mushroom cloud rising over your home town.

That’s the 2.0 version of NUKEMAP — now in three dimensions! — expected for launch by late Thursday, the brainchild of a guy named Alex Wellerstein.

A historian with the American Institute of Physics, Wellerstein has had 3 million visitors to the original two-dimensional edition of his website, who have virtually detonated a whopping 17.4 million nuclear warheads over their choice of locations virtually anywhere around the world.

Launched in February 2012, the initial or “classic” version of NUKEMAP featured your choice of 18 preselected cities — from Beijing or Berlin to Tehran or Tokyo — and 23 preset atomic-warhead explosive capacities, or “yields,” numbering in kilotons, or even more stratospheric megatons. A pick of North Korean, Indian, Pakistani, Russian and U.S. bombs was on offer, along with others.

You could have gone wild and plugged in any city across the planet along with a numerical yield for your notional attack, clicked the clearly marked “Detonate” button and wham: A multicolor bulls-eye appeared onscreen, overlaid on your designated city map — described as a “mashup” of Google Maps and algorithms for nuclear blast effects.

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Live In The South? Your Life Expectancy Is Shorter, Sicker Than The Rest Of The U.S.

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Photo Credit: GettyIf you’re 65 and living in Hawaii, here’s some good news: Odds are you’ll live another 21 years. And for all but five of those years, you’ll likely be in pretty good health.

Hawaii tops the charts in the government’s first state-by-state look at how long Americans age 65 can expect to live, on average, and how many of those remaining years will be healthy ones.

Retirement-age Mississippians fared worst, with only about 17 1/2 more years remaining and nearly seven of them in poorer health.

U.S. life expectancy has been growing steadily for decades, and is now nearly 79 for newborns. The figures released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate life expectancy for people 65 years old, and what portion will be free of the illnesses and disabilities suffered late in life.

“What ultimately matters is not just the length of life but the quality of life,” said Matt Stiefel, who oversees population health research for Kaiser Permanente.

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New Sabre Air-Breathing Rocket Engine to Dramatically Cut Flight Times, Drastically Reduce Costs of Space Payloads (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reaction Engines LtdImagine taking off from a runway like a normal aeroplane but flying so high and so fast that when you unclip your seatbelt, you float around the cabin. Look out of the windows: on one side is the inky blackness of deep space, while on the other is the electric blue of your home planet, Earth.

This is no joyride for a few brief minutes of space-tourism weightlessness. Instead you are three, five or even 10 times higher than those little hops. In front of you is your destination: a space station. Perhaps it is a hotel or a place of work. You are in low earth orbit – and you’ve got there in far less time than it takes for a transatlantic flight.

This is the promise of the spaceplane, and it took a step closer to reality yesterday. UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts confirmed the government’s £60m investment in Reaction Engines Ltd.

Spaceplanes are what engineers call single-stage-to-orbit (if you really want to geek out, just use the abbreviation: SSTO). They have long been a dream because they would be fully reusable, taking off and landing from a traditional runway.

By building reusable spaceplanes, the cost of reaching orbit could be reduced to a twentieth current levels. That makes spaceplanes a game changer both for taking astronauts into space and for deploying satellites and space probes.

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$27,500 Gun Hits Targets at 1,000 Yards, and Further (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNNA new company in Texas is selling a precision rifle with a unique technology that allows even an inexperienced shooter to hit a target 10 football fields away. The price tag is a staggering $27,500.

Tracking Point describes the weapon as a smartgun, with a trigger wired to the scope so that the gun won’t fire until it’s locked on the target that’s been tagged.

“There are a number of people who say the gun shoots itself,” said Chief Executive Officer Jason Schauble, a former Marine captain who was wounded in Iraq. “It doesn’t. The shooter is always in the loop.”

The TrackingPoint rifles, which are Wi-Fi enabled and have a color display so users can post videos of their shots on Facebook or YouTube, started shipping in May. Schauble said his company is on track to sell as many as 500 of them this year, to clients that he describes as “high net worth hunters” who want to kill big game at long range.

TrackingPoint claims that the gun took down a South African wildebeest at 1,103 yards, a company record.

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The Decline in Male Fertility (+video)

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Photo Credit: 10 sec. RuleAre today’s young men less fertile than their fathers were? It’s a controversy in the fertility field, with some experts raising the alarm over what some are calling a “sperm crisis” because they believe men’s sperm counts have been decreasing for a decade or more.

Experts here for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual conference last week debated the issue for an entire day.

One recent analysis found that in France, the sperm concentration of men decreased by nearly one-third between 1989 and 2005. Most but not all studies from several European nations with large databases and the ability to track health records have found that over the past 15 years or so, the counts of healthy men ages 18 to 25 have significantly decreased. This comes after a prominent study from the 1990s suggested that sperm count has decreased by half over the last half-century.

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Horrified British Woman Discovers that Headaches and Scratching Sounds Inside Her Head are FLESH-EATING MAGGOTS After Trip to Peru (+video)

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Photo Credit: Discovery A woman has spoken of her terror at discovering that she harboured flesh-eating maggots inside her ear.

When Rochelle Harris, 27, from Derby, returned from the holiday of a lifetime in Peru, she thought little of the headaches that she had started to develop on the flight back to the UK.

But within hours she had developed excruciating shooting pains down one side of her face and had started to hear strange scratching sounds in her head. The next morning she woke to a pillow soaked with fluid from her ear.

Rochelle’s ordeal features in a new Discovery Channel documentary, called ‘Bugs, Bites and Parasites’ that follows the work of specialists who are faced with patients exhibiting a variety of mysterious symptoms – more often than not from people who have traveled abroad.

On her arrival back in the UK, Rochelle became increasingly concerned there may be something seriously wrong, so she visited her local Accident and Emergency department at the Royal Derby Hospital.

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Man Wrestles 200 Pound Shark in Massachusetts and Wins (+video)

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Photo Credit: FacebookA Nantucket man has taken on a 200 pound shark and won.

A spectacular photograph captures the moment Elliot Sudal wrestled the enormous sandbar shark after hooking it while beach fishing on Sunday evening.

The fit 24-year-old was with some pals hunting for bluefish off the coast of the Massachusetts island when he met the seven-foot adversary and the energetic tussle ensued.

Photo Credit: Facebook
‘It just kind of seemed sharky,’ he told ABC News. ‘There was something coming by and chomping them (the bluefish) in half. I thought, “It’s got to be a shark.”‘

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Study: Later Retirement May Help Prevent Dementia

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Photo Credit: APNew research boosts the “use it or lose it” theory about brainpower and staying mentally sharp. People who delay retirement have less risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia, a study of nearly half a million people in France found.

It’s by far the largest study to look at this, and researchers say the conclusion makes sense. Working tends to keep people physically active, socially connected and mentally challenged — all things known to help prevent mental decline.

“For each additional year of work, the risk of getting dementia is reduced by 3.2 percent,” said Carole Dufouil, a scientist at INSERM, the French government’s health research agency.

She led the study and gave results Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Boston.

About 35 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5 million have Alzheimer’s — 1 in 9 people aged 65 and over. What causes the mind-robbing disease isn’t known and there is no cure or any treatments that slow its progression.

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