The mystery blob that appeared on radars across the Tennessee Valley on Tuesday is still unexplained. The anomaly as it is affectionately being called, started appearing on doppler screens in the early afternoon hours and eventually covered an area nearly the size of Huntsville city limits itself. The blob was accompanied by increased military aircraft activity and numerous reports of strange chemical odors.

Huntsville, Alabama is largely anchored by various military-industrial complex companies, the NASA program and one of the largest US military bases, Redstone Arsenal. Redstone Arsenal is home to new units and personnel as a result of BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) as well as many classified entities.

To see a headline like this raises many possibilities to mild skeptics and the reckless conspiracy theorists alike. Scanning the internet, many blamed the anomaly on HAARP, which is not farfetched for a number of reasons, but unlikely in this case. Others mentioned chemtrails as it is constantly rumored that new, stealthier geoengineering technologies have been developed of late.

What is known is that there were more than the usual number of military helicopters flying around Tuesday afternoon. It is common to see the occasional training happening in Huntsville skies but there was an increased number of helicopters out, including multiple twin rotor Chinooks and an above average number of civilian copters. WTF News editor Baran Hines also noticed the uptick in activity over Huntsville.

You may have had remote controlled airplanes growing up, but they probably weren't as cool as the quadcopter. This tiny helicopter looks a lot like a toy, but it's really a high-tech robot controlled exclusively by human thought.

Developed by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, the four-blade helicopter, or quadcopter, can be quickly and accurately controlled for a sustained amount of time using the electrical impulses associated with a subject's thoughts.

The team used a noninvasive technique known as electroencephalography (EEG) to record the electrical brain activity of five different subjects. Each subject was fitted with a cap equipped with 64 electrodes, which sent signals to the quadcopter over a WiFi network.

The subjects were positioned in front of a screen that relayed images of the quadcopter's flight through an on-board camera, allowing them to see the course the way a pilot would. The plane, which was driven with a pre-set forward moving velocity, was then controlled by the subject's thoughts.

By imagining that they were using their right hand, left hand and both hands together, subjects controlled the flight path of the plane. If they imagined raising their left hand, for example, the plane turned left. If they imagined raising their hands together, the plane lifted higher in the air.

The oldest well-preserved skeleton of a primate, a 55-million-year-old specimen found in China, has been discovered, researchers report.

The primate appears to be the most primitive known relative of the group that contains tarsiers, small primates found only in Southeast Asia. The finding suggests this group diverged from anthropoids, the group that contains monkeys, apes and humans, during the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago), a time of widespread warming.

It's not the oldest primate fossil, researchers say, but it is one of the oldest most-complete skeletons of the group known as tarsiiformes.

"This discovery is really exciting," vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch of the University of Florida's museum of natural history told LiveScience, "because it shows us the first really [well-articulated] skeleton of one branch of the crown primate tree," (the group including all primates alive today and their common ancestor). Bloch was not involved in the study.

The fossil confirms speculation that the earliest primates probably lived in trees, ate insects and were active during the daytime.

The primate, now named Archicebus achilles (roughly translated as "ancient monkey"), would have weighed about 1 ounce (20-30 grams), suggesting the earliest primates were very small.

The skeleton shares some features of tarsiers and some of anthropoids. For instance, the specimen's heel bone strongly resembles those of anthropoids, hence the species name, achilles.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health, and their colleagues, have discovered that a gene called BACH2 may play a central role in the development of diverse allergic and autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, asthma, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and type-1 diabetes. In autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks normal cells and tissues in the body that are generally recognized as "self" and do not normally trigger immune responses. Autoimmunity can occur in infectious diseases and cancer.

The results of previous research had shown that people with minor variations in the BACH2 gene often develop allergic or autoimmune diseases, and that a common factor in these diseases is a compromised immune system. In this study in mice, the Bach2 gene was found to be a critical regulator of the immune system's reactivity. The study, headed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), both part of NIH, and their colleagues appeared online in Nature, June 2, 2013.

The cores of black holes may not hold points of infinite density as currently thought, but portals to elsewhere in the universe, theoretical physicists say.

A black hole possesses a gravitational field so powerful that not even light can escape. A black hole generally forms after a star dies in a titanic explosion known as a supernova, which crushes the remaining core into dense lumps.

A maddening enigma called a singularity -- a region of infinite density -- lies at the heart of each black hole, according to general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. The infinite nature of singularities means that space and time as we know them cease to exist there.

Scientists have long sought ways to avoid the complete breakdown of all the known laws of physics brought on by singularities. Now researchers suggest the centers of black holes may not hold singularities after all.

These new findings are based on loop quantum gravity, one of the leading theories seeking to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single theory that can explain all the forces of the universe. In loop quantum gravity, the four dimensions of spacetime are composed of networks of intersecting loops - ripples of the gravitational field.

The researchers applied loop quantum gravity theory to the simplest model of black hole - a spherical, uncharged, non-rotating body known as a Schwarzschild black hole.

A strange comet-like object discovered in 2010 ended up being an asteroid that had been the victim of a head-on collision from another space rock. The object created a bit of buzz because of its mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and long, trailing streamers of dust. Named P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), the object is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has been the focus of much study, including images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and many ground-based observatories. But over time, the asteroid's long dust tail has grown to be so long that the entire object can't fit into the field of view of most observatories.
"Here, we are watching the death of an asteroid," said Jayadev Rajagopal, a scientist at the WIYN (Wisconsin Indiana at Yale NOAO) Telescope, speaking today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. "We know of dozens of asteroids this has happened to in the past, but this is the only one showing us the event as it is happening."

Using the new wide-field camera at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, Rajagopal and his team have found that the peculiar asteroid P/2010 A2′s tail is much longer than was previously supposed. The tail is about a million kilometers long, roughly three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The new One Degree Imager (ODI) can currently image an area of the sky about the size of the full moon: a future upgrade will increase the size of the field to about four times as large.

One day in 1788, students at the Hunterian School of Medicine in London were opening a cadaver when they discovered something startling. The dead man's anatomy was a mirror image of normal. His liver was on his left side instead of the right. His heart had beaten on his right side, not his left.

The students had never seen anything like it, and they rushed to find their teacher, the Scottish physician Matthew Baillie, who was just as stunned as they were. "It is so extraordinary as scarcely to have been seen by any of the most celebrated anatomists," he later wrote.

His report was the first detailed description of the condition, which came to be known as situs inversus and is thought to occur in about 1 in 20,000 people. Baillie argued that if doctors could figure out how this strange condition came to be, they might come to understand how our bodies normally tell the right side from the left.

Over two centuries later, the mystery of left and right still captivates scientists.

Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Sco (TOCP Designation: PNV J17335943-3606216) we performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer of iTelescope network (MPC Code Q62 - Siding Spring, AU).

On our images taken on June 03.7, 2013 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with unfiltered CCD magnitude 11.5 at coordinates:

R.A. = 17 33 59.44, Decl.= -36 06 20.7 (equinox 2000.0; UCAC-3 catalogue reference stars).

Our annotated confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version). North is up, East is to the left:
An animation showing a comparison between our confirmation image and the archive POSS2/UKSTU plate (R Filter - 1996).

Regina Dugan, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and current head of Google-owned Motorola's research division, introduced a prototype "vitamin authentication" tablet which turns your entire body into a walking authentication token.

"We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA," Dugan said. Indeed, DARPA has been involved in everything from weaponized hallucinations to tiny spy computers to military human enhancements to automated drone-borne targeting and tracking systems to linking rat brains over the internet and much more.

Forget traditional usernames and passwords, this technology unveiled at D11 uses a tiny stomach acid-powered tablet to produce an 18-bit signal which can be detected by outside devices and used for authentication.

Dugan also showed off wearable electronic tattoos produced by a company called MC10, in partnership with Motorola, which serve a similar function.

The rationale behind these technologies, according to Dugan, is the annoyances caused by traditional authentication.

"Authentication is irritating," Dugan said. "After 40 years of advances in computation, we're still authenticating basically the same way we did years ago."

An international team of researchers have discovered enormous tornadoes in space, more than a thousand miles wide, that could quite possibly be heating the surface of the Sun to more than a million degrees centigrade, a finding that has possible implications for clean Earth energy.

These super tornadoes - which are thousands of times larger and immensely more powerful than anything seen on Earth - twist at speeds beyond 6,000 miles per hour within the Sun's atmosphere.

The discovery may explain why the atmosphere around the Sun is much hotter than its surface, which has puzzled scientists previously. They believe the solar tornadoes carry energy from the energy reservoir below the Sun's surface (the convection zone) to the outer atmosphere in the form of magnetic waves.

The scientists, who estimate that there are as many as 11,000 of these supermassive twisters swirling above the Sun's atmosphere, are hoping that these magnetic tornadoes could form a basis for clean reactors here on Earth. This could be a major step forward in the field of plasma-astrophysics, according to the scientists.