Open source developers and privacy campaigners are raising concerns over the automatic installation of a shady "eavesdropping tool" designed to enable 'OK Google' functionality but potentially capable of snooping on any conversation near the computer.

When one installs an open source Chromium browser, as it turns out, it "downloads something" followed by a status report that says "Microphone: Yes" and "Audio Capture Allowed: Yes," according to an article by Rick Falkvinge, Swedish Pirate Party founder, published on the website Privacy Online News.

While the Chromium, the open source basis for Google's browser, at least shows the code and allows user to notice it and turn it off, the same installation is included by default in the most popular browser Chrome, used by over 300 million people.

The code was designed to enable the new "OK, Google" hot word detection, which lets the computer do things like search or create reminders in response to human voice. Yet, some users are worried that the service could be activated without their permission, eventually sending recorded data to Google. The worried users describe the Chrome Hotword Shared Module as an audio-snooping "black box", with only the corporation that provided it fully aware of what the injected pre-compiled code is capable of.

The mystery surrounding the dwarf planet Ceres continues to thicken: New images taken by the Dawn probe have revealed a three-mile high pyramid shaped peak, while also giving updated photographs of the planet's puzzling bright spots.

The craft took the photographs on June 9 from a distance of 2,700 miles (4,300 kilometers). It revealed a number of new geographical characteristics, in particular, the high peak that juts out from the surrounding landscape.

"The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features. For example, icy moons in the outer solar system have craters with central pits, but on Ceres central pits in large craters are much more common. These and other features will allow us to understand the inner structure of Ceres that we cannot sense directly," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

A major solar explosion and geomagnetic storm resulted in incredible northern lights on Monday night, mainly seen across northern Europe and North America.


The geomagnetic storm was classified G4, the second-highest possible degree - the last on such a scale happened in March, when auroras were seen as far south as New Mexico.

Analysis of the genome structure of Leningrad siege survivors and their contemporaries has allowed Russian scientists to spot specific DNA mutations that helped people to live through one of the most tragic chapters of the WWII.

A team of researchers took blood samples from Leningrad siege survivors to analyze the structure of the genes involved in metabolism and cell activity when facing severe food shortages. They compared their findings with genetic samples of elderly Russians who did not live through similar horrors.

Many siege survivors who suffered the worst turned out to have a completely different structure of two genes related to PPAR (peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors) proteins, and one from the UCP (uncoupling proteins) gene family, which play major roles in development, metabolism and thermogenesis of higher organisms.

The inhabitants of the besieged city, now known as St. Petersburg, had these genes undergo a mutation that increased the efficiency of the cells' activities and reduced the loss of energy invested in keeping the body warm, according to an article, recently published in the journal Science.

A new study shows fetuses respond to touch more than noise

When it comes to mother-baby connections, new research suggests a mother's touch during pregnancy elicits the greatest response.

In a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers looked at what behaviors resulted in the greatest response from fetuses: a mother's voice, a mother's touch or nothing. The researchers brought 23 healthy pregnant women who were between the 21^st and 33^rd week of gestation into a dark room, and had them try three different behaviors.

On this day 245 years ago - July 1, 1770 - humanity had its closest known encounter with extinction (with the possible exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis).

Two weeks before that date the French astronomer Charles Messier had discovered a faint comet in the constellation Sagittarius, which thereafter rapidly brightened and began moving swiftly across the sky. At its peak it was naked-eye, and its coma, according to various observers, the apparent size of from 5 to 16 full moons across. Lexell's Comet, so named after another astronomer who subsequently calculated its orbit, was then under one-and-a-half million miles from Earth, or less than six times the distance of the Moon, and thus the nearest a comet has ever approached us in recorded history. (Kronk n.d.)

It was also larger than any asteroid known to have come that close, and in fact large enough to have wrought global consequences had it impacted our planet. The comet's nucleus is estimated to have been 5 kilometers in diameter, or approximately half that of the comet or asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

It is a curious fact of history that the celestial spectacle most superstitiously associated with presaging calamity has now been given scientific legitimacy as a major threat to human existence. (Bayle 2000 & Genuth 1997) It is an ironic fact of very recent times that the celestial spectacle most popularly associated in times past with presaging calamity and now known to have this potential in fact, is today looked upon mainly as a showpiece and photo op by much of the public and amateur astronomical community and as a scientific opportunity by the professional astronomical community. I refer in both instances to the appearance of a new comet.

These are thus the best of times and the worst of times for planetary defenders against potential impactors from outer space, since, on the one hand, for the first time since the Earth came into being, some of its inhabitants have an accurate awareness of the nature of this hazard and even the technological potential to do something about it, while, on the other hand, insufficient steps are being taken to protect us from it. What is most needed, I submit therefore, is a raising of comet consciousness among both the general and expert populace, who are currently, to coin a term, cometose.

And how better to do this than to institute a Comet Day? Global recognition has just been rallied for analogous awareness with the first annual Asteroid Day. This took place yesterday, on the anniversary of the largest impact event in recorded history, which occurred on June 30, 1908, in (or over) Tunguska, Siberia. The resulting explosion of the object upon penetration of the atmosphere would have obliterated any major metropolitan area that happened to lie beneath it. Current estimates are of one million objects of this or greater size in the Earth's vicinity, only one percent of which have been discovered and are being tracked to date. The purpose of Asteroid Day is to build a global consensus for finding all the rest as soon as possible, to give us time to devise a suitable defense against any that might be heading our way.

If the cat in Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought-experiment behaved according to quantum theory, it would be able to exist in multiple states at once: both dead and alive. Physicists' common explanation for why we don't see such quantum superpositions—in cats or any other aspect of the everyday world—is interference from the environment. As soon as a quantum object interacts with a stray particle or a passing field, it picks just one state, collapsing into our classical, everyday view.

But even if physicists could completely isolate a large object in a quantum superposition, according to researchers at the University of Vienna, it would still collapse into one state—on Earth's surface, at least. "Somewhere in interstellar space it could be that the cat has a chance to preserve quantum coherence, but on Earth, or near any planet, there's little hope of that," says Igor Pikovski. The reason, he asserts, is gravity.

Pikovski and his colleagues' idea, laid out in a paper published in Nature Physics on June 15, is at present only a mathematical argument. But experimenters hope to test whether gravity really does collapse quantum superpositions, says Hendrik Ulbricht, an experimental physicist at the University of Southampton, UK. "This is a cool, new idea, and I'm up for trying to see it in experiments," he says. Assembling the technology to do so, however, may take as long as a decade, he says.

Lead researcher Hannah Hilbert-Wolf and supervisor Dr. Eric Roberts used innovative methods to examine the ground around Mbeya in Tanzania where a large earthquake occurred some 25,000 years ago.

They found evidence of fluidisation (where soil behaves like quicksand) and upward displacement of material unprecedented in a continental setting, raising questions of how resilient the rapidly growing cities of the region would be in a major shake.

'We can now use this to evaluate how the ground would deform in a modern earthquake,' said Dr. Roberts. 'This is important because the approach is inexpensive and can be used to model how structures might be affected by future events, providing a valuable tool in hazard assessment.'

Hilbert-Wolf said the team found evidence of massive ground deformation and previously unknown styles of liquefaction and fluidisation, caused by past earthquakes. 'This could be a major concern for the growing urban population of East Africa, which has similar tectonic settings and surface conditions,' she said.

The study comes on the back of a series of damaging earthquakes already this year, including in Nepal and Papua New Guinea and the study may be of much use in predicting the effects of earthquakes in those countries.

'What we have shown is that in developing countries in particular, which may lack extensive seismic monitoring, the rock record can be used to not only investigate the timing and frequency of past events, but also provide important insights into how the ground will behave in certain areas to seismic shock,' said Hilbert-Wolf.

Sometime between the demise of the dinosaurs and the rise of primates, Earth suffered a one-two punch from two unrelated asteroids. The double whammy could signify chaos in the inner solar system, triggering a cascade of events that perhaps plunged Earth into the recent ice age.

The impacts that made the Popigai crater in Siberia and the Chesapeake Bay crater on the US East Coast were two of the largest asteroid strikes since the one that killed the dinosaurs, so big that their dust left thin layers of debris all over the globe.

The depth of debris layers shows that the asteroids struck in quick succession - within 20,000 years of each other, around 36 million years ago. A Popagai-sized impact happens just once every 20 million years. So the thinking was that the two rocks were fragments of one larger asteroid.

But when Birger Schmitz of Lund University in Sweden examined sediment from a site in central Italy containing debris from both impacts, he found two distinct types of meteoritic grains. Those from the part of the deposit associated with Popigai were rich in iron; those from the part associated with Chesapeake Bay were iron-poor. So the pair can't be explained by a single body breakup - they must be from two separate asteroids (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, doi.org/5cb).

But how could that happen? One explanation is that chaos in the inner solar system disturbed asteroids' orbits, sending several Earthwards.

It's even possible that a change in Earth's own orbit sent the asteroids on their paths. Such a shift might explain why Earth entered an ice age around 35 million years ago: a new orbit meant less energy from the sun.

The crew of the International Space Station were put on alert briefly over a computer failure in the US segment. It took efforts by the spacemen, as well Russian and American ground control, to set things straight.

The glitch occurred early Saturday morning. The crew were woken up by an alarm signal.

"There was a computer malfunction in the American segment of the ISS," Russian space agency Roscosmos' spokesman Igor Burenkov told the TASS news agency. "The Russian and US ground controls acted together quickly. Besides, Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko helped their American crewmate Scott Kelly to restore the computer in the American segment."

After analyzing the situation, specialists took the decision to reroute the US computer's lines to back-up Russian ones.