Edward Snowden's magic thumb drive holds a lot of state secrets. But it doesn't hold them all.

Vainglorious Ed knows much about what the United States is snooping into. His latest release is a beauty, in fact, revealing that the National Security Agency sweeps up 5 billion cellphone-call records worldwide every day.

The Snowden reveals are the perfect holiday scandal - the one that just keeps on giving.

But there is a flip side to all this very disquieting news about the disappearance of our personal privacy space and the federal government's role in taking it away from us.

The NSA is not the only pack of supersnoops tapped into the waves of American metadata washing daily from sea to sea. They aren't the only ones looking into our personal lives in places we do not like having them look.

Cyberthievery is becoming rampant. On Wednesday, I got a letter from the Maricopa County Community College District informing me of "a security incident that may have resulted in the disclosure of your personal information."

Perhaps you heard about it. More than 2.4 million students, former students and employees may have had their personal information held by the college district stolen.

Personally, I'm outraged about this. Not because thieves may have stolen my data. But because I can't for the life of me figure out why the district has my data in the first place. I've never taken a class there! What the hell are they doing with my stuff?

Maybe the answer is that far more people have our stuff than most of us realize.

Not so long ago, the most closely held secret at the Pentagon was the design of the F-35, the new generation of attack jet. A group of hackers known as Titan Rain/Byzantine Hades is believed to have stolen much of the F-35 design data on behalf of the Chinese in the mid-2000s.

A giant planet that has been found orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance has stirred immense confusion in the minds of US astronomers, making them question planet formation theories.

The planet - currently known as HD 106906 b - weighs in at 11 times the mass of Jupiter and is orbiting its star at a massive distance of 60 billion miles - a much further distance than any planet has ever previously been seen orbiting its star.

The planet has been described as unlike anything astronomers have ever seen before.

"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," said Vanessa Bailey, the team's lead researcher with the University of Arizona's astronomy department in a news release.

You probably have no idea how much of yourself you have given away on the internet, or how much it's worth. Never mind Big Brother, the all-seeing state; the real menace online is the Little Brothers - the companies who suck up your personal data, repackage it, then sell it to the highest bidder. The Little Brothers are answerable to no one, and they are every-where.

What may seem innocuous, even worthless information - shopping, musical preferences, holiday destinations - is seized on by the digital scavengers who sift through cyberspace looking for information they can sell: a mobile phone number, a private email address. The more respectable data-accumulating companies - Facebook, Google, Amazon - already have all that. Even donating money to charity by texting a word to a number means you can end up on databases as a 'giver' - and being inundated with phone calls from other noble causes. Once your details end up on a list, you can never quite control who will buy them.

As you surf the web, thousands of 'third-party cookies' track your browsing habits. Then there's your smartphone, which can log information every waking and sleeping moment. Quintillions - yes that really is a number - of pieces of data are being generated by us, about us. Look at Facebook. In a typical week, its users upload 20 billion items of content - pictures, names, preferences, shopping habits and other titbits: all information that can be stored and later employed to help advertisers.

It is perfectly legal for companies to spy on us, and it is very lucrative. Some analysts estimate we're each giving away up to £5,000 worth of data every year. A worldwide industry has emerged over the past decade that is dedicated to finding new ways of extracting and analysing this bounty. 'Data brokers' operate enormous clearing houses which buy, analyse and then sell online and offline data. One of the largest, Acxiom Corporation, is believed to hold information on about 500 million consumers around the world, and has annual sales of more than $1 billion. Many of the big social media companies, including Facebook, work closely with these data brokers - cross-referencing your status updates against postcodes or loyalty-card data from shops. From thousands of fragments, they can build a remarkably detailed picture of you.

A little further down the chain, companies are scooping up your tweets or Facebook posts, analysing them and selling on the results for a hefty fee: this week Sony paid $200 million for a company that does exactly that. This doesn't just affect exhibitionists on Facebook; if you've completed the electoral register, your home address could be only a click away for anyone vaguely interested.

Comet ISON's visit to Earth was a bit of a disappointment - but next year Mars is getting a cometary visitor that looks like it will be anything but. Calculations suggest that the Red Planet's "comet of the century" will come closer to its surface than any comet has come to Earth's in recorded history - causing a meteor shower so epic that it may pose a danger to the spacecraft that orbit Mars.

Comet C/2013 A1, also known as comet Siding Spring after the observatory in New South Wales, Australia, where it was discovered, is due to cross Mars's orbit on 19 October 2014.

Early estimates of its path made it look as though the comet could smack into the Red Planet.

A more recent study rules out a collision - but only just - and raises the alarm for the fleet of orbiters overhead.

Comet ISON may be no more than just a cloud of icy debris these days but there's another comet that's showing off in the morning sky: C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy), which was discovered in September and is steadily nearing its Christmas Day perihelion. In the early hours of Dec. 3, astronomers using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii captured this amazing image of Lovejoy, revealing the intricate flows of ion streamers in its tail. (Click here for a higher resolution of the image above.)

Wolves have social skills that may have contributed to their domestication thousands of years ago.

Research suggests they can learn where food is hidden by watching humans and recognise when an attempt is made to fool them.

When early humans began to tame wolves, they may have built on this ability to learn from others, scientists believe.

Recent research suggests that humans domesticated dogs about 18,000 years ago. Possibly the first dog to be domesticated was a European grey wolf that is now extinct.

But how much of the dog's ability to communicate with humans developed over time and how much arose from wild traits is unclear.

When it launches in 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will let us see deeper into the universe than ever before. Its enormous eye is centered around 18 octagonal mirrors which assemble to form the largest telescope mirror ever built, but someday even the James Webb Telescope (formerly the Next-Gen Space Telescope) will outlive its usefulness - and then what will we do? The obvious answer is to launch an even more advanced telescope, one with an even bigger mirror that can focus on even more distant or difficult light. There's just one problem: given the costs and practical barriers to launching objects into space, it's very possible that in this case simply going bigger may be impossible.

That's where DARPA comes in. The agency has always liked playing smarter - rather than harder - and has a stated goal of allowing its government to view any point on the planet, instantly and in real-time. That being the case, they needed to develop a way of launching surveillance satellites much more cheaply. DARPA has looked into everything from satellite miniaturization to Hyperloop style drone throwers, but a satellite's mirror is the hardest part to launch in most cases. In a move sure to excite cash-strapped astronomers and terrify nervous libertarians, DARPA now says it could have a way around that problem, making high-fidelity space cameras much quicker and cheaper to launch.

View the video below for a quick artist's rendering.

Stones as large as mountains could be physical evidence for interplanetary lightning bolts on Earth.

In the last installment about immense solitary stones that are found all over the world, it was noted that several of them in Australia and Europe could be the result of tremendous electric arcs. The magnetic fields created from such forces may have lifted the sediments and other materials from the surrounding landscape, crushed it in compression zones capable of squeezing sand into stone, and left behind a solidified mass. Some extraordinary formations are located in areas where there is nothing around except flat desert for thousands of square kilometers.

Sometimes the stone monoliths are made from several minerals that are fused into a solid, although the various crystals retain their shapes. Granite is an example of different minerals that have been fused into a single stone and then laid down in enormous beds - although there are almost as many different kinds of granite as there are deposits.

Granite is composed of feldspar and quartz, but usually contains mica and hornblende as well, providing a characteristic sparkle. Granite decomposes into soils that are well drained and high in mineral nutrients, making places like California ideal for agriculture. Since the Sierra Nevada mountains are granite uplifts, the erosion of the peaks has supposedly washed down the rivers over millions of years, forming the sediments in the Central Valley, "America's breadbasket".

On every continent are examples of isolated stone mountains that are not easy to explain.

Mount Augustus in Australia is an example of a sandstone monolith that could be the largest of those monoliths that also includes Uluru. Mount Augustus, or Burringurrah to the local Wadjari people, is an asymmetric anticline resting on top of what geologists refer to as "very old" granite. Its composition differs markedly from the underlying rock strata.

Ben Bulben is an example of another isolated monolith, or tor, that can be found on every continent. They all share similar morphology, although they are composed of different minerals. Mount Augustus, for instance, is made up of rocks and pebbles of various sizes cemented together by hard sandstone. In other areas of Australia, such as Bald Rock, the great blocks of stone are actually granitic, resting on top of discontinuous strata that does not match the overall structure of the rock.

The geology of Ben Bulben is quite different, however. It is composed of Darty limestone (which makes up the Darty mountains) and shale, overlying Glencar limestone. Ben Bulben is the headland of the Darty mountains, sloping gradually upward until the flat-topped mesa and steep, regularly carved cliff face stop at the edge of the ocean. The change from Ben Bulben shale to Glencar limestone in the monolith is dramatic - the boundary layer is paper-thin.

In other areas of the world, such as Peña de Bernal in Mexico, or the Rock of Gibraltar in Europe, the single stones appear to be metamorphic, indicating a powerful energy source that drew the material in the mountains together, as well as melting and reforming their mineralogical composition. The Rock of Gibraltar is composed of metamorphosed limestone and chalk. The Strait of Gibraltar, itself, demonstrates some remarkable topography and could mark an area where Earth-grazing electric arcs touched-down and sculpted the region.

WUWT readers may recall our coverage of Charles Monnett, whose antics with polar bear sitings and attribution led Al Gore to put this famous animated video clip into An Inconvenient Truth and make wild claims about polar bears drowning for lack of sea ice:


Monnett's legal case is over, and he has been forced to resign:

Scientist settles legal case over study of polar bear drownings

Becky Bohrer, The Associated Press / 37 min ago

JUNEAU, Alaska - An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has retired as part of a settlement with a federal agency. Charles Monnett was briefly suspended in 2011 from his work with the U.S. ...

Under the settlement, signed in October but released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on Wednesday, Monnett will receive $100,000 but cannot seek Interior Department work for five years. His retirement was effective Nov. 15, at which point the agency agreed to withdraw the letter of reprimand and issue Monnett a certificate for his work on the tracking project.