Spiders Eat More Meat Than Humans Every Year🕷

Spiders are a very successful group of arthropods. They're found everywhere from deserts to grasslands to forests to Arctic tundra. More than 45,000 individual species have been identified so far, Nyffeler and Birkhofer wrote. Scientists estimate that there are around 131 spiders per every square meter of land on the globe, and in some places up to 1,000 individuals.

With a few rare exceptions, spiders are carnivores, but it's hard to directly measure their impact on their prey because spiders often hunt at night or in nooks and crannies that are difficult to observe, the researchers wrote. To estimate how much spiders eat, then, the researchers had to start by figuring out how much spider tonnage is out there.

To estimate spider biomass (essentially, the weight of all the spiders in the world), the researchers drew from published data on spider biomass from tropical forests, temperate forests, tropical grasslands, temperate grasslands and shrublands, agricultural land, deserts and Arctic tundra. They then used global land cover for each type of environment to estimate the total weight of spiders on the globe, arriving at 27 million tons.

To figure out how much food it takes to keep 27 million tons of spiders creeping and crawling, the researchers used two methods. In the first, they simply estimated the food needs of a spider per the spider's mass. For most spiders, they pegged this at around 0.1 milligram of food per milligram of spider, or about 10 percent of a spider's body weight, each day. For desert spiders, which live notoriously spartan lives, the researchers used estimates of between 0.01 and 0.04 milligrams of food per milligram of spider.

This method led to a range of between 500 million and 700 million tons.

The second method involved extrapolating from data taken from the field in which scientists actually counted the number of insects spiders ate. This method led to an estimate of between 400 million and 800 million tons.

Insects and springtails (collembolans) make up about 90 percent of spiders' prey, the researchers wrote. A few large species eat worms and small vertebrates, like birds or bats (or even snakes). Forest and grassland spiders are responsible for 95 percent of the prey kill each year, in part because these areas contain the most ground cover and in part because these habitats aren't frequently disturbed. Spiders living in agricultural fields, for example, have to contend with human activities and pesticides. 

It's impossible to say how many individual insects it takes to get to some 800 million tons or how many spiders put together weigh 27 million tons, Nyffeler, a senior lecturer in biology, told Live Science. There is too much variation in the estimates, he said. For example, no one knows how many juvenile (and thus smaller) spiders there are per every larger adult. A British arachnologist did estimate in 1947 that there were approximately 2.2 trillion spiders in England and Wales alone, Nyffeler noted.  

The only other group of arthropods that can compete with spiders, pound-for-pound, are ants, Nyeffeler and Birkhofer wrote, but ants are not overwhelmingly carnivorous like spiders are.

These estimates emphasize the important role that spider predation plays in semi-natural and natural habitats, as many economically important pests and disease vectors breed in those forest and grassland biomes.

Intel to invest $7 billion in factory in Arizona💽

Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich met with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, where the company announced it will invest $7 billion in a factory employing up to 3,000 people.

The factory will be in Chandler, Arizona. Over 10,000 people in the Arizona area will support the factory.

This factory will help the U.S. maintain its position as the global leader in the semiconductor industry.

The 7 nanometer chips will be produced there will be the most powerful computer chips on the planet.

Physicists might have made a mistake in claiming to have turned hydrogen into a metal⚗

Scientists have been chasing hydrogen’s elusive metallic form for over 80 years, foiled by the confoundingly high pressures required to create it. Now, researchers have caught the tell-tale glint of metal in their apparatus, according to a paper published Thursday in Science.

Experts consider this novel state of hydrogen a “holy grail” of solid state physics for its potentially world-changing applications, from big bang-for-your-buck rocket fuel to ideal electric wires.

In any environment humans could survive, hydrogen exists as a gas. But just as water can transform into ice at low temperatures, hydrogen gas, like most substances, can become liquid or even solid if you cool it or squeeze it enough. 

The key to the alchemy of hydrogen is pressure. By definition, metals share electrons that can flow freely throughout the substance, which is why metal spoons get hot while wooden spoons don’t. This property also makes them good at carrying electricity, as well as heat.

To get hydrogen to perform this trick, scientists had to squeeze the atoms so hard that electrons got knocked loose from their original atoms, becoming free to move around.

But achieving such high pressures isn’t easy. Early estimates predicted that hydrogen would become metal at 250,000 times the atmospheric pressure of sea level, but as scientists devised ever craftier experiments, the goal kept receding just out of reach.

It's a question that can only be answered experimentally, and scientists around the world have been racing to create the exotic form of hydrogen in the lab.

“If you look at the literature for the last 30 years,” Eugene Gregoryanz, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, previously told Science News, “I think every five years there is a claim that we finally metallized hydrogen.” Skepticism surrounding this latest announcement is high, too. At least five experts already told Nature they don’t believe the claim.

But eveof at least four forms of solid hydrogen, one as recently as 2011, and a 2015 experimn mistaken claims move the field forward. In the last 40 years, physicists have learned ent led to a record-breaking new superconductor. 

Two physicists claimed that they had finally succeeded in a feat that scientists have been attempting for almost a hundred years – crushing hydrogen and turning it into metal through space travel, and has been hailed as one of the biggest breakthroughs in history.an “alchemical” process. Such a discovery would potentially revolutionise technology and 

But experts have cast doubts on the claims of the two scientists, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, both physicists at Harvard University. They might have mistaken something else for the important metal, a number of other scientists have said.

But the paper was published this week in the journal Science all the same, heralding a succession of headlines that claimed that humanity had made a huge breakthrough that could shed light on some of the central questions of the universe. The news was covered in a range of newspapers and websites.

But five different experts have told Nature's news reporters that they don't believe the claim and that it could be based on an error.

That is what the two Harvard scientists claimed to have done. But they cannot yet show off the piece of metal because it is still stuck between the jaws of the anvil – and they say that removing it might cause it to disappear entirely.

The researchers believe however that the reflective and shiny material they can see crushed in the anvil is metallic hydrogen. One of the scientists, Isaac Silvera, said that when looking through a microscope at the sample it looked to be shiny and so “you can only believe it is a metal”.

But other researchers have said that they don’t necessarily believe that it is a metal. The shininess may be something else entirely – like aluminium oxide, which is known to coat the diamonds that sit in the anvil and may become shiny under high pressure.

Nasa finally publishes controversial fuel free 'impossible drive" paper📃

The EM Drive has made headlines over the past year, because it offers the incredible possibility of a fuel-free propulsion system that could potentially get us to Mars in just 70 days. But there's one major problem: according to the current laws of physics, it shouldn't work.

The issue is the fact that the EM Drive defies Newton's third law, which states that everything must have an equal and opposite reaction. So, according to Newton and our current understanding of the world around us, for a system to produce propulsion, it has to push something out the other way (in space, that's usually combusted rocket fuel).

But the EM Drive works without any fuel or propellants at all. It works by simply bouncing microwave photons back and forth inside a cone-shaped closed metal cavity. That motion causes the 'pointy end' of the EM Drive to generate thrust, and propel the drive in the opposite direction.

Despite years of testing and debate, the drive remains controversial. The bottom line is that, on paper, it shouldn't work, according to the laws of physics. And yet, in test after test, the EM Drive just keeps on working.

Last year, NASA's Eagleworks Laboratory got involved to try to independently verify or debunk the EM Drive once and for all. And a new paper on its tests in late 2015 has just been leaked, showing that not only does the EM Drive work - it also generates some pretty impressive thrust. 

To be clear, despite rumours that a NASA paper on these tests has passed the peer-review process, the version that's been leaked hasn't been published in an academic journal. So, for now, this is just one group of researchers reporting on their results, without any external verification.

But the paper concludes that, after error measurements have been accounted for, the EM Drive generates force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a vacuum.

That's not an insignificant amount - to put it into perspective, the super-powerful Hall thruster generates force of 60 millinewtons per kilowatt, an order of magnitude more than the EM Drive.

But the Hall thruster uses fuel and requires a spacecraft to carry heavy propellants, and that extra weight could offset the higher thrust, the NASA Eagleworks team conclude in the paper.

Light sails on the other hand, which are currently the most popular form of zero-propellant propulsion, use beams of sunlight to propel them forward rather than fuel. And they only generate force up to 6.67 micronewtons per kilowatt - two orders of magnitude less than NASA's EM Drive, says the paper.

The NASA Eagleworks team measured the EM Drive's force using a low thrust pendulum at the Johnson Space Centre, and the tests were performed at 40, 60, and 80 watts.

They were looking for any sign that the thrust could be a result of another anomaly in the system, but for now, that doesn't appear to be the case.

"The test campaign included a null thrust test effort to identify any mundane sources of impulsive thrust, however none were identified," the team, led by Harold White, concluded in the paper.

"Thrust data from forward, reverse, and null suggests that the system is consistently performing with a thrust to power ratio of 1.2 ± 0.1 millinewtons per kilowatt."

But the team does acknowledge that more research is needed to eliminate the possibility that thermal expansion could be somehow skewing the results. 

They also make it clear that this testing wasn't designed to optimise the thrust of the EM Drive, but simply to test whether it worked, so further tweaking could make the propulsion system more efficient and powerful.

So where does this leave us with the EM Drive? Again, the results haven't been published as yet - although rumours are circulating that we're getting tantalisingly close to that happening - so we need to take these leaked results with a grain of salt.

But they do offer further evidence that the thrust produced by the EM Drive is real. So it might be time to start trying to figure out how the system could work - and, more importantly, start testing the drive in space.

Thankfully that's scheduled to happen in the coming months, with plans to launch the first EM Drive having been made back in September.

And back in June, a team of researchers from Finland proposed a way that the EM Drive could work without defying Newton's third law, by propelling photons as a type of exhaust - although that hypothesis has yet to be tested.

We're still a long way off understanding how the system works - or if it works at all - but a lot of brilliant minds are now seriously considering the possibility that we might have a way to get to space without rocket fuel. We're excited to see what happens next.

Tesla + SolarCity🏠🚗

Musk,showcased a line of high-design solar roof tiles that would replace clunky solar panels and tie into an upgraded version of the Tesla wall-mounted battery for those times when the sun doesn’t shine. 

The solar roof tiles will come in four styles. The first looks like a conventional black roof shingle. The second resembles a conventional slate roof. Its individual tiles vary slightly in shade, making for a roof that is the most attractive of all. Third is called Tuscan and looks like the curved terracotta roofing tiles common throughout southern Europe and California. The fourth option is called textured glass and is visually appealing as well.

The secret sauce in all this is a series of micro-louvers built into each tile, technology developed in cooperation with 3M Corporation. The louvers allow sunlight to shine directly on the solar cells below but hide them from view from the street. The result is the best of both worlds — solar panels that generate electricity and a roof that generates compliments and adds value to any home.

To show off the new roof products, Tesla took over four houses on the back lot of Universal Studios that once served as the set for the reality TV series Desperate Housewives. Each house had its old roof stripped off and replaced with one of the four styles of glass roof tiles that Tesla and SolarCity will offer. Naturally, each home had Tesla automobiles parked in the garage to emphasize that having a solar roof means sufficient power for the inhabitants with enough electricity leftover to charge electric vehicles.

The missing link in that scenario is battery storage. Tesla has recently introduced its second generation Powerwall with double the energy storage capacity as the original — 14 kWh versus 7 kWh. It is less sculpted than the original but comes with the inverter built in, which should simplify installation. The original cost is about $7,000 including an inverter and installation. Musk says the new unit should be capable of meeting the needs of a family of four for lighting, normal household use, and a refrigerator for about a day if there is a power outage. Notably absent from his example is any mention of heating or air conditioning.

The Powerwall 2.0 with double the power should cost about the same as the original after installation, which illustrates how quickly the prices of energy storage products are dropping, The original has only been on the market for about a year and already we have a new version with twice the power for about the same money. Elon let slip that he expects Tesla to sell more Powerwalls than automobiles.

Musk is working to build a personal alternative energy ecosystem connected by software and harmonious design, all under the Tesla brand name. The idea is that green-minded homeowners will mix with performance-oriented automotive geeks at Tesla retail stores to shop for electric cars, charging stations, solar rooftops and wall-mounted batteries for energy storage, available separately but designed to work best as a system.

NASA’s Juno mission team is delaying putting their spacecraft into a shorter orbit around Jupiter🛰

Juno has been in orbit around Jupiter since July 4th. The spacecraft is on what is known as a highly elliptical orbit, meaning it spends most of its time far out in space and then spends a few short hours up close to Jupiter’s surface. This orbit is meant to keep the spacecraft away from most of the intense radiation that surrounds the gas giant.

Right now, Juno’s orbit takes 53 days to complete, but that time period will eventually get shorter. After completing two of its longer orbits, Juno was supposed to ignite its main engine again and put itself into a 14-day orbit around Jupiter. Specifically, a pair of helium check valves, which help the main engine fire, didn’t work like NASA wanted them to during a command sequence on Thursday.

The valves should have opened in a few seconds, but it took several minutes, Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager, said in a statement. "We need to better understand this issue before moving forward with a burn of the main engine."

The best time for Juno to reduce its orbit is when it swings by the planet for a few hours in what is known as a perijove pass. That next pass is happening on Wednesday, but now NASA is going to wait for the following pass so that the mission team has more time to figure out what’s going on with the helium valves. That means Juno has at least one more 53-day orbit to complete before it can get into its shorter orbit.

The delay isn’t all bad news though. Originally, the plan was to turn off all of Juno’s instruments on the 19th, so that nothing interfered with the engine burn. But since there’s no burn scheduled, the mission team is going to leave the instruments on while Juno passes close to Jupiter. Plus, the length of Juno’s orbit doesn’t affect the quality of the science the spacecraft can do.The data we collected during our first flyby on August 27th was a revelation, and I fully anticipate a similar result from Juno's October 19th flyby."

Hopefully, 53 days is enough time for NASA to figure out what’s up with Juno’s engine and get it working again.

Smallest working transistor ever made📏

Transistor size is an important part of improving computer technology. The smaller your transistors, the more you can fit on a chip, and the faster and more efficient your processor can be.

That's why it's such big news that a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has successfully built a functional 1 nanometer long transistor gate, which the lab claims is smallest working transistor ever made.

For years, the computing industry has been governed by Moore’s Law, which states that the the number of transistors in a semiconductor circuit doubles every two years. 

Current generation technology uses 14nm scale technology, with 10nm semiconductors anticipated for release in 2017 or 2018 with products like Intel’s Cannonlake line.

What is a (field effect) transistor and how does it work?  A transistor is an electronic switch, the essential building block of modern digital electronics.  A field-effect transistor (FET) has three terminals - a "source" (an input), a "drain" (an output) on either side of a semiconductor "channel", and a "gate" (a control knob).

If you think of electrical current like fluid flow, this is like a pipe with an inlet, and outlet, and a valve in the middle, and the gate controls the valve.  In a "depletion mode" FET, the gate electrode repels away charges in the channel to turn off current between the source and drain.

In an "accumulation mode" FET, the gate attracts mobile charges into the channel to turn on current between the source and drain.   Bottom line:  the gate uses the electrostatic interaction with charges to control current in the channel.  There has to be a thin insulating layer between the gate and the channel to keep current from "leaking" from the gate.

What's the big deal about making smaller transistors?  We've gotten where we are by cramming more devices on a chip at an absurdly increasing rate, by making transistors smaller and smaller.

One key length scale is the separation between source and drain electrode.  If that separation is too small, there are at least two issues:  Current can leak from source to drain even when the device is supposed to be off because the charge can tunnel; and because of the way electric fields actually work, it is increasingly difficult to come up with a geometry where the gate electrode can efficiently (that is, with a small swing in voltage, to minimize power) turn the FET off and on.

What did the LBL team do?  The investigators built a very technically impressive device, using atomically thin MoS2 as the semiconductor layer, source and drain electrodes separated by only seven nm or so, a ZrO2 dielectric layer only a couple of nm thick, and using an individual metallic carbon nanotube (about 1 nm in diameter) as the gate electrode.  The resulting device functions quite well as a transistor, which is pretty damn cool, considering the constraints involved.   This fabrication is a tour de force piece of work.

Does this device really defy physics in some way, as implied by the headline on that news article?  No.  That headline alludes to the issue of direct tunneling between source and drain, and a sense that this is expected to be a problem in silicon devices below the 5 nm node (where that number is not the actual physical length of the channel).   This device acts as expected by physics - indeed, the authors simulate the performance and the results agree very nicely with experiment.

If you read the actual LBL press release, you'll see that the authors are very careful to point out that this is a proof-of-concept device.

That said, the research here is still in very early stages. At 14nm, a single die has over a billion transistors on it, and the Berkley Lab team has yet to develop a viable method to mass produce the new 1nm transistors or even developed a chip using them. But as a proof of concept alone, the results here are still important – that new materials can continue to allow smaller transistor sizes, and with it increased power and efficiency for the computers of the future.

Controlled impact onto the Comet☄

ESA’s historic Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet,confirmation of the end of the mission arrived at ESA’s control centre in Darmstadt, Germany at 11:19 GMT with the loss of Rosetta’s signal upon impact.

Rosetta carried out its final manoeuvre, setting it on a collision course with the comet from an altitude of about 19 km. Rosetta had targeted a region on the small lobe of Comet, close to a region of active pits in the Ma’at region.

Pits are of particular interest because they play an important role in the comet’s activity. They also provide a unique window into its internal building blocks.

The descent gave Rosetta the opportunity to study the comet’s gas, dust and plasma environment very close to its surface, as well as take very high-resolution images.

The information collected on the descent to this fascinating region was returned to Earth before the impact.

The final image was taken from an altitude of 66 feet (20 meters) above the comet’s surface by the spacecraft’s OSIRIS wide-angle camera on Sept. 30. The initial report of 167 feet, or 51 meters, was based on the predicted impact time.

Now that the time has been confirmed, and following additional information and timeline reconstruction, the estimated distance has been updated. Analysis is ongoing.

The decision to end the mission on the surface is a result of Rosetta and the comet heading out beyond the orbit of Jupiter again. Further from the Sun than Rosetta has ever journeyed before, there would be little power to operate the craft.

Mission operators were also faced with an imminent month-long period when the Sun is close to the line-of-sight between Earth and Rosetta, meaning communications with the craft would have become increasingly more difficult.

Many surprising discoveries have already been made during the mission.

Scientists now believe that the comet’s two lobes formed independently, joining in a low-speed collision in the early days of the Solar System.

Long-term monitoring has also shown just how important the comet’s shape is in influencing its seasons, in moving dust across its surface, and in explaining the variations measured in the density and composition of the coma, the comet’s atmosphere.

Some of the most unexpected and important results are linked to the gases streaming from the comet’s nucleus, including the discovery of molecular oxygen and nitrogen, and water with a different ‘flavour’ to that in Earth’s oceans.

Rosetta did not disappoint, detecting the amino acid glycine, which is commonly found in proteins, and phosphorus, a key component of DNA and cell membranes. Numerous organic compounds were also detected.

Comets are time capsules containing primitive material left over from the epoch when the Sun and its planets formed.

While the operational side of the mission has finished today, the science analysis will continue for many years to come.

Worst hack ever, 500 million accounts swiped🔓

Yahoo has admitted a data breach that involved the theft of information from at least 500 million user accounts.

The company said on Thursday that it believed a "state-sponsored actor" stole information including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.
An investigation is still continuing into the breach, which Yahoo said happened in late 2014.

The company said that the stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information, which is not stored in the system that was targeted.
A statement released by Yahoo added: "The investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo's network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter."
Yahoo said it is notifying any potentially affected users and asking any users that have not changed their passwords in the last two years to do so.
A list of security tips published on the company's Tumblr platform on Thursday read: "Change your password and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which you used the same or similar information used for your Yahoo account.
"Review your accounts for suspicious activity.
"Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your personal information or refer you to a web page asking for personal information.
"Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails."
Bob Lord, Yahoo's chief information security officer (CISO), said: " An increasingly connected world has come with increasingly sophisticated threats. Industry, government and users are constantly in the crosshairs of adversaries.
"Through strategic proactive detection initiatives and active response to unauthorised access of accounts, Yahoo will continue to strive to stay ahead of these ever-evolving online threats and to keep our users and our platforms secure."
Network security company NSFocus said that the Yahoo breach had been originally reported in 2012, but that the numbers of users affected had been significantly underestimated.
Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at NSFocus, said: "In 2012, the number of potentially compromised user credentials was estimated to be around 450,000.
"However, the hacker known as Peace is claiming to have up to 500 million user credentials he/she is now attempting to sell online."
He echoed Yahoo's advice for users to change their passwords and added that companies must also take further measures to protect user data.
"Enterprises must first assess what hackers would likely want to steal from them," he said.
"Once identified, enterprises must use all measures at their disposal to protect that data - at all costs."
Other organisations have commented on the effect the breach could have on Yahoo's impending takeover by US telecoms company Verizon.
The firm announced in July that it would be buying Yahoo's operating business - including its search and email services and news pages - for 4.83 billion US dollars (£3.7 billion).
Mark James, of internet security company ESET, said: "As Verizon are about to buy Yahoo, they will have to consider the backlash of future issues with compromised account data."
Others say that the breach draws attention to outdated security systems across other websites.

Revoluntionary Air Flyboard🏄

We'd estimate that no human alive has more experience operating a standing jet platform than Franky Zapata. The French jet ski champion stunned the world in 2011 with the release of his Flyboard, a jet platform tethered to a jet ski that put enough thrust under your feet to lift you 9 meters (29.5 ft) into the air on a jet of water and perform all sorts of aerobatics.

The simple, fun Flyboard very quickly became one of the must-do holiday experiences of the noughties. It was tricky to fly, required a lot of core body strength and sent a lot of people forcefully into the drink – but it was the closest thing you could get to a safe and affordable personal flight experience.

And as it turns out, it may have been a stepping stone to something far greater.

The Flyboard Air. Gone is the jet ski, gone is the hose, and gone is the tether. This thing appears to take the handling and control system of the Flyboard, but replace the water jets with at least one jet turbine engine and what appears to be a backpack fuel tank.

In the video he soars as high as 30 meters (98 ft) above the ground, instantly leapfrogging the best personal flight efforts we've seen from manned multicopter operators – although like previous efforts, Zapata is wise to keep his flight testing over water where an engine failure will be less likely to turn him into a jam pancake.

Details are being kept deliberately scant, but Zapata has released the following figures: The Flyboard Air can go as high as 10,000 feet (3,048 m), with 10 minutes of flight possible and a top ground speed around 150 km/h (93 mph).

That puts Zapata in a similar league with David Mayman and Nelson Tyler, whose JB-9 jetpack is also capable of such numbers. And it saddles him with similar problems: what do you do in case of engine failure? How can you make it safer for non-Zapata level athletes to fly? Can you responsibly sell these things to people?

Parachutes are more or less useless below 100 feet, as they just don't have time to open and slow you down. Even that's a stretch – 250 feet is about as low as you want to get to feel like you're not pushing your luck. And yet, presumably, people will want to fly these things low enough to get a bird's eye perspective on the world. That means both the Flyboard Air and the JB-9 will spend a lot of their flight time in a deadly zone between 30 and 200 feet off the ground where the failure of a jet engine or a miscalculation in fuel load will be catastrophic. With no wings or autorotation to bring them down softly, they're entirely reliant on the thrust they produce.

Still, safety issues aside, the Flyboard Air is a proper space-age flying platform, and Franky Zapata is the perfect man to pilot it. He makes it look nimble and fun, if slightly terrifying. It'll be fascinating to see where things go from here.

Suspected Meteor Explodes Over Cyprus🌠

A suspected meteorite did a close fly-by over Cyprus early on Friday. It had a 45 degree tilt.

It wouldn't have weighed any more than a few kilos, When it crossed Cyprus, it exploded. Some reported the ground shook.

Flashing and thundering so powerfully overhead that the ground shook, according to reports from residents. 

A Cyprus Geological Department official, Iordanis Demetriades, said there’s no indication that the object hit Earth.

This type of near-Earth encounter with a space object may seem rare (and terrifying), but is actually quite common.

32ft Asteroid passed just 40,000km from our planet today📡

A small asteroid designated 2016 RB1 safely flew past Earth today at 10:20 a.m. PDT (1:20 p.m. EDT / 17:20 UTC) at a distance of about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers, or just less than 1/10th the distance of Earth to the moon). Because the asteroid’s orbit carried it below (or over) Earth’s south pole, it did not pass within the orbits of communication or weather satellites. 2016 RB1 is estimated to be between 25 to 50 feet (7 and 16 meters) in diameter. It is the closest the space rock will come to Earth for at least the next half century. 

But this is not the only close encounter we should expect this week.

Another huge asteroid will come hurtling towards Earth next week, and will sweep by more closely.

The space rock is predicted to whistle past our planet at 31,000 miles (50,000km) per hour, on September 17.

Nasa is not certain of the time of the pass due to relying on estimated calculations, and could be up to 16 minutes out on the estimated flyby.

The huge asteroid could be up to a mile long (1.6km). But luckily the giant will pass at a safe distance of 7.3 million miles. An asteroid would need to be of larger than 0.6 miles wide (1 km) to have the force to wipe out humanity.

Jupiter's Auroras Photographed for 1st Time🛰

Juno captured the images on Aug. 27, when the probe skimmed just 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops during the first of three dozen close flybys of the solar system's largest planet.

"First glimpse of Jupiter's north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. [Photos: NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter

This image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter.It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms.  We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.

Saturn has a huge hexagonal storm swirling at its north pole. But Jupiter lacks such a vortex, the new photos show.

"There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that," Bolton said. "The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is."

So the Aug. 27 approach marked the first opportunity for the Juno team to photograph Jupiter up close and make detailed measurements with its suite of eight science instruments. (The spacecraft is currently in a highly elliptical, 54-day orbit around the planet.)

Like Earth, Jupiter has auroras — dramatic light displays that dance above the planet's north and south polar regions. JIRAM got unprecedented looks at the powerful Jovian southern aurora, Juno team members said.

"No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora," he added. "Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora's morphology and dynamics."

Juno also managed to "hear" Jupiter's auroras, using the spacecraft's Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment.

"Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras which encircle Jupiter's north pole," said Waves co-investigator Bill Kurth, a research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa. "These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them."

Next month, Juno is scheduled to perform another engine burn that will shift the probe into a 14-day-long orbit. The spacecraft will continue gathering data — especially during its close flybys over the planet's poles.

Closest look at Jupiter 🛰

Nearly two months after NASA’s Juno spacecraft slipped into orbit around Jupiter, the solar-powered probe made a passage 4,200 kilometres (2,600 miles) over the giant planet’s colourful banded clouds on Saturday, the closest planned encounter during its 20-month exploration of the Solar System’s largest world.

Spinning on its axis once every 30 seconds, Juno swung by Jupiter at 2:44pm BST (1344 GMT), zoomed over its north pole, then raced north to south and crossed the planet’s equator at a blistering speed of 208,000 kilometres per hour (130,000 mph).

“Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Juno passed through this unexplored part of space hugging Jupiter’s cloud tops once before, when the probe fired its main engine to brake into orbit 4 July. But Saturday’s flyby was the first time Juno will collect science data so close to the massive planet.

“We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It will take days for all the science data collected during the flyby to be downlinked and even more to begin to comprehend what Juno and Jupiter are trying to tell us.”

The mission’s prime objective is to study the history and evolution of Jupiter. Scientists want to know if the planet has a solid core and learn how Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field is generated.

Named for the wife of Jupiter in Roman mythology, a figure who could see through the cloak of clouds kept by the chief deity, Juno will reveal the gaseous world’s poles in detail for the first time and peer beneath Jupiter’s clouds with a microwave radiometer.

Earlier missions left open questions about the inner workings of Jupiter, and instead focused on taking pictures and surveying the planet’s many moons.

Juno looped into a 53-day orbit 4 July, and the mission’s flight plan calls for the spacecraft to make two laps around Jupiter before another main engine burn 19 October steers it into a tighter 14-day orbit for regular science observations.

Saturday’s close approach, called a perijove, is a chance to see what awaits Juno on future flybys.

“It’s sort of a toe dip operation,” said Steve Levin, Juno’s project scientist at JPL. “We’re dipping our toes in the ocean.”

Ground controllers switched off all of Juno’s science instruments for the craft’s 35-minute main engine burn to enter orbit around Jupiter last month.

In the weeks since Juno’s arrival, scientists turned on the spacecraft’s camera, spectrometers and detectors one-by-one to ready the probe for Saturday’s encounter.

Juno soared as far as 8.1 million kilometres (5 million miles) from Jupiter on 31 July — the apex of its current orbit — then the planet’s strong gravity pulled the spacecraft back in for Saturday’s high-speed flyby.

“This is the first time with our eyes open, so this is the time to really get excited,” Levin said in a recent presentation to NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group. “I know there was a lot of excitement about orbit insertion … But for this group, the time to be really excited is not July 4, it’s August 27.”

Juno will conduct 35 more close-up passes before a final approach ends with a commanded destructive dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

All of the spacecraft’s nine science instruments, comprising 29 individual sensors, were programmed to collect data Saturday, including JunoCam, a visible camera that was expected to capture the first close-up views of Jupiter’s poles.

NASA plans to release the highest-resolution images of Jupiter’s atmosphere and the first direct snapshots of the planet’s polar regions in the next couple of weeks, the space agency said in a statement Saturday. JunoCam has also recorded imagery of Jupiter for nearly a full orbit of the planet, and scientists will assemble the pictures into a time-lapse “marble movie” showing its motion since early July.

“We are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world,” Bolton said.

Detailed analysis of the data gathered Saturday will take months, and Levin said earlier this month that Juno’s science team aims to release the initial results from the mission at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in December in San Francisco.

“I’m anticipating there will be lots of great stuff,” Levin said.

Scientists originally planned for Juno to enter a longer 107-day path around Jupiter, then fire its engine again in October to immediately go into its 14-day orbit. Managers decided after Juno’s launch to change the plan to divide the 107-day orbit into two 53.5-day orbits, giving scientists an early sneak peek at the conditions the spacecraft will encounter.

Juno has a finite lifetime because it will go through Jupiter’s intense radiation belts, running the risk of electronics damage caused by collisions charged particles encircling the planet. The mission is due to end in February 2018, but NASA officials may be able to grant a limited extension if Juno remains healthy.

“When we looked at it, one of the conclusions we drew was we would really like to get a sense of what the environment is like, how the instruments are really going to work, and what surprises Jupiter is going to throw at us before we’re on this two-week cadence, where we have a flyby every two weeks,” Levin said.

Once Juno starts circling Jupiter every two weeks Oct. 19, mission managers will have limited time to recover from technical problems that may crop up.

“If something is really wrong, we have the option of delaying that [19 October manoeuvre] and take another 53 days before we go into the main mission,” Levin said. “We wouldn’t want to do that for a variety of reasons. It costs money and things like that, but if there were really bad surprises, we have that option.”

Spacewalk with Rubins and Williams 🛰

Space station crew members have conducted 194 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,210 hours and 46 minutes working outside the station.

NASA astronauts Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins are due to work outside the International Space Station on Aug. 19 for 6.5 hours. The duo will install the first of two International Docking Adapters that future Commercial Crew vehicles being developed by Boeing and SpaceX will use to dock to the space station -- a significant milestone in NASA’s work to return crew launches to U.S. soil.

The docking adapter arrived to the space station July 20 on a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply spacecraft. On Wednesday, ground controllers used the Canadarm2 robotic arm, and its attached “Dextre” Special Dexterous Manipulator, to extract the IDA from the trunk of Dragon and position it just 2 feet away from Pressurized Mating Adapter-2 located on the forward end of the Harmony module.

Once the IDA is moved to a surface to surface contact with the PMA, Williams and Rubins will begin work to hook up tethers in advance of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi sending commands to close the hooks between the two docking ports. Once the hooks are closed, Williams and Rubins will press ahead to mate power and data connectors for future use of the IDA.

Williams is wearing the spacesuit with a red stripe. Rubins is wearing the spacesuit with the white stripe. This is the fourth spacewalk in Williams’ career and the first for Rubins. It is the 194th spacewalk for the space station

NASA now has this super camera in their arsenal 🚀📹

You’ve never truly seen what a rocket plume looks like. They are extremely bright and therefore, have never been photographed properly and unless you want to stare directly into one, it will be nearly impossible to imagine. Although that’s difficult, considering there haven’t been cameras that could capture its image before.

NASA unveiled a new camera during its recent space launch test, which is able to show the detail in a rocket plume. And it looks pretty spectacular.

The new High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) project overcomes this by being able to record multiple slow motion exposures at once and combining them into a more high-quality video.

The HiDyRS-X gives researchers the best of both worlds, and this QM-2 booster test was the camera’s first real world dry-run.How the HiDyRS-X works, there’s not much info about that. A year-old memo from when the project was first moved into the Prototype stage says, “camera exposure will instead be controlled at the chip/pixel level and then integrated into a high-speed video camera.”

In fact, the HiDiRS-X team says it captured things never before seen during a rocket booster test.

Currently, this is just a prototype. Scientists plan to build a second one with more advanced capabilities, including with alignment.

One Year on Earth Seen From One Million Miles 🌎

On July 20, 2015, NASA released to the world the first image of the sunlit side of Earth captured by the space agency's EPIC camera on NOAA's DSCOVR satellite. The camera has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its orbit at Lagrange point 1, approximately 1 million miles from Earth, where it is balanced between the gravity of our home planet and the sun.

EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. EPIC will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth.

The primary objective of DSCOVR, a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, is to maintain the nation’s real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.

Scientists Reveal 3-D Map of Universe Ever Created 🎓

The map is based on data from the past decade by scientists at a number of astronomical institutions.

Why it’s so impressive, that hundreds of scientists working together were able to map out a quarter of the sky that measures dark energy. They used complex measurements and created a 3D model of 650 billion cubic lights years of space that includes 1.2 million galaxies.

The other 85 percent is made up of dark matter and dark energy, totally invisible to the naked eye and really any instruments that we have today — only its gravitational effects on things that we can see let us know it’s there.

Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in science — what it is, why we can’t see it, and what impact it has on our universe. Many scientists believe it is responsible for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, or even the cosmological constant described by Albert Einstein. Still others suggested it may be a sign that gravity itself was deteriorating.

The measurements were made by determining the size of what are known as baryonic acoustic oscillations, which are basically pressure waves from just after the Big Bang, leaving their own special footprint on the universe.

“We have spent five years collecting measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one quarter of the sky to map out the structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light years,” says Jeremy Tinker of New York University, a co-leader of the scientific team carrying out this effort. “This map has allowed us to make the best measurements yet of the effects of dark energy in the expansion of the Universe. We are making our results and map available to the world.”

When scientists recently discovered that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, dark energy was suggested as the “anti-gravity” force responsible for it, perhaps even as the “cosmological constant” that Einstein envisioned. Another theory argued that gravity itself was breaking down – not particularly encouraging in a universe thought to be ruled by its laws.

Results from this massive project, however, have affirmed the laws of gravity and general relativity on a universal level, providing evidence that dark energy is indeed responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. The research indicated that this energy is consistent with Albert Einstein’s suggestion of Lambda, a cosmological constant that is a repellent force countering attraction between matter.

The map is based on data collected over the course of a decade by scientists from several institutions affiliated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III’s Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a project that draws on the lasting impact of acoustic waves that undulated through the early universe.

Apart from the feat of using such measurements to depict the structure of the universe, the map has pivotal implications both for understanding how the expansion of the universe works and validating existing theories of cosmology

The measurements for the map were made by determining the size of baryonic acoustic oscillations, or pressure waves that permeated the universe circa 400,000 years post-Big Bang. These waves left an imprint on the matter distribution of the universe and contributed to galaxies being separated by a characteristic distance, which scientists call the BAO scale. Using observations of the cosmic microwave background, scientists can detect what that primordial scale was, giving them a point of reference.

"Measuring the acoustic scale across cosmic history gives a direct ruler with which to measure the Universe’s expansion rate,” said Dr. Ariel Sanchez of the Max-Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics in a press release. “With BOSS, we have traced the BAO’s subtle imprint on the distribution of galaxies spanning a range of time from 2 to 7 billion years ago."

Dr. Sanchez makes it sound simple, but it wasn't.

The scientists also had to account for the movements of the galaxies away from us in their measurements, and for the fact that the further away a galaxy is, the faster away from us it will move, which meant that scientists had to develop a model for galaxy distribution that took into account “the so-called redshift space distortion,” as Dr. Shun Saito from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics explained.

Different researchers used different methods to analyze the BOSS data, which were then compared. Another method set aside “prior assumptions about the cosmological model,” says Dr. Salvador Salazar-Albornoz of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

As scientists carefully took these variables into account and compared their data, they were not just measuring three-dimensional distances between objects we can see, but the amount of dark matter and dark energy that also fills the universe – two features that remain mysterious but appear to dictate much about how the universe is shaped and will continue to expand – as this research further confirms.

When the overall picture was constructed, they found their results to be consistent with standard cosmology, or the set of theories that essentially date our universe to 13 billion years ago when the Big Bang set matter into a rapid inflation, before cooling to temperatures able to sustain the formation of atoms.

This ordinary matter, built from protons, neutrons, and electrons, comprises only about 5 percent of the universe. The remainder, the theory posits, is part dark matter – slow-moving mass that helps structure the universe – and dark energy, which makes up 70 percent of the universe.

In addition, the findings indicate that if dark energy is the driving force of universal expansion, it is evolving very slowly. “The change is at most 20 percent over the past seven billion years,” said Dr. Florian Beutler at the University of Portsmouth.