The reach of Google's online empire is hard to overstate. In a sense, the Google search engine is the loom through which the entirety of the public internet is woven. With tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, the company also handles many of our private online tasks. Using the data generated by these services to target online ads, Google has built a business that generates tens of billions of dollars a year.

Now, with the $500 million purchase of Skybox, a startup that shoots high-res photos and video with low-cost satellites, Google can extend its reach far across the offline world. Thanks to its knack for transforming mass quantities of unstructured data into revenue-generating insights, the unprecedented stream of aerial imagery to which the company is gaining access could spark a whole new category of high-altitude insights into the workings of economies, nations, and nature itself.

But this acquisition will also demand assurances from Google that it will incorporate privacy safeguards into its vast new view of the world. Already Google gets a lot of flack for tracking user behavior online. With Skybox's satellites, Google may gain a window into your everyday life even if you don't use Google at all.

This month, the full moon falls on Friday the 13th.

Freaky? Nah, probably not.

Despite many myths, the full moon does not actually embolden criminals, bring about births or make people mad, studies show. And while Friday the 13th superstitions may be well entrenched, there's nothing particularly special about a full moon falling on this date.

This Friday's full moon will be the lowest in the sky this year, however, since it will occur so close to the summer solstice. You can watch this freaky full moon rising in a live webcast on Live Science, beginning at 9:30 p.m. EDT tonight (June 12).

Premature hype over gravitational waves highlights gaping holes in models for the origins and evolution of the Universe, argues Paul Steinhardt.

Intentional damage to a Proton rocket booster was reportedly established by a polygraph and a criminal case has been initiated, Izvestia daily quotes the Ministry of Interior. Previously sabotage was considered an unlikely option.

An investigation into the Proton-M rocket crash in April 2013 conducted by the Federal Security Service (FSB) has resulted in establishing general proof that foreign matter could have been deliberately placed into crucial components of the booster in order to provoke malfunction - at the factory where the boosters are assembled.

As Izvestia found out, the Ministry of Interior launched a criminal case of "Intentional destruction or waste of property which caused human death through negligence or other grave consequences."

It has now been leaked that the cause for a special investigation occurred back in April 2013, when X-raying at an incoming control checkpoint detected several unused aluminum tube seals inside the air duct supply of the second stage engine RD-0210. If the fault had not been noticed, it would have resulted in yet another crash of the booster.

Emergency malfunction repairs cost about $6,000, and the $83 million launch of a booster (excluding the vehicle it was launching) was saved.

Satellite dwarf galaxies at the edges of the Milky Way and neighboring Andromeda defy the accepted model of galaxy formation, and recent attempts to pigeon-hole them into the model are flawed, an international team of scientists reports.

The mismatch raises questions about the accuracy of the standard model of cosmology, which is the widely accepted paradigm for the origin and evolution of the universe, the astrophysicists say.

A preprint of the research paper, accepted for publication by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is online here.

The standard model, also called the "lambda cold dark matter model," says that satellite dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to behave a certain way: The galaxies would form in halos of dark matter, be widely distributed and would have to move in random directions, said Marcel Pawlowski, a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the new study.

"But what astronomers see is different," Pawlowski said. "We see the satellite galaxies are in a huge disk and moving in the same direction within this disk, like the planets in our solar system moving in a thin plane in one direction around the sun. That's unexpected and could be a real problem."

In the Milky Way, the dwarf galaxies and accompanying star clusters and streams of stars are in what's called the Magellanic plane, or what the authors call the Vast Polar Structure; and in Andromeda, half of the satellites are in the Great Plane of Andromeda.

Pawlowski and 13 co-authors from six different countries examined three recent papers by different international teams that concluded the planar distributions of galaxies fit the standard model.

"When we compared simulations using their data to what is observed by astronomers, we found a very substantial mismatch," Pawlowski said.

Imagine if people from Kansas and California were as genetically distinct from each other as someone from Germany is from someone from Japan. That's the kind of remarkable genetic variation that scientists have now found within Mexico, thanks to the first fine-scale study of human genetic variation in that country. This local diversity could help researchers trace the history of the country's different indigenous populations and help them develop better diagnostic tools and medical treatments for people of Mexican descent living all over the world.
The team has done a "tremendous job" of creating a "blueprint of all the genetic diversity in Mexico," says Bogdan Pasaniuc, a population geneticist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research.

Mexico contains 55 different indigenous ethnic groups, 20 of which are represented in the study, says Andrés Moreno-Estrada, a population geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and the study's lead author. Working with Carlos Bustamante, another Stanford population geneticist, the team sampled the genomes of indigenous populations all over Mexico, from the northern desert of Sonora to the jungles of Chiapas in the south. Over centuries of living so far apart - and often in isolation because of mountain ranges, vast deserts, or other geographic barriers - these populations developed genetic differences from one another, Bustamante explains.

Many of these variants are what he calls "globally rare but locally common." That is, a genetic variant that's widespread in one ethnic group, like the Maya, may hardly ever show up in people of different ancestry, like people of European descent. If you study the genomes of only the Europeans, you'd never catch the Maya variant. And that's a big problem for people with Maya ancestry if that variant increases their risk of disease or changes the way they react to different kinds of medication. "All politics is local, right? What we're starting to find is that lots of genetics is local, too," Bustamante says.

Ninth-graders design science experiment to test the effect of cellphone radiation on plants. The results may surprise you.

Five ninth-grade young women from Denmark recently created a science experiment that is causing a stir in the scientific community.

It started with an observation and a question. The girls noticed that if they slept with their mobile phones near their heads at night, they often had difficulty concentrating at school the next day. They wanted to test the effect of a cellphone's radiation on humans, but their school, Hjallerup School in Denmark, did not have the equipment to handle such an experiment. So the girls designed an experiment that would test the effect of cellphone radiation on a plant instead.

The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress, into a room without radiation, and six trays of the seeds into another room next to two routers that according to the girls' calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone.

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests. In a behavior that's unusual for a primate, the silvery gibbon sings: It can vocalize long, complicated songs, using 14 different note types, that signal territory and send messages to potential mates and family.

Far from being a mere curiosity, the silvery gibbon may hold clues to the development of language in humans. In a newly published paper, two MIT professors assert that by re-examining contemporary human language, we can see indications of how human communication could have evolved from the systems underlying the older communication modes of birds and other primates.

From birds, the researchers say, we derived the melodic part of our language, and from other primates, the pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech. Sometime within the last 100,000 years, those capacities fused into roughly the form of human language that we know today.

But how? Other animals, it appears, have finite sets of things they can express; human language is unique in allowing for an infinite set of new meanings. What allowed unbounded human language to evolve from bounded language systems?

"How did human language arise? It's far enough in the past that we can't just go back and figure it out directly," says linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "The best we can do is come up with a theory that is broadly compatible with what we know about human language and other similar systems in nature."

The extinct influenza virus that caused the worst flu pandemic in history has been recreated from fragments of avian flu found in wild ducks in a controversial experiment to show how easy it would be for the deadly flu strain to reemerge today.

Scientists said the study involved infecting laboratory ferrets with close copies of the 1918 virus - which was responsible for the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people - to see how easy it can be transmitted in the best animal model of the human disease.

But other researchers have denounced the research as foolhardy and dangerous. Critics said that any benefits of the attempts to recreate 1918-like flu viruses from existing avian flu strains do not justify the catastrophic risks if such a genetically engineered virus were to escape either deliberately or accidentally from the laboratory and cause a deadly influenza pandemic.

However, Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison dismissed the criticisms of his research saying that it is necessary for the development of influenza vaccines and other countermeasures designed to minimise the risks of a future flu pandemic.

"These critics fail to appreciate the precautions and safeguards built into our work, the regulation, review and oversight these studies receive....The risks of conducting this research are not ignored, but they can be effectively managed and mitigated," Professor Kawaoka said.

"We know studies like ours advance the field and help those responsible for making decisions about surveillance and pandemic preparedness [to] base decisions on scientific fact, rather than conjecture. Therefore our research provides important benefits that cannot be achieved by other means," he said in an email to The Independent.

The study, which was carried out in a secure laboratory with the second highest biosafety level, showed that all the necessary ingredients exist in the wild population of bird flu viruses for the emergence of a virus similar to the deadly 1918 flu strain.

At several times in Earth's history, mass extinctions have come close to wiping life out altogether. The reasons for these catastrophes are still unclear - they've been blamed on everything from asteroid impacts to cosmic ray blasts. But a new study has found that our planet itself could have a surprising hand in these disasters.

Research recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that reversals of the Earth's magnetic field may have sparked mass extinctions in the past by stripping oxygen from the atmosphere.