Cutting Edge

Earth's atmosphere lights up with airglow in time-lapse video

A little known fact about the Earth is that its atmosphere generates its own light. Lines and clouds in hues of yellow, green, blue, and red reach 60 miles above the surface of the planet.

This light is created in what's known as a chemiluminescent process and is called "airglow" or "night glow," according to videographer and scientist Alex Rivest. "The colors are not reflected light, and not pollution, but rather are light generated from the components in the atmosphere itself," he wrote in a blog post.

Rivest has just released a new time-lapse video (see below) and blog post more

Next week's solar transit of Venus the last until 2117

On June 5 in the Americas and June 6 in the rest of the world, people will be able to see one of the rarest predictable events in astronomy: a solar transit of the planet Venus.

Over a six-hour period the disc of Venus will be silhouetted against the sun. Seeing it safely requires a special eye-protection filter, available for a dollar or so -- alternately, a telescope or binoculars can safely project an image onto a wall or sheet of paper. But if you miss it, your next chance won't come until the year 2117.

Every century or more

Take a look through this transparent smartphone screen

Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu showed off a sensational prototype device at the 2012 Wireless Japan expo sporting a feature unlike any other on the market today: a transparent dual-sided OLED touch screen smartphone. In other words, science fiction meets reality.

The latest take on the barely there touch screen concept appears slightly more practical than ever before, as one could control the user interface from the front or rear of the phone. For example, one could pull down the notifications bar or select an icon with the unused index finger behind the phone, meaning less finger obstruction over the screen. The prototype shown at the expo featured a 2.4-inch OLED screen (320x240) and used an unidentified version of Android.

You won't be the life of the party with this shoulder robot

Got a chip on your shoulder, pal? Or is that just a 20-axis humanoid telepresence robot?

For cyber-boffins from Japan's Yamagata University, it's the latter. It seems this creepy little golem has been riding around on shoulders in northern Japan, probably freaking citizens out.

The project, dubbed the MH-2 wearable communication robot, was recently presented at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in St. Paul, Minn., where it turned some heads.

As IEEE Spectrum tells us, the MH-2 is a telepresence robot that acts as an avatar for your friends around the world. With its intricate parallel wire mechanisms and 20 axes of motion, it can reproduce their movements in a realistic fashion.

Perhaps you've never thought about what is inside your airbag, other than air.

This story might make you wonder.

In 2010, Ronald Smith of Scotland, was involved in a six-car accident, during which his airbag deployed successfully. He wasn't hurt, even though he had been hit from behind and had struck the car in front.

The crash was of sufficient force that his car window broke and pierced the airbag of his Vauxhall Insignia. (Vauxhall Motors is owned by General Motors.) After the crash, Smith, an engineer, reported seeing white powder emerge from the airbag. His face was more

SpaceX cargo ship returns to Earth after historic mission

In the final chapter of a history-making space drama, a commercial cargo ship completed a near-flawless test flight to the International Space Station with a splashdown off the Baja California peninsula today, clearing the way for the start of routine cargo delivery missions later this year.

Leading the space station by about 200 miles, Dragon's retro rockets ignited at 10:51 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) and burned for a planned 9 minutes 50 seconds, reducing the ship's 5-mile-per-second velocity by 224 mph, just enough to drop the far side of the orbit into Earth's atmosphere over the more

SpaceX cargo ship departs station for Pacific splashdown

Space station astronauts unbolted a commercial cargo ship early Thursday, used the lab's robot arm to pull it away and released it into open space to set the stage for re-entry and splashdown off the Baja California peninsula to close out a successful test flight and set the stage for the start of routine cargo delivery missions later this year.

With the space station's Canadian-built robot arm locked onto the Dragon cargo craft, four gangs of motorized bolts holding the capsule in place were driven out, releasing the spacecraft from Harmony's Earth-facing port at 4:07 a.more

Was Russia's discovery of water on moon in 1976 ignored?

One day, when our children live on the Newt Gingrich Lunar subdivision, they will know just how watery the moon truly is.

As far as we in the West have been concerned, the first proof that there might be water up there came in 1994, when the Clementine mission returned results suggesting that there must at least be watery ice beneath the moon's surface.

However, a Columbia University astrophysicist, Arlin Crotts, has declared that the Russians had secured evidence of moon water as far back as 1976. This evidence was simply ignored by the high-fallutin' West.

A pulsating treatise more

Apple now selling Nest Learning Thermostat

The Nest Learning Thermostat has found a new home with the folks at Apple.

The company better known for iPhones and iPads is now selling the high-tech thermostat in its online store for $249.95. But the Nest is unlike conventional thermostats.

As befits the term "learning," the Nest can learn and remember your preferred temperatures to automatically keep things cool or warm. It turns itself off when your house is empty. And it taps into the power of remote control, letting you change the temperature from anywhere via your iPhone, iPad, Android device, or Mac.

This is the second more

Watch California Lt. Gov. try out Google's Project Glass

We can now confirm that at least one human being not in the employ of Google has touched those mysterious Project Glass spectacles.

In an episode of Current TV's "Gavin Newsom Show," set to air on Friday, the host and California lieutenant governor dons the futuristic goggles with an embedded heads-up display that have been the subject of much speculation and some comedy over recent months.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki -- co-founder of gene-mapping startup 23andMe -- guest on the show. Brin claims to snap a picture of Newsom, seemingly without using his hands, and then passes the glasses to Newsom to show him the shot.