This night was a real pleasure for moon lovers as it marks the third in a series of supermoons this summer. On Monday stargazers were able to view one of the biggest and brightest moons in 20 years - and with a reddened shade.

The supermoon was calculated to be about 50,000 kilometers closer to Earth than when it is at its furthest point, known as its "apogee."

"Because the moon is at perigee, or the closest point of its orbit, it's going to be about 13 or 14 percent bigger, optically, and ... about 30 percent brighter," Philip Erikson, principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory outside Boston, told Reuters.

This moon is also called the Harvest Moon, which means that the full moon is the closest to the autumn equinox, on September 23. The term Harvest Moon comes from the days when farmers relied on moonlight to tend to their crops during the night.

"Whether we call this a super Harvest Moon or a Harvest supermoon, and whether we fuss over the fact that lunar perigee happened just one night before this moon was full, there's no denying that it's the Harvest Moon," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement, reported Space.com, space and astronomy news website.

Super Moon♥ #supermoon2014pic.twitter.com/eCKJBumGeE

- Shoko(쇼코) (@BLAQLady99) September 9, 2014

"This is the year's most famous full moon, and one of only two that even have a name. Yet it's bathed in myth and misconception even without all the extra 'supermoon' business. It will be fun to explore the true secrets of the Harvest Moon while watching it live," Berman added.

A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Jacqueline Faherty has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System. Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune -- but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

Their findings are published today by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

At the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Faherty, along with a team including Carnegie's Andrew Monson, used the FourStar near infrared camera to detect the coldest brown dwarf ever characterized. Their findings are the result of 151 images taken over three nights and combined. The object, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, or W0855, was first seen by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Explorer mission and published earlier this year. But it was not known if it could be detected by Earth-based facilities.

"This was a battle at the telescope to get the detection," said Faherty.

Chris Tinney, an Astronomer at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, UNSW Australia and co-author on the result stated: "This is a great result. This object is so faint and it's exciting to be the first people to detect it with a telescope on the ground."

With climate change and rise in industrial monoculture farming, scientists and farmers increasingly dependent on wild crop species for sustainable crop development.

The ongoing conflicts raging across the Middle East are putting the Earth's essential food stocks at dire risk, a group of researchers from England's University of Birmingham announced Monday.

The scientists, presenting their findings at the British Science Festival in Birmingham, say they have identified key global 'hotspots' for wild crop species - known as crop wild relatives (CWRs) - which are distantly related to domesticated crops. According to the group, these species are most concentrated in the area of the Middle East known as the 'Fertile Crescent,' which arcs around the Arabian desert in Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and ending in Iraq and Iran.

"The Middle East is where the basis of our future food security is located," Dr. Nigel Maxted of the University of Birmingham's School of Biosciences told the Independent. "Wheat is not a native UK species. It was brought from the Fertile Crescent centuries ago."

Globally, the highest concentration of CWR per unit area is found within the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, the scientists report. Ongoing conflicts in this region have increasingly threatened the conservation of these vital plants, as both access and protection are limited.

The land of chocolate and clocks could soon be known for something quite different: tsunamis. Authorities in Nidwalden, a canton in landlocked Switzerland, are factoring the risk of a tsunami in Lake Lucerne into their hazard plans. It is the first official acknowledgement of such a threat in Europe's Alpine region - and comes in step with findings that the risk of tsunamis in the area, which is home to around 13 million people, is much higher than previously thought.

Most tsunamis occur in the ocean but they can also occur in enclosed bodies of water, when underwater sediments shift as a result of an earthquake, falling rocks or underlying instability. The hazard that such events pose is outsized. "The same source placed inside a lake can have a bigger impact than along the coast of an open ocean," says Hermann Fritz, who studies tsunamis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. A tsunami at Lake Yanawayin in Peru in 1971 is thought to have killed 400 - 600 people.

Although not as seismically active as Peru or Japan, the Alps do experience earthquakes from time to time: one as strong as magnitude 6 occurs roughly every millennium around Lake Lucerne, for instance.

The issue of tsunamis in Alpine lakes grabbed the spotlight two years ago when limn­ogeologist Katrina Kremer, then at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and her colleagues reported evidence for a major tsunami in Lake Geneva in ad 563 that had wiped out communities living on its shores¹.

For the first time, researchers have reproduced the results of the Miller-Urey experiment in a computer simulation, yielding new insight into the effect of electricity on the formation of life's building blocks at the quantum level.

In 1953, American chemist Stanley Miller had famously electrified a mixture of simple gas and water to simulate lightning and the atmosphere of early Earth. The revolutionary experiment - which yielded a brownish soup of amino acids - offered a simple potential scenario for the origin of life's building blocks. Miller's work gave birth to modern research on pre-biotic chemistry and the origins of life.

For the past 60 years, scientists have investigated other possible energy sources for the formation of life's building blocks, including ultra violet light, meteorite impacts, and deep sea hydrothermal vents.

Higgs' elementary particle underpins existence in our universe might become unstable, warns renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. The energy potential of the 'God particle' is so vital for the entire universe it could make the cosmos collide, he concludes.

In a preface to a new book he contributed to, which is essentially a collection of lectures gives by famous scientists and astronomers called 'Starmus', Hawking shared his concerns regarding the Higgs Boson, that Hawkins suspects of being unstable and potentially capable of decay.

"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV)," Hawking wrote.

The imminent danger of that power potential is that it could end time any time soon!

"This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming," Hawking explained, acidly noting that "A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."

Stephen Hawking knows so much he cannot be an optimist by definition. Having spooked the audience once with cruel aliens that could kill us all and with artificial intelligence going the Skynet way one day, and now he is promising the end of the universe. All due to the Higgs Boson elementary particle, which was recently discovered by physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider during staged experiments to find this long-ago predicted key element of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The field created by the Higgs Boson is believed to give mass to other particles by slowing their movement through the space vacuum. The existence of such particle was first predicted in the 1960s by British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, and six other scientists. However, the hypothesis was only confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva in 2012.

Hawking's bitter attitude towards the Higgs Boson is understandable, the CNET media outlet recalls. The famous physicist lost a $100 bet that the Higgs particle could be unearthed, plus he made a statement after the Higgs particle was finally identified, that for him physics had become less interesting. After all, as the scientist shared earlier, he believes mankind only has 1,000 years left to leave Earth, anyway.

Scientists have uncovered a giant mountain in the Pacific Ocean, with the summit of the seamount rising 1,100 meters from the 5,100-meter-deep ocean floor. The discovery was made around 2,600 kilometers south of Hawaii.

It was uncovered in mid-August by a research team, which was led by NOAA and University of New Hampshire scientist, James Gardner. The team was aiming to try and map the outer limits of the US continental shelf.

Gardner was surveying one of least known parts of the central Pacific Ocean, which was around 300 kilometers south east of uninhabited Jarvis Island. However, the seamount, which has yet to be named, appeared "out of the blue."

(Phys.org) - Imagine living on an exoplanet with two suns. One, you orbit and the other is a very bright, nearby neighbor looming large in your sky. With this "second sun" in the sky, nightfall might be a rare event, perhaps only coming seasonally to your planet. A new study suggests that this could be far more common than we realized.

The NASA Kepler Space Telescope has confirmed about 1000 exoplanets, as well as thousands more stars considered "Kepler objects of interest", dubbed KOIs - stars that could possibly host planets.

Until now, there has been an unanswered question about exoplanet host stars; how many host stars are binaries? Binary stars have long been known to be commonplace - about half the stars in the sky are believed to consist of two stars orbiting each other. So, are stars with planets equally likely to have a companion star, or do companion stars affect the formation of planets?

A team of astronomers, led by Dr. Elliott Horch, Southern Connecticut State University, have shown that stars with exoplanets are just as likely to have a binary companion: that is, 40% to 50% of the host stars are actually binary stars. As Dr. Horch said, "It's interesting and exciting that exoplanet systems with stellar companions turn out to be much more common than was believed even just a few years ago."

The International Space Station has a cannon that launches tiny CubeSat microsatellites into orbit. Most of the time, those launches are triggered by human scientists on board or back on Earth. But this week, the ISS launched two CubeSats entirely on its own. This is how the uprising begins.

Yes, on Thursday night, ISS commander Steve Swanson was loading blood samples into a freezer when he noticed the doors of the CubeSat launcher were open. Swanson alerted mission control in Houston, which confirmed that two CubeSats had been inadvertently released.

It's not the first time this has happened: A NASA status report shows that two other CubeSats were unintentionally released on August 23rd. That means that, of the 12 CubeSats launched into orbit so far, one-third of them got impatient waiting for permission, and just launched themselves.

The CubeSats, made by Planet Labs, are tiny devices roughly the size of a well-stuffed foot-long cheesesteak. The plan is to launch 100 of the baby satellites into orbit to gather detailed, real-time imagery of the Earth below and make it available to anyone on the internet. You can read tons more about Planet Labs' tiny satellite program here.

Fake masts are discovered by people using a heavily customised Android device - but it's unclear who owns them. Mysterious fake mobile phone towers discovered across America could be listening in on unsuspecting callers.

A report by Popular Science says the towers have been discovered across the country, and have the ability to attack mobile phones through eavesdropping and installing spyware.

They were discovered by people using a heavily customised Android device called the CryptoPhone 500. It uses a secure version of the software which can tell if the phone is being subjected to what is known as a baseband attack. It is then possible to trace the location of the offending tower.

The fake cell towers were detected in July, but the report states there could be more.

Les Goldsmith, chief executive of security firm ESD America, told the magazine: "Interceptor use in the US is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found eight different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at a casino in Las Vegas."

He said several of the masts were situated near US military bases.

"What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of US military bases," he said. "So we begin to wonder - are some of them US government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?

"Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the US military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don't really know whose they are."