A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago.

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

Michael Crichton in his 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain deals with a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism that rapidly and fatally clots human blood. A military satellite designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms upon reentering the Earth wreaks havoc in Piedmont, Arizona, where the satellite lands. This may not seem like the stuff sci-fi anymore, now with some leading scientists claiming that the microorganism found in 'red rain' in Sri Lanka is of extraterrestrial origin.

Red rain which caused fear and panic in four different areas in the country namely, Monaragala, Polonnaruwa, Sewanagala and Manampitiya leaving red frost in the latter two districts, continue to baffle local scientists still studying samples of the freak showers. Similar showers of 'blood rain' were experienced in Kerala, South India during two consecutive months from July to September this year, spawning several scientific and non-scientific theories with regarding to its origin.

So from where exactly does this mysterious rain originate? Is it from the earth whose natural elements we are familiar with having growing in these environments since the day we were born? Or from some extraterrestrial origins we are completely alien to? Was Sri Lanka's best known expatriate resident, Sir Arthur C Clarke was correct when he said that alien life existed wishing that he would live to see proof of this before his death? Are we at the brink of a close encounter with aliens, which has coincided with many other strange happenings occurring both here and in other parts of the world? For example the mysterious allergies in school children, the cause of which scientists are still trying to work out.

Does the red rain have a cosmic ancestry - a hypothesis first trotted out by Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar (of Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam) in a paper that won world recognition, which pointed to higher life forms including intelligent life?

In a bid to allegedly prevent 'bio-scientific problems in the future' to quote a leading state paper, the Health Ministry is to dispatch six doctors to the affected areas. The same paper states that further studies by the Industrial Technology Institute and Nano Technology Institute also found the algae was harmless and had no impact on human health.

As mentioned in my last post, Mars has two moons. Jupiter has... well, it's complicated.

Galileo discovered the four big ones in 1609 - 1610. Today they're known as the Galilean Moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

It took 282 years for the next Jovian moon to be spotted, which is remarkable, because a lot was discovered in the meantime (including the moons of Mars). That next-discovered moon was known as "Jupiter V" until 1975, when it got the name Amalthea.

Many Jovian moons were discovered since then; the current count stands at 67. Two were discovered in 2010 and two more in 2011, so others probably remain to be found. The four Galilean moons are much, much bigger than all the others, which is why it took the others so long to be found.


The fact that moons continue to be discovered isn't the only complicating factor, however. Jupiter can capture asteroids or comets, turning them into moons. Actually, any planet can do that, but Jupiter's large mass makes it very good at capture. Most of Jupiter's small moons are thought to be captured asteroids (or captured asteroids that broke into pieces).

Andrea Hernandez won't have to leave her high school for refusing to wear a badge designed to track her every move there - yet - her attorneys announced today.

A district court judge for Bexar County, Texas, has granted a temporary restraining order to prevent Northside Independent School District from removing a Hernandez from John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy because she refused to wear a name badge designed to use a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip to track students' precise location on school property, the Hernandez's attorneys announced today.

"The court's willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go - not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset, in general, that everyone needs to be monitored and controlled," said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.

The cashless society came a step closer today, with the launch of a service that offers a prepaid Visa card for children aged 8-16 and claims to be 'pocket money for the digital age.'

PKTMNY allows parents to deposit money into an account for their children to then use a Visa card linked to it to withdraw money, use contactless payments in shops and buy items on the internet.

But it's improbable that most parents will take up Visa's offer to replace old-fashioned pocket money. There is a raft of fees and charges: a £5 one-off joining fee per family, and then a £1 monthly charge per child. So if you have two children, the first year would cost you £29 in charges.

For the first time, blind people could read street signs with a device that translates letters into Braille and beams the results directly onto a person's eye.

The technology is a modification of a previous device, Argus II developed by Second Sight, which has been implanted on 50 patients, many of whom can now see colors, shapes, and movements. The complicated device uses a camera attached to a pair of glasses, a small processor to convert the signal of the camera into electrical stimulation, and a microchip with electrodes attached directly to the person's retina.

The technology, used primarily for patients with retinal pigmentosis which causes patients to lose the use of their retina but to still have working neurons, can take up to 10 seconds to convert a single letter and minutes to read a single word, and can only be used with words that are printed in a large font and held up close to a person's face. Street signs, for example, cannot be read. The new technology, a modification of the Argus II, should take just seconds to read words, by contrast.

"In this clinical test with a single blind patient, we bypassed the camera that is the usual input for the implant and directly stimulated the retina. Instead of feeling the Braille on the tips of his fingers, the patient could see the patterns we projected and then read individual letters in less than a second with up to 89% accuracy," lead author of the paper Thomas Lauritzen said in a press release.

Analysts brands operating system as confusing.

Analysts have criticized Microsoft's latest operating system Windows 8 by calling it confusing and for playing its part in slow PC growth.

In a research note from analyst Chris Whitmore, the first reason Deutsche Bank attributed for decreasing its PC estimates this quarter was a "lackluster initial uptake of Windows 8." In addition to referring to the impact of "macro weakness" and the "fiscal cliff", he continues:

"As in past cycles we expect the introduction of a new Microsoft OS to spur an increase in PC demand. However...we believe Win8 will have a more muted impact than prior cycles for a several reasons: 1) Win8 reviews are mixed due to a confusing UI; 2) there is a lack of Enterprise interest in Window 8; 3) tablet form factor complicates positioning (Win8 vs. Windows RT), 4) continued substitution of PCs by iPads/tablets 4)."

The mainly-vegetarian bear is likely to have starved during the Ice Age when its main source of food disappeared. Carbon dating of cave bear bones suggests its extinction almost 30,000 years ago, coincided with major changes in the environment.

Professor Anthony Stuart, a Natural History Museum palaeontologist, and a colleague from the University of Vienna, used new radiocarbon dating of fossil remains from sites across Europe, to accurately establish the timing of the bear's disappearance.

The cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) was found across much of Europe from Spain to the Urals but no further east suggesting it was unsuited to areas of extreme temperatures.

Despite weighing up to 1,000lbs the cave bear, unlike its modern day counterpart which eats fish, was entirely vegetarian and probably ran out of food as the climate cooled and vegetation disappeared.

Australian researchers have invented a device that can reset the body's clock and help people get a proper sleep even after a flying to a different time zone.

The device called Re-Timer works by stimulating the part of brain that regulates 24-hour sleep cycle in the body.

The device has been developed and launched by sleep researchers at Flinders University, Australia.

"Body clocks or circadian rhythms influence the timing of all our sleeping and waking patterns, alertness, performance levels and metabolism," said Psychologist Professor Leon Lack from Flinders University.

People who wish to reset their body clocks to fit their sleep schedule must prepare in advance. The device must be used three days for 50 minutes each day. To advance body clock, the user must wear the device after awakening in the morning while wearing it before bed time delays the body clock.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.

The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds - the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.

SAM apparently spotted something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity's huge robotic arm delivered to the instrument recently.

"This data is gonna be one for the history books," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. "It's looking really good."

The rover team won't be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results. Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco.