The European Space Agency is planning to shake its Rosetta satellite from its slumber and has set a date for Nov. 11, 2014 to land on a comet. ESA has targeted comet comet 67P/Churyumov - Gerasimenko. Prior to the satellite landing on the comet, the space agency has launched the "Wake Up Rosetta" campaign which let the public upload videos and the top submissions will be beamed to the satellite.

Rosetta was first launched on March 2, 2004, and has been in deep space hibernation, near Jupiter, since June 8, 2011. During this first leg of its mission, Rosetta traveled around the sun five times but that was only the beginning of its ambitious mission. Rosetta will wake from hibernation on Jan. 20, 2014 and ESA expects the satellite to start communicating with Earth a few hours after waking up. The satellite will complete its first comet rendezvous maneuver in May 2014.

On Tuesday, NASA announced that it had started the countdown for OSIRIS-REx, the space agency's mission to collect a physical sample from a distant asteroid.

"This is a pioneering effort, both technologically and scientifically," said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-Rex principal investigator from the University of Arizona. "Starting the countdown clock carries a lot of symbolism for us. After December 9, we will have a constant reminder of the time remaining to send OSIRIS-REx on his quest to return a sample of asteroid Bennu."

Led by researchers at the University of Arizona, OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to visit the primitive, carbonaceous asteroid Bennu in 2018, collect a sample from its surface, and return it to Earth in 2023.

"999 days seems a long time to get the spacecraft on the pad, but we know that time will pass quickly. There is a lot of work to do before our spacecraft begins its journey, and we have to be very disciplined to get everything done in time," said Mike Donnelly, an OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA is allowing the world to follow the run-up to launch on the university team's website, on official Twitter feed and on Facebook.

"Osiris was formed from pieces scattered across ancient Egypt, where he awoke as the bringer of life and ruler of the underworld," Lauretta said. "Our spacecraft has a similar story - it will be consist of components fabricated in locations around the world, that once together, will allow us to connect with a near-Earth object that is an accessible remnant from the formation of our solar system."

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed¹ that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing - and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

It's been known since 2005 that Saturn's 300-mile-wide moon Enceladus has geysers spewing ice and dust out into orbit from deep troughs that rake across its south pole. Now, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we know of another moon with similar jets: Europa, the ever-enigmatic ice-shelled moon of Jupiter. This makes two places in our Solar System where subsurface oceans could be getting sprayed directly into space - and within easy reach of any passing spacecraft.

The findings were announced today during the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"The discovery that water vapor is ejected near the south pole strengthens Europa's position as the top candidate for potential habitability," said lead author Lorenz Roth of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas. "However, we do not know yet if these plumes are connected to subsurface liquid water or not."

The 125-mile (200-km) -high plumes were discovered with Hubble observations made in December 2012. Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) detected faint ultraviolet light from an aurora at the Europa's south pole. Europa's aurora is created as it plows through Jupiter's intense magnetic field, which causes particles to reach such high speeds that they can split the water molecules in the plume when they hit them. The resulting oxygen and hydrogen ions revealed themselves to Hubble with their specific colors.

Unlike the jets on Enceladus, which contain ice and dust particles, only water has so far been identified in Europa's plumes. (Source)

San Francisco - The sun's current space-weather cycle is the most anemic in 100 years, scientists say.

Our star is now at "solar maximum," the peak phase of its 11-year activity cycle. But this solar max is weak, and the overall current cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, conjures up comparisons to the famously feeble Solar Cycle 14 in the early 1900s, researchers said.

"None of us alive have ever seen such a weak cycle. So we will learn something," Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University told reporters here today (Dec. 11) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The learning has already begun. For example, scientists think they know why the solar storms that have erupted during Solar Cycle 24 have caused relatively few problems here on Earth.

The sun often blasts huge clouds of superheated particles into space, in explosions known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Powerful CMEs that hit Earth squarely can trigger geomagnetic storms, which in turn can disrupt radio communications, GPS signals and power grids.

But such effects have rarely been seen during Solar Cycle 24, even though the total number of CMEs hasn't dropped off much, if at all. The explanation, researchers said, lies in the reduced pressure currently present in the heliosphere, the enormous bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the sun puffs out around itself.

Scientists have found that a mutation in a new strain of bird flu infecting people in China can render it resistant to a key first-line treatment drug without limiting its ability to spread in mammals.

The discovery means that unlike seasonal flu strains, which often become less transmissible when they develop resistance to drugs like Roche's Tamiflu, the new H7N9 bird flu does not lose any of its spreading potential with drug resistance.

While this does not make H7N9 any more likely to develop into a human pandemic, researchers said it means doctors should be prudent in their use of anti-viral medicines to treat H7N9 cases, and consider using drugs other than Tamiflu, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, where possible.

"It's important to emphasize that these H7N9 viruses seem to transmit fairly inefficiently overall," said Nicole Bouvier, who led the H7N9 study which was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

"But what was surprising about our study was that the drug-resistant virus was no less efficient than the drug-sensitive one. Usually what we see with influenza, is that resistance...also confers a fitness disadvantage on the virus."

Ever wanted your own botnet of flying drones? SkyJack can help.
Serial hacker Samy Kamkar has released all the hardware and software specifications that hobbyists need to build an aerial drone that seeks out other drones in the air, hacks them, and turns them into a conscripted army of unmanned vehicles under the attacker's control.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have catapulted life to Mars and the moons of Jupiter, US researchers say.

They calculated how many Earth rocks big enough to shelter life were ejected by asteroids in the last 3.5bn years.

The Chicxulub impact was strong enough to fire chunks of debris all the way to Europa, they write in Astrobiology.

Thousands of potentially life-bearing rocks also made it to Mars, which may once have been habitable, they add.

"We find that rock capable of carrying life has likely transferred from both Earth and Mars to all of the terrestrial planets in the solar system and Jupiter," says lead author Rachel Worth, of Penn State University.

This is how it starts, people. First we get our chatbots to sound and act realistic - and then we get them to convince everyone they're actually human. Listen to this crazy conversation between Time's Michael Scherer and a telemarketing robot who refuses to admit her true artificial nature.

Recently, Time Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer received a phone call from an apparently bright and engaging woman asking him if he wanted a deal on his health insurance. But he soon got the feeling something wasn't quite right.

After asking the telemarketer point blank if she was a real person or a computer-operated robot, she chuckled charmingly and insisted she was real. Looking to press the issue, Scherer asked her a series of questions, which she promptly failed. Such as, "What vegetable is found in tomato soup?" To which she responded by saying she didn't understand the question. When asked what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained of a bad connection (ah, the oldest trick in the book).

San Francisco - It's time to accept reality: Comet ISON is dead.

Comet ISON broke apart during its highly anticipated solar flyby on Nov. 28, emerging from behind the sun as a diffuse cloud of dust that has since all but dissipated in the darkness of deep space, scientists say.

"At this point, it seems like there's nothing left," comet expert Karl Battams, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said here today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "Comet ISON is dead; its memory will live on."