Researchers in Canada's western Arctic have found evidence of a crater that formed when a huge meteorite slammed into Earth millions of years ago.

Measuring about 15 miles (25 kilometers) across, the formation was named the Prince Albert impact crater after the peninsula where it was discovered. Researchers don't know exactly when it was created, but evidence suggests the crater is between 130 million and 350 million years old, according to a statement from the University of Saskatchewan.

Meteors are fragments of asteroids or comets that enter Earth's atmosphere at high speeds; most are small, some as tiny as a grain of sand, so they discintegrate in the air, and only rarely are they large enough to make it to Earth's surface. When meteors slam into Earth, they are called meteorites.

A team of geologists spotted this newly identified meteorite crater while surveying the region for possible energy and mineral resources. They were initially intrigued by steeply tilted strata visible in river gorges and other features in the flat tundra of northwestern Victoria Island.

"Unless you recognized the telltale clues, you wouldn't know what you were looking at," researcher Brian Pratt explained in the statement. "You might see a bunch of broken rocks and wonder how they got there, but we found abundant shatter cones."

In the 1998 movie "Armageddon," Bruce Willis plays an oil-drilling platform engineer who leads a team that lands on an asteroid aimed at Earth, drills a hole into its center and explodes a nuclear device that splits the asteroid, saving the planet.

Could it actually happen? Definitely not, say physics graduate students at the University of Leicester in England.

Leaving aside the question of whether we have spacecraft that could transport the drilling team to intercept the asteroid, the group of four students concluded that we simply don't have a big enough bomb to split the asteroid so that the two halves would pass by the Earth.

Ben Hall, Gregory Brown, Ashley Back and Stuart Turner devised a formula to calculate how much energy would be needed to split an asteroid of the size depicted in the film. They reported in two related papers in the University of Leicester Journal of Special Physical Topics that it would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy to split the asteroid in two with both pieces clearing the planet. Unfortunately, the largest nuclear bomb known, a Russian monster known as Big Ivan, yields only 418,000 joules. Hence, they said, the project would require a bomb a billion times as powerful to save the Earth.

Scientists have come up with a theory which could answer one of the biggest mysteries in the universe.

In 2010, NASA scientists discovered four stars which absolutely dwarf anything that comes before them - they are 300 times as massive as the Sun, and twice as large as it was predicted stars could ever be.

Now researchers at the Bonn University in Germany, say the stars, part of the giant star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is about 160,000 light years from Earth, could be the size they are thanks to a few mergers and acquisitions.

Until the discovery of these objects in 2010, observations of the Milky Way and other galaxies suggested that the upper limit for stars formed in the present day universe was about 150 times the mass of the Sun.

This value represented a universal limit and appeared to apply wherever stars formed.
'Not only the upper mass limit but the whole mass ingredient of any newborn assembly of stars appears identical irrespective of the stellar birthplace', said Prof. Dr Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn, a co-author on the new paper.

I can see it in her eyes. Every morning after I wake up and sleepily stumble into my kitchen to pour myself a glass of water or grab some clean clothes from the dryer. After all, who folds clothes anymore?

As I make my way through the house, she lies in wait, crouched in pouncing posture, head poking through the living room blinds just so, keeping an eye out for the squirrels which enjoy a daily breakfast at the dried corn feeder my wife and I placed on our front porch. Sure, there's a sliding glass door separating her from living in all of her primeval and powerful glory, but it doesn't do anything to lessen the intense stare in her eyes. On the surface, she's just a basic, tame house cat, but in her heart, she's a well-trained killing machine.

And she even plays fetch with my spent beer bottle caps.

Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows just how mysterious and perplexing these creatures can be. Anyone who has ever owned a cat which roams the outdoors knows these creatures can be cold blooded killers, laying their kill on your doorstep as either an offering of gratitude or a warning of your impending fate. One can never tell.

While their predatory nature might be well understood by their owners (or is it masters?), some University of Georgia researchers decided to attach cameras to some 60 or more pet cats as they roamed outdoors to see what happens when these creatures are allowed to tap into their primordial instincts.

"The results were certainly surprising, if not startling," said Kerrie Anne Loyd, University of Georgia student and lead author of the KittyCam study, speaking to the Detroit Free Press.

As the venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft hurtles ever outward, breaking through the very borders of our solar system at staggering speeds upwards of 35,000 mph, it's sending back information about the curious region of space where the Sun's outward flow of energetic particles meets the more intense cosmic radiation beyond - a boundary called the heliosheath.

Voyager 1 has been traveling through this region for the past seven years, all the while its instruments registering gradually increasing levels of cosmic ray particles. But recently the levels have been jumping up and down, indicating something new is going on... perhaps Voyager 1 is finally busting through the breakers of our Sun's cosmic bay into the open ocean of interstellar space?

Data sent from Voyager 1 - a trip that currently takes the information nearly 17 hours to make - have shown steadily increasing levels of cosmic radiation as the spacecraft moves farther from the Sun. But on July 28, the levels of high-energy cosmic particles detected by Voyager jumped by 5 percent, with levels of lower-energy radiation from the Sun dropping by nearly half later the same day. Within three days both levels had returned to their previous states.

The last time such a jump in levels occurred was in May - and that spike took a week to happen.

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted "horrible problems" in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold.

Wozniak, 61, was the star turn at the penultimate performance in Washington of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China.

In a post-performance dialogue with Daisey and audience members, Wozniak held forth on topics as varied as public education (he once did a stint as a school teacher) and reality TV (having appeared on "Dancing with the Stars").

But the engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today's personal computer, the Apple II, was most outspoken on the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into remote servers, known as cloud computing.

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

Pasadena, California - In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the Red Planet's past.

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."


The extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is debating whether it can afford another Mars landing this decade. At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which scientists and government officials hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries.

"We are the only country that has ever done anything like this," boasted John Holdren, the senior advisor to President Obama on science and technology issues, who was in the JPL control room as Curiosity touched down. "Many new technologies had to work in perfect synchronization."

Pasadena, California - After a journey of 354 million miles, a spacecraft approaching Mars at 13,200 mph is on course to land inside its sweet spot early Monday.

The landing is one of the riskiest ever tried, and the descent is what NASA officials call "seven minutes of terror."

Nonetheless, the spacecraft carrying the Mars rover Curiosity is on target "to fly through the eye of the needle" and touch down within its five-by-13-mile landing elipse, said Arthur Amador, mission manager of the Mars Science Laboratory. "We're . . . in as good shape as we could hope for."

Yet with so much riding on the $2.5 billion mission, he said at a news conference, "we're often reminding each other to keep breathing."

The spaceship is on course to enter the Martian atmosphere at 1:24 a.m. Eastern time on Monday.

Because the rover is so much larger, more complicated and more ambitious than earlier models, it has to land in a new and far more hazardous way. The landing, which could never be tested in full on Earth, includes a hovering rocket stage, a kind of sky crane, to lower it to the ground. NASA's chief scientist John Grunsfeld has said that because of that heightened landing difficulty, in addition to the unprecedented sophistication of the instruments on board, Curiosity is "the most important NASA mission of the decade."

I'm bobbing on my back on the second largest body of water in the world.

Beneath me is the gentle push and swell of the Atlantic Ocean, 106 million square kilometres of water that stretches from the Arctic to the boundaries of the Antarctic Ocean.

Few things are more relaxing for me than mucking about in the ocean. But unlike a lake or river, here you're always aware of the huge, powerful entity in which you're immersed. Ocean water feels almost alive, a latent force that could go from playful to unimaginably powerful in the blink of an eye.

Which of course - as Maritime residents are all too aware - it can.

But for now, it's a comforting sensation as I float on the warm, shallow waters off P.E.I.'s north shore.

As a weak swimmer who loves the water, I've grown to appreciate sandbars and there's a doozy here at Cabot Beach Provincial Park.

Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole.

This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic oscillation or QPO, is a characteristic feature of the accretion disks that often surround the most compact objects in the universe -- white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes. QPOs have been seen in many stellar-mass black holes, and there is tantalizing evidence for them in a few black holes that may have middleweight masses between 100 and 100,000 times the sun's.

Until the new finding, QPOs had been detected around only one supermassive black hole -- the type containing millions of solar masses and located at the centers of galaxies. That object is the Seyfert-type galaxy REJ 1034+396, which at a distance of 576 million light-years lies relatively nearby.

"This discovery extends our reach to the innermost edge of a black hole located billions of light-years away, which is really amazing. This gives us an opportunity to explore the nature of black holes and test Einstein's relativity at a time when the universe was very different than it is today," said Rubens Reis, an Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Reis led the team that uncovered the QPO signal using data from the orbiting Suzaku and XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes, a finding described in a paper published August 2 in Science Express.