Washington: Astronomers using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have identified 28 new families of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

An asteroid family is formed when a collision breaks apart a large parent body into fragments of various sizes. Some collisions leave giant craters. For example, the asteroid Vesta's southern hemisphere was excavated by two large impacts.

Other smash-ups are catastrophic, shattering an object into numerous fragments. The cast-off pieces move together in packs, travelling on the same path around the Sun, but over time the pieces become more and more spread out.

"We're separating zebras from the gazelles," said Joseph Masiero of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study.

"Before, asteroid family members were harder to tell apart because they were travelling in nearby packs. But now we have a better idea of which asteroid belongs to which family," Masiero said in a statement.

Pasadena, California -- A sequence of radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 was obtained on the evening of May 29, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth, which is 15.6 lunar distances.

The radar imagery revealed that 1998 QE2 is a binary asteroid. In the near-Earth population, about 16 percent of asteroids that are about 655 feet (200 meters) or larger are binary or triple systems. Radar images suggest that the main body, or primary, is approximately 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) in diameter and has a rotation period of less than four hours. Also revealed in the radar imagery of 1998 QE2 are several dark surface features that suggest large concavities. The preliminary estimate for the size of the asteroid's satellite, or moon, is approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide. The radar collage covers a little bit more than two hours.

The radar observations were led by scientist Marina Brozovic of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Some retirees golf. Some dream of buying a boat and sailing the world. Anton and Maria Chobot spent 30 years of their retirement digging up artifacts of the Clovis culture on their property near Buck Lake, Alberta, and now, they may have provided some of the evidence needed to settle a long debate in the science community.

Roughly 13,000 years ago, something touched off the 'Big Freeze' - a 1,300-year-long cold snap formally called the Younger Dryas stadial - that caused major climate changes and droughts.

These have been blamed for the extinction of the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, and also the downfall of the ancient Clovis culture. However, what that something was has been debated for years.

One idea that's proven popular over the years is that a meteorite or comet struck the planet, somewhere around what is now Hudson Bay. However, if something big enough to melt the Laurentide ice sheet had hit the planet there should have been some indication of it, in the form of a crater, or shocked and melted rocks, or 'impact spherules'. And, until recently, the evidence was lacking.

Scientists in Japan have created a new material that can be shaped into complex, conductive 3-D structures. Get ready for your custom brain electrodes.

The rabbit sculpture above is the size of a typical bacterium and is made of a new type of resin that has exciting implications for bionic implants. Developed by researchers in Japan, the resin allows scientists to mold highly conductive, complex 3-D structures at the microscopic level.

The scientists began with a problem: In order to make a tiny resin sculpture into an electrode (which, for example, could be implanted into the brain to treat epilepsy), scientists bake it at high temperatures, which turns its surface into carbon. The "carbonizing" process makes the resin more conductive, but it also wrecks the sculpture's shape, warping it into more of a blob (not so good if you're trying to create a delicate, precise medical implant).

Using only biomolecules (such as DNA and enzymes), scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed and constructed an advanced biological transducer, a computing machine capable of manipulating genetic codes, and using the output as new input for subsequent computations. The breakthrough might someday create new possibilities in biotechnology, including individual gene therapy and cloning.

The findings appear today (May 23, 2013) in Chemistry & Biology(Cell Press).

Interest in such biomolecular computing devices is strong, mainly because of their ability (unlike electronic computers) to interact directly with biological systems and even living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.

On Nov. 18, 2001, millions of sky watchers saw a dazzling storm of Leonid meteors. Some observers heard them too!

All at once there was a eye-squinting flash of light and a strange crackling noise. Puzzled sky watchers looked at one another ... and confessed: "Yes, I heard it, too."

Hearing meteors? It could happen -- and indeed it did, plenty of times during this month's Leonid meteor storm.

"I am sure I could hear several of the meteors," recalled Karen Newcombe, a Leonid watcher from San Francisco -- one of many who reported meteor sounds to Science@NASA on Nov. 18th. "Several times when a Leonid with a persistent debris train flew directly overhead, I heard a faint fizzing noise [instantly]." There was no delay between the sight and the sound.

"How is that possible when the meteor was so many miles above my head?" she wondered.

The same question has bedeviled some of history's greatest scientists. For example, in 1719 astronomer Edmund Halley collected accounts of a widely-observed fireball over England. Many witnesses, wrote Halley, "[heard] it hiss as it went along, as if it had been very near at hand." Yet his own research proved the meteor was at least "60 English miles" high. Sound takes about five minutes to travel such a distance, while light can do it in a fraction of a millisecond. Halley could think of no way for sky watchers to simultaneously hear and see the meteor.

Plants that were frozen during the "Little Ice Age" centuries ago have been observed sprouting new growth, scientists say.

Samples of 400-year-old plants known as bryophytes have flourished under laboratory conditions.

Researchers say this back-from-the-dead trick has implications for how ecosystems recover from the planet's cyclic long periods of ice coverage.

The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They come from a group from the University of Alberta, who were exploring an area around the Teardrop Glacier, high in the Canadian Arctic.

The glaciers in the region have been receding at rates that have sharply accelerated since 2004, at about 3-4m per year.

British police are arresting people in the middle of the night if they have made racist or anti-Muslim comments on Twitter following the murder of a soldier by two Muslims in Woolwich, London.

Three men have so far been taken into custody for using Twitter and Facebook to criticize Muslims.

In the Woolwich attack, Lee Rigby, a drummer in the Royal Regiment of Fusliers, was run down in a car and then hacked and stabbed to death by two men with knives and a cleaver. They told a man video recording the scene that it was vengeance for the killings of Muslims by the British Army.

One man has been charged with "malicious communications" on Facebook, the Daily Mail reports.

Two others have been arrested under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred. The police are now arresting people based on mere speech in social media, a detective said in a statement to the press:

The men were arrested under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred. Our inquiries into these comments continue.

What if we could journey to the outer edge of the Solar System - beyond the familiar rocky planets and the gas giants, past the orbits of asteroids and comets - one thousand times further still - to the spherical shell of icy particles that enshrouds the Solar System. This shell, more commonly known as the Oort cloud, is believed to be a remnant of the early Solar System.

Imagine what astronomers could learn about the early Solar System by sending a probe to the Oort cloud! Unfortunately 1-2 light years is more than a little beyond our reach. But we're not entirely out of luck. 2010 WG9 - a trans-Neptunian object - is actually an Oort Cloud object in disguise. It has been kicked out of its orbit, and is heading closer towards us so we can get an unprecedented look.

But it gets even better! 2010 WG9 won't get close to the Sun, meaning that its icy surface will remain well-preserved. Dr. David Rabinowitz, lead author of a paper about the ongoing observations of this object told Universe Today, "This is one of the Holy Grails of Planetary Science - to observe an unaltered planetesimal left over from the time of Solar System formation."

• Revolutionary 'wearable computer' could disrupt crucial cognitive capacity
• Google Glass is a wearable computer with a head mounted display
• But leading experts say distraction glasses pose could be dangerous

Google's Glass 'eye wear' could be potentially dangerous, leading professors have warned.

The revolutionary 'wearable computer' could disrupt crucial cognitive capacity and distract wearers to the point where they miss things which are 'utterly obvious', they say.

Daniel J. Simons, is a professor of psychology and advertising at the University of Illinois and Christopher F. Chabris, is a professor of psychology at Union College.

Google Glass is a wearable computer with a head mounted display. It can connect with the internet via voice command and display information on the glass 'screens'.

In a piece for the New York Times, the two experts examine the dangers the real-time digital distraction could pose.

They write: '...most agree that a smartphone-linked display and camera placed in the corner of your vision is intriguing and potentially revolutionary - and like us, they want to try it.

'But Glass may inadvertently disrupt a crucial cognitive capacity, with potentially dangerous consequences.'