The Earth will get another close shave Monday, when the 152 metre asteroid 2003 DZ15 makes a pass by our fair planet on the night of July 29^th/30^th at 3.5 million kilometres distant. This is over 9 times the Earth-Moon distance and poses no threat to our world.

This is much smaller than 2.75 kilometre 1998 QE2, which sailed by (bad pun intended) our fair world at 5.8 million kilometres distant on May 31st, 2013. The Virtual Telescope Project will be presenting a free online event to monitor the passage of NEA 2003 DZ15 starting Monday night July 29^th at 22:00 UT/6:00 PM EDT.

An Apollo asteroid, 2003 DZ15 was confirmed by the Lowell Observatory and NEAT's Mount Palomar telescope upon discovery in February 2003. This is its closest approach to the Earth for this century, although it will make a pass nearly as close to the Earth in 2057 on February 12^th.

When Timothy P. Murray crashed his government-issued Ford Crown Victoria in 2011, he was fortunate, as car accidents go. Mr. Murray, then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was not seriously hurt, and he told the police he was wearing a seat belt and was not speeding.

But a different story soon emerged. Mr. Murray was driving over 100 miles an hour and was not wearing a seat belt, according to the computer in his car that tracks certain actions. He was given a $555 ticket; he later said he had fallen asleep.

The case put Mr. Murray at the center of a growing debate over a little-known but increasingly important piece of equipment buried deep inside a car: the event data recorder, more commonly known as the black box.

About 96 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States have the boxes, and in September 2014, if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its way, all will have them.

The boxes have long been used by car companies to assess the performance of their vehicles. But data stored in the devices is increasingly being used to identify safety problems in cars and as evidence in traffic accidents and criminal cases. And the trove of data inside the boxes has raised privacy concerns, including questions about who owns the information, and what it can be used for, even as critics have raised questions about its reliability.

Dolphins have previously shown the ability to perform simple math, rescue people and even spot mines for the military. A new study from British researchers shows that the marine mammals are capable of doing something else once thought to be unique to humans - call each other by name.

According to the new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, individual dolphins have a signature whistle that they use to identify themselves and each other.

Marine biologists had previously suspected that individual dolphins have a unique name, but the new study from scientists at the University of St. Andrew found that dolphins respond to hearing their identifier by repeating it back, as if to say, "I'm here!"

"If we look at complex ability in communication in human language, one of the key features that is important to us is that we can copy sounds, we can invent new sounds," study co-author Vincent Janik, a biologist at St Andrews University, told The Guardian. "We can then use those sounds and attach some kind of meaning to them and use them to refer to objects and to refer to external things in the world."

Findings reveal new understanding of how virus suppresses the human immune system.

Disabling a protein in Ebola virus cells can stop the virus from replicating and infecting the host, according to researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The data are published in July in the journal Cell Host and Microbe.

Ebola viruses cause severe disease in humans because they can deactivate the innate immune system. Christopher Basler, PhD, Associate Professor of Microbiology at Mount Sinai and his team have studied how Ebola viruses evade the immune system, and discovered that a viral protein called VP35 is critical to deactivating the immune system. They found that when VP35 interacts with an important cellular protein called PACT, it blocks PACT from activating the immune system, allowing the virus to spread.

A newfound asteroid about the size of a football field will cruise past Earth tonight (July 22), and you can follow all the action live online.

The near-Earth asteroid 2013 NE19, estimated to be between 194 feet and 426 feet wide (59 to 130 meters), will pass within 2.6 million miles (4.2 million kilometers) of Earth tonight - about 11 times the distance between our planet and the moon. There is no danger that it will strike Earth on this pass, scientists say.

The online Slooh Space Camera will webcast live views of 2013 NE19's close approach as seen from an observatory in the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. You can watch the asteroid webcast live here on SPACE.com at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT Tuesday), courtesy of Slooh.

Asteroid 2013 NE19, which was discovered just last Monday (July 15), will be quite faint, making it a difficult target for backyard observers. But it should be readily visible in Slooh's remote-controlled telescope, the group said.

"Slooh's imaging technology and high-altitude location in the Canary Islands are well suited for a tricky object like this, which may be impossible for garden-variety setups to capture," Slooh CEO Michael Paolucci said in a statement.

The power of computing, and the thrill of its apparently infinite possibilities, has also long been a source of fear.

Going into a San Francisco second-hand book shop, shortly before a visit to Google's headquarters in California, I happened upon a copy of Dick Tracy, an old novel based on Chester Gould's cartoon strip starring America's favourite detective.

For a 1970 publication, the plot seemed remarkably topical. Dick, and his sidekick Sam Catchem, find themselves battling a sinister character known as "Mr Computer" who wants to control the world. His strange powers enable him to remember everything he hears or sees and recall it instantly. This is a bad guy who can store data, analyse voice patterns and read private thoughts.

My visit to the legendary "Googleplex" at Mountain View comes at an awkward time for the company. Edward Snowden's revelations about the snooping of the US Government's National Security Agency (NSA) in its clandestine electronic-surveillance programme PRISM have provoked a crisis of trust in Silicon Valley. Larry Page, Google co-founder and CEO, rushed out a blog to deny claims in leaked NSA documents that it - in parallel with other American internet giants - had been co-operating with the spying programme since 2009. "Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false," he said.

When 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.

The software works even when people are wearing sunglasses, hats and scarves. Recent tests have found that facial hair, aging, or changes in weight or hair color do not affect the accuracy of the system.

When a flock of birds changes direction on a dime, it's easy to imagine that the group is controlled by a single, collective mind. But in reality, the individual matters. That's the message of new research on group navigation in homing pigeons. The study used computer tracking to reveal a complex hierarchy, where even birds with a low social rank on the ground may be trusted leaders in the air.

In research on animal social dynamics, large mammals such as wolves and gorillas have received a lot of attention, because their groups' smaller numbers make them easier to study, says Andrew King, a behavioral ecologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom who was not involved in the study. But when hundreds or thousands of creatures synchronize their movements, the decision-making process is harder to sort out. King says that these big groups have traditionally been viewed as hoards of anonymous agents in a democracy. "Five or so years ago, papers were saying that you should be finding consensus decisions where everybody has an equal say."

And yet elaborate synchronized movements arise from individuals with various abilities and social roles. Zoologist Dora Biro of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom wanted to investigate how a flock of pigeons manages to stay organized as it navigates the skies. "Different individuals within these flocks might have different ideas about where they want to go," she says "but at the same time, they want to maintain a kind of cohesive flock, because there's safety in numbers." Computerized tracking methods make this type of research possible. Remote visual sensors and GPS units on the birds can keep tabs on every bird at every moment, and complex data analysis can tease out meaningful social patterns.

Conventional theories have placed life on land for the last 500 million years, but a new study from a team of American and Australian researchers might push that back to 2.2 billion years.

To support their claim, the scientists presented evidence in the form of tiny newly discovered fossils the size of a match head called Diskagma buttonii that were discovered in ancient soil samples.

"They certainly were not plants or animals, but something rather more simple," said co-author Gregory Retallack, co-director of paleontological collections at the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

The fossils are small, vase-like structures with a cup on one end and a basal tube on the other end. Retallack says these ancient organisms are comparable to a modern soil organism called Geosiphon, a fungus containing a cavity filled with symbiotic cyanobacteria.

"There is independent evidence for cyanobacteria, but not fungi, of the same geological age, and these new fossils set a new and earlier benchmark for the greening of the land," he said. "This gains added significance because fossil soils hosting the fossils have long been taken as evidence for a marked rise in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at about 2.4 billion to 2.2 billion years ago, widely called the Great Oxidation Event."

That event, which occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, boosted atmospheric oxygen to around 5 percent - still a far cry from today's level of 21 percent.

An analysis of data returned by the Curiosity rover, which landed on the planet a year ago, suggests there was a major upheaval which could have been caused by volcanic eruptions or a massive collision which stripped away the atmosphere.

The rover has returned its first measurements of the makeup of gases, including argon, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, in the Martian atmosphere.

The results, published in two parallel studies in the journal Science, allow scientists to better understand how the Martian climate changed, and understand whether it ever had the right conditions for life.

Dr Chris Webster at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, lead author on one of the studies, said the data enabled direct comparisons with the Earth's climate.

"As Mars became a planet and its magma solidified, catastrophic outgassing occurred while volatiles were delivered by impact of comets and other small bodies", Dr Webster said.

"Our Curiosity measurements are - for the first time - accurate enough to make direct comparisons with measurements done on Earth on meteorites using sophisticated large instrumentation that gives high accuracy results."