What if a giant asteroid crashed into the area near your home? Scientists have come up with an 'impact effects calculator' that lets you work out what would happen if an asteroid hits our planet.

Users can type in the size of their hypothetical asteroid, its speed, what it will hit, its angle of entry and even how far they are from the blast, the Daily Mail reported.

For those who cannot visualise how big their asteroid could be, there is even a helpful drop-down menu of pre-set sizes which include 'school bus', 'humpback whale', 'Empire State Building', all the way up to the ominous-sounding 'small planet'.

The website's algorithms then calculate what the effects of the asteroid's impact would be on the earth's axis, whether there would be a fireball - and what chance of surviving any bystanders would have.

It even tells you how far you should be from the impact to avoid being buried in the material thrown up from any crater that is left behind.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was an ambitious and forward-looking plan. Unfortunately for all its ambition, it might have been a bit poorly executed. The initial target cost of $100 ballooned to $188 per laptop.

However, a software great in Britain has devised [video] what could be the salvation of OLPC and similar future programs -- a fully functional computer that's as small as a USB stick and costs only $25 USD (£15) to make.

The tiny computer -- dubbed "Raspberry Pi" -- looks somewhat like a standard USB memory stick, as a USB 2.0 connector juts out of it. But on the side it packs a SD/MMC/SDIO card reader to provide Flash storage (of course buying said storage might bump the price $10-$20). And on the side opposite to the USB port an HDMI connector sits, capable of piping out 1080p video to a monitor/TV.

The little board has smartphone-esque hardware, with a 700MHz ARM11 processor and 128 MB of SDRAM packed in. Specifics on the processor, including the manufacturer were not yet revealed. The GPU also was not revealed, but it is said to be capable of handling OpenGL ES 2.0 (hence the 1080p output).

Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity.

Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B).

"The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

"This is an epic result," adds Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis. An expert in Einstein's theories, Will chairs an independent panel of the National Research Council set up by NASA in 1998 to monitor and review the results of Gravity Probe B. "One day," he predicts, "this will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of physics."

Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.

Boeing first unveiled a near-complete version of its Phantom Ray unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) nearly a year ago. This week, the company announced that its Phantom Ray has completed its first flight.

The first flight lasted for 17 minutes during which the Phantom Ray reached a maximum altitude of 7,500 feet and a top speed of 178 knots.

The program is being completely funded by Boeing, and the first test flight's primary goals were to test fight characteristics of the aircraft. The company also notes that future mission parameters for the aircraft could include strike operations and autonomous in-air refueling.

The Boeing Phantom Ray is 36 feet long and has a wingspan of 50 feet. The maximum takeoff weight for the aircraft is 36,500 pounds and is powered by a single GE F404-GE-102D engine.

"Autonomous, fighter-sized unmanned aircraft are real," said Phantom Ray program manager Craig Brown. "The UAS bar has been raised. Now I'm eager to see how high that bar will go."

Cosmic rays zapping the Earth over the South Pole appear to be coming from particular locations, rather than being distributed uniformly across the sky. Cosmic ray "hotspots" have also been seen in the northern skies too, yet there is no source close enough to produce this strange pattern.

"We don't know where they are coming from," says Stefan Westerhoff of the University of Wisconsin, who used the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole with a team of colleagues to create the most comprehensive map to date of the arrival direction of cosmic rays in the southern skies.

IceCube detects muons produced by neutrinos striking ice, but it also detects muons created by cosmic rays hitting Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic ray muons can be used to figure out the direction of the original cosmic ray particle.

Between May 2009 and May 2010, IceCube has detected 32 billion cosmic-ray muons, with a median energy of about 20 teraelectronvolts (TeV). These muons revealed, with extremely high statistical significance, a southern sky with some regions of excess cosmic rays ("hotspots") and others with a deficit of cosmic rays ("cold" spots).

Over the past two years, a similar pattern has been seen over the northern skies by the Milagro observatory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the Tibet Air Shower array in Yangbajain.

You may have heard the news: Comet Elenin is coming to the inner-solar system this fall. Comet Elenin (also known by its astronomical name C/2010 X1), was first detected on Dec. 10, 2010 by Leonid Elenin, an observer in Lyubertsy, Russia, who made the discovery "remotely" using the ISON-NM observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. At the time of the discovery, the comet was about 647 million kilometers (401 million miles) from Earth. Over the past four-and-a-half months, the comet has - as comets do - closed the distance to Earth's vicinity as it makes its way closer to perihelion (its closest point to the sun). As of May 4, Elenin's distance is about 274 million kilometers (170 million miles).

"That is what happens with these long-period comets that come in from way outside our planetary system," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They make these long, majestic, speedy arcs through our solar system, and sometimes they put on a great show. But not Elenin. Right now that comet looks kind of wimpy."

How does a NASA scientist define cometary wimpiness?

"We're talking about how a comet looks as it safely flies past us," said Yeomans. "Some cometary visitors arriving from beyond the planetary region - like Hale-Bopp in 1997 -- have really lit up the night sky where you can see them easily with the naked eye as they safely transit the inner-solar system. But Elenin is trending toward the other end of the spectrum. You'll probably need a good pair of binoculars, clear skies, and a dark, secluded location to see it even on its brightest night."

Research by a team of scientists at the University of London reinforced a theory that evidence of life on the early Earth might be found in rocks on the moon that were ejected during the Late Heavy Bombard period -- about four billion years ago when the Earth was subjected to a rain of asteroids and comets. Given that material from early Mars has been found in meteorites on Earth, it certainly seems reasonable that tens of thousands of tons of terrestrial meteorites may have arrived there during the Late Heavy Bombardment.
Research by a team under Ian Crawford and Emily Baldwin of the Birkbeck College School of Earth Sciences at the University of London in 2008 used sophisticated technology to simulate the pressures any such terrestrial meteorites might have experienced during their arrival on the lunar surface. In many cases, the pressures could be low enough to permit the survival of biological markers, making the lunar surface a productive place to look for evidence of early terrestrial life.

Any such markers are unlikely to remain on Earth, where they would have been erased long ago by more than three billion years of volcanic activity, later meteor impacts, or simple erosion by wind and rain.

However, meteorites arriving on Earth are decelerated by passing through our atmosphere. As a result, while the surface of the meteorite may melt, the interior is often preserved intact.
Could a meteorite from Earth survive a high-velocity impact on the lunar surface? Crawford and Baldwin used finite element analysis to simulate the behavior of two different types of meteors impacting the lunar surface.

Researchers have confirmed two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, concluding one of NASA's longest-running projects. The Gravity Probe B experiment used four ultra-precise gyroscopes housed in an Earth-orbiting satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein's theory about gravity. The first is the geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a gravitational body. The second is frame-dragging, which is the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates.

Gravity Probe-B determined both effects with unprecedented precision by pointing at a single star, IM Pegasi, while in a polar orbit around Earth. If gravity did not affect space and time, GP-B's gyroscopes would point in the same direction forever while in orbit. But in confirmation of Einstein's theories, the gyroscopes experienced measurable, minute changes in the direction of their spin, while Earth's gravity pulled at them.

The project as been in the works for 52 years.

The findings are online in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Scientists studying Saturn have detected a glowing patch of ultraviolet light that marks the presence of an electrical circuit connecting the planet with its moon Enceladus, they report today in the journal Nature.

Long theorized, but not previously seen, the newly discovered bright patch indicates that electrically charged particles travel between Saturn and Enceladus, interacting with the planet's magnetic field lines. This makes a glowing patch near the planet's north pole, caused by a similar phenomenon to the northern and southern lights ( or aurora ) on Earth.

There was no eclipse on Earth, today, but there was one in Earth orbit. More than 22,000 miles above the planet's surface, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watched the Moon pass almost directly in front of the sun:

Look at the full-sized image and trace your finger around the Moon's limb. Thanks to the high resolution of SDO's 16 megapixel cameras, you can actually count jagged mountains backlit by the sun's atmosphere.

Beyond the novelty of observing a such an event from space, these images have practical value to the SDO science team. Karel Schrijver of Lockheed-Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab explains: "The very sharp edge of the lunar limb allows us to measure the in-orbit characteristics of the telescope--e.g., light diffraction on optics and filter support grids. Once these are characterized, we can use that information to correct our data for instrumental effects and sharpen up the images to even more detail."