NEW YORK -- East Coast residents were buzzing on social media sites and elsewhere Friday night after a brief but bright flash of light streaked across the early-evening sky _in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down.

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be "a single meteor event." He said it "looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports."

"Judging from the brightness, we're…

Justin Thomas and his colleagues at the GRASP Lab have produced an �avian-inspired� claw drone that mimics the way an eagle uses its talons to grab a fish out of the ocean.



A video clip of the drone shows the UAV swooping down at high speed to snatch an object using its 3D printed mechanical claw. By mimicking how a bald eagle sweeps its legs and claws backwards to aerodynamically close in on its prey without the need to slow down, the drone is able to grasp a stationary object…

Cyprus is a beta test. The banksters are trying to commit bank robbery in broad daylight, and they are eager to see if the rest of the world will let them get away with it. 



Cyprus was probably chosen because it is very small (therefore nobody will care too much about it) and because there is a lot of foreign (i.e. Russian) money parked there. 



The IMF and the EU could have easily bailed out Cyprus without any trouble whatsoever, but they purposely decided not to do…

New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.

Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.

Skin…

Passenger pigeons once darkened the skies over the eastern United States. Huge flocks would roost on chestnut trees, their weight snapping off branches. By 1914, though, humans had hunted the bird to extinction.

Now, a project to reanimate the pigeon using genetic engineering is drawing new attention to the question of “de-extinction,” or whether biotechnology can help conserve rare animals and even restore others that dissapeared eons ago.

The passenger pigeon effort, known as…

Another Wall Street investigation. Another trove of e-mails, instant messages and telephone conversations capturing executives, bankers and traders discussing their compromising positions.

First, it was the evidence that depicted questionable behavior at Barclays, UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland, where traders discussed their rate-rigging activities. Then it was the Justice Department’s complaint against Standard & Poor’s over toxic mortgage securities, which included an…

JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, ignored internal controls and manipulated documents as it racked up trading losses last year, while its influential chief executive, Jamie Dimon, briefly withheld some information from regulators, a new Senate report says.

The findings by the Congressional investigators shed new light on the multibillion-dollar trading blunder, which has claimed the jobs of several top executives and prompted an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.…

(Reuters) - An ally of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has received a suspended death sentence for taking millions of yuan in bribes, a Beijing lawyer said on Thursday, in the latest fallout from one of China's biggest political scandals.

Tang Jianhua, once deputy police chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Bo was Communist Party chief, was found guilty of taking 17 million yuan ($2.7 million) in bribes, according to Li Zhuang, a lawyer and prominent opponent of Bo…

North Korea on Friday accused the United States and South Korea of carrying out a "persistent and intensive" cyber attack against its official websites in recent days.

A number of official North Korean websites, including those of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the daily Rodong Sinmun newspaper, and Air Koryo airline became inaccessible early Wednesday.

"Internet servers operated by our republic have come under daily cyber attack(s) which are persistent and intensive",…

LONDON, March 15 (Reuters) - Archaeologists said on Friday they had found a graveyard during excavations for a rail project in London which might hold the remains of some 50,000 people killed by the "Black Death" plague more than 650 years ago.

Thirteen skeletons laid out in two neat rows were discovered 2.5 metres (8 feet) below the road in the Farringdon area of central London by researchers working on the 16 billion pound ($24 billion) Crossrail project.

Historical records…

The increasing amount of personal information that can be gleaned by computer programs that track how people use Facebook has been revealed by an extensive academic study.

Such programs can discern undisclosed private information such as Facebook users’ sexuality, drug-use habits and even whether their parents separated when they were young, according to the study by the University of Cambridge academics.

In one of the biggest studies of its kind, scientists from the…

Seventy-five years after the Nazi invasion and occupation of Austria, a newspaper in country has asked citizens about their opinion of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi annexation during World War II. Jewish leaders who have been raising the alarm about anti-Semitism in Austria say the results were not surprising.

Forty-two percent said life was not all bad under Hitler, while 61 percent said they would be interested in a strong-armed leader who did not have to deal with democratic challenges…

China is building one of the world's largest drone fleets aimed at expanding its military reach in the Pacific and swarming U.S. Navy carriers in the unlikely event of a war, according to a new report. The Chinese military — known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) — envisions its drone swarms scouting out battlefields, guiding missile strikes and overwhelming opponents through sheer numbers. China's military-industrial complex has created a wide array of homegrown drones to accomplish…

Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror between 1933 to 1945.

The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated, according to The New York Times.

Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of…

from the but-but-terrorism dept

We've been discussing the now annual rush to re-approve the FISA Amendments Act, despite the fact that the original bill was on shaky constitutional ground, and it's been made much (much, much) worse due to a secret interpretation of what the law means (a secret interpretation that many in Congress apparently have no interest in finding out about). Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, has penned an interesting column laying out many of the reasons why the…

from the it's-all-about-the-public-perception dept

As the Congressional investigation into the DOJ's prosecution of Aaron Swartz has continued, apparently a DOJ representative has admitted that part of the reason it insisted on having Swartz plead guilty to a felony and go to jail, no matter what, was that it feared the public backlash for the original arrest if they couldn't then show a felony conviction and jailtime. According to a Huffington Post article, quoting various…