The United States Cyber Command hasn't been around for long. In fact, it only reached full operational capability last October. However, things seem to be trundling along quite nicely over as USCYBERCOM, as the command just recently completed its first major attack simulation.

InformationWeek reports that the mock attack, dubbed Cyber Flag, took place over the space of a week at the Air Force Red Flag Facility at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. All told, 300 people participated in the simulation (both on site and off), which involved splitting into two teams, the "good guys" and the "bad guys." The bad guys spent their time throwing everything they had at the Cyber Command's networks, attempting infiltration with malware and other nasty tricks. For their part, the good guys did everything they could to defend the network.

Col. Rivers J. Johnson of the command's public affairs office told InformationWeek that while the Cyber Command was not 100 percent successful in fending off all of the attacks, the majority of threats were identified and deflected "in a timely manner."

"There were a variety of scenarios based on what we think an adversary would do in real world events and real world time," he's quoted as saying. "It was a great exercise."

A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside Earth's solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, except for one hitch. It is a bit too big.

The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard to find place that is not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, does not freeze or boil. And it has a shopping mall-like surface temperature of near 72 degrees, scientists say.

The planet's confirmation was announced Monday by NASA along with other discoveries by its Kepler telescope, which was launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

That is the first planet confirmed in the habitable zone for Kepler, which already had found Earth-like rocky planets elsewhere. Twice before astronomers have announced a planet found in that zone, but neither has been as promising.

"This is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history," Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside Earth's solar system, said in an email. "This discovery shows that we Homo sapiens are straining our reach into the universe to find planets that remind us of home. We are almost there."

Would you choose to take someone's life in order to prevent the deaths of several other people? A new study using 3D simulations found that nine out of 10 people would answer "yes."

In the experiment, subjects donned a head-mounted device that placed them in a 3D setting with realistic digital characters. The participants also wore sensors attached to their fingertips to monitor their emotional arousal.

In the virtual world, participants were standing near a railroad switch where two sets of tracks veered off from each other. As a coal-filled boxcar approached, the subjects could choose to do nothing and allow the boxcar to kill five hikers, or pull a joystick "switch" to reroute the boxcar to a different track, where it would kill one hiker.

Of the 147 participants, 14 allowed the boxcar to kill the five hikers; eleven of these subjects did not pull the rerouting switch at all, while three did so but then changed their minds and returned it to its original position. About 90 percent, or 133 participants, chose to pull the switch that diverted the boxcar to kill just one hiker.

The end is not near. At least that's according to a German expert who says his decoding of a Mayan tablet with a reference to a 2012 date denotes a transition to a new era and not a possible end of the world as others have read it.

The interpretation of the hieroglyphs by Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia was presented for the first time Wednesday at the archaeological site of Palenque in southern Mexico.

His comments came less than a week after Mexico's archaeology institute acknowledged there was a second reference to the 2012 date in Mayan inscriptions, touching of another round of talk about whether it predicts the end of the world.

Gronemeyer has been studying the stone tablet found years ago at the archeological site of Tortuguero in Mexico's Gulf coast state of Tabasco.

He said the inscription describes the return of mysterious Mayan god Bolon Yokte at the end of a 13th period of 400 years, known as Baktuns, on the equivalent of Dec. 21, 2012. Mayans considered 13 a sacred number. There's nothing apocalyptic in the date, he said.

The text was carved about 1,300 years ago. The stone has cracked, which has made the end of the passage almost illegible.

Astronomers have found 18 new alien planets, all of them Jupiter-size gas giants that circle stars bigger than our sun, a new study reports.

The discoveries increase the number of known planets orbiting massive stars by 50 percent. The exoplanet bounty should also help astronomers better understand how giant planets form and grow in nascent alien solar systems, researchers said.

The haul comes just a few months after a different team of researchers announced the discovery of 50 newfound alien worlds, including one rocky planet that could be a good candidate for life. The list of known alien planets is now well over 700 and climbing fast.

The White House is concerned about the government's "ability to protect citizens" if this bill were to be signed into law

Members of the U.S. House intelligence committee have proposed a bill that would allow private firms to receive cyber threat-related information from government agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).

The legislation was proposed Wednesday by Representative Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the U.S. House intelligence committee, and Representative C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger, the committee's senior Democrat.

The bill intends to allow the sharing of classified threat information with defense contractors and internet service providers (ISPs). This would require spy and intelligence agencies to tell ISPs, for example, what types of threats they've identified so that the ISPs can block traffic that contains that particular signature.

Scientists have linked two diamonds in a mysterious process called entanglement that is normally only seen on the quantum scale.

Entanglement is so weird that Einstein dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." It's a strange effect where one object gets connected to another so that even if they are separated by large distances, an action performed on one will affect the other. Entanglement usually occurs with subatomic particles, and was predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the realm of the very small.

But now physicists have succeeded in entangling two macroscopic diamonds, demonstrating that quantum mechanical effects are not limited to the microscopic scale.

"I think it's an important step into a new regime of thinking about quantum phenomena," physicist Ian Walmsley of England's University of Oxford said."That is, in this regime of the bigger world, room temperatures, ambient conditions. Although the phenomenon was expected to exist, actually being able to observe it in such a system we think is quite exciting."

Scientists understand that Earth's magnetic field has flipped its polarity many times over the millennia. In other words, if you were alive about 800,000 years ago, and facing what we call north with a magnetic compass in your hand, the needle would point to 'south.' This is because a magnetic compass is calibrated based on Earth's poles. The N-S markings of a compass would be 180 degrees wrong if the polarity of today's magnetic field were reversed. Many doomsday theorists have tried to take this natural geological occurrence and suggest it could lead to Earth's destruction. But would there be any dramatic effects? The answer, from the geologic and fossil records we have from hundreds of past magnetic polarity reversals, seems to be 'no.'

Reversals are the rule, not the exception. Earth has settled in the last 20 million years into a pattern of a pole reversal about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, although it has been more than twice that long since the last reversal. A reversal happens over hundreds or thousands of years, and it is not exactly a clean back flip. Magnetic fields morph and push and pull at one another, with multiple poles emerging at odd latitudes throughout the process. Scientists estimate reversals have happened at least hundreds of times over the past three billion years. And while reversals have happened more frequently in "recent" years, when dinosaurs walked Earth a reversal was more likely to happen only about every one million years.

Sediment cores taken from deep ocean floors can tell scientists about magnetic polarity shifts, providing a direct link between magnetic field activity and the fossil record. The Earth's magnetic field determines the magnetization of lava as it is laid down on the ocean floor on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Rift where the North American and European continental plates are spreading apart. As the lava solidifies, it creates a record of the orientation of past magnetic fields much like a tape recorder records sound. The last time that Earth's poles flipped in a major reversal was about 780,000 years ago, in what scientists call the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. The fossil record shows no drastic changes in plant or animal life. Deep ocean sediment cores from this period also indicate no changes in glacial activity, based on the amount of oxygen isotopes in the cores. This is also proof that a polarity reversal would not affect the rotation axis of Earth, as the planet's rotation axis tilt has a significant effect on climate and glaciation and any change would be evident in the glacial record.

The X-37B was supposed to land 270 days after launch, but the Air Force is extending the space plane's mission with no exact landing date in sight

The U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office has decided to extend the trip of the secretive X-37B experimental robotic space plane, which is pushing its own orbital record.

The X-37B, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, is a mysterious unmanned craft that was built by Boeing Co.'s Space and Intelligence Systems unit in Huntington Beach. It is a 29-foot space plane that is the second of its kind, and has been circling the Earth since its launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida earlier this year.

The Air Force has said that the X-37B is used to test new technologies in space, but some industry analysts believe that it is a test unit for a potential orbiting weapon, which could disable foreign satellites or drop bombs as it makes its way around the Earth.