Completing its third voyage into space (22 months since it left in December 2012), the X-37B is a known space plane with a secret purpose. The U.S. Air Force's fact sheet lists the official purpose of the craft as "reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth." Speculation abounds that there's an intelligence purpose to the missions, but the secrecy around the program means whatever the X-37B does besides test orbital re-entry will remain secret for some time.

Built by Boeing's secretive Phantom Works in Huntington Beach, Calif., the Air Force X-37B spacecraft is rumored to be everything from a space bomber to a satellite-killer or a test-bed for advanced spy satellite sensors. But as the news media fails to contain their excitement at the opportunity to wildly speculate, experts have debunked the rumors repeatedly, over the years.

"To the extent that it does have a purpose, I think its purpose is to keep the Chinese guessing as to what the purpose is," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a leading source of defense, space and intelligence information. "Over time, most of the money got spent just to keep the program going."

Shortly after NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX mult-billion dollar contracts in the "space taxi" program, Sierra Nevada Corporation filed a lawsuit against NASA challenging its loss to Boeing, despite submitting a cheaper bid. While the lawsuit caused NASA to immediately request Boeing and SpaceX to halt work on their vehicles, they've now reversed course and requested the programs be restarted. NASA stated that a delay in providing transportation services to the ISS crew will put the crew at risk and will highly affect several operations of the ISS. This delay may even result in the US failure to fulfill the commitments it made in its international agreements.

The lawsuit is starting to result in private internal documents coming out of the woodwork and into public view. While many speculated that NASA was fully behind SpaceX and only granted Boeing a chunk of the contract for political reasons, it seems that Boeing was ranked above SpaceX in every major category, from technical maturity to management competence to likelihood of sticking to a timetable. Despite SpaceX's historic achievement of becoming the first commercial entity to put a capsule into orbit and ferry NASA cargo to and from the international space station, the agency had somewhat less assurance in the company's ability to perform, based on performance on its own preliminary contract.

Since the 1930s scientists have been searching for particles that are simultaneously matter and antimatter. Now physicists have found strong evidence for one such entity inside a superconducting material. The discovery could represent the first so-called "Majorana particle," and may help researchers encode information for quantum computers.

As opposed to particles found in a vacuum, unattached to other matter, these Majoranas are what's called "emergent particles." They emerge from the collective properties of the surrounding matter and could not exist outside the superconductor. The discovery could have implications for searches for free Majorana particles outside of superconducting materials. Many physicists suspect neutrinos-very lightweight particles with the strange ability to alter their identities, or flavors-are Majorana particles, and experiments are ongoing to investigate whether this is the case. Now that we know Majorana particles can exist inside superconductors, it might not be surprising to find them in nature.

Marriott (since 2012) has been using wireless technology to prevent guests at the Gaylord Opryland hotel and convention center from using their own Wi-Fi mobile hotspots, forcing exhibitors or customers to use Marriott's expensive Internet services, available at the whopping cost of $250 to $1,000 per wireless access point. Despite popular press reports, this did not involve "jamming" which is strictly illegal in the US, but instead something more like a WiFi DoS attack.

Marriott had deployed a Wi-Fi monitoring system with a "containment capability". When activated, the system could identify Wi-Fi access points that were not part of Marriott's own Wi-Fi system (or otherwise authorized by Marriott). Such non-Marriott access points were dubbed "rogues". When rogues were detected, the system sent "de-authorization" packets to the unauthorized access points, booting those users off their free connections and, presumably, forcing them to pony up for Marriott's paid Internet access.

http://www.commlawblog.com/2014/10/articles/enforcement-activities-fines-f/marriott-whacked-for-600000-for-war-on-rogue-wifi-hotspots/

Feels Like Earthquake Weather...

Hurricane Irene, a powerful storm that ran north along the US East Coast four days after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake rattled Virginia in 2011, may have triggered some of that earthquake's aftershocks. The rate of aftershocks following the 23 August 2011, earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

The researchers are not the first to examine a potential link between hurricanes and seismic activity. Shimon Wdowinski, a seismologist at the University of Miami, Florida, says that he has found a strong correlation between extremely wet tropical cyclones striking Taiwan and big earthquakes that occur up to three years later. He thinks that the erosion of landslide debris in such a storm's aftermath triggers a change in fault loading, eventually producing an earthquake.

That work is not yet published. But another study by researchers in the United States and Taiwan found a similar association between slow earthquakes - which take places over hours or even days - and tropical cyclones in Taiwan.

http://www.nature.com/news/hurricane-may-have-triggered-earthquake-aftershocks-1.12839

The physical traits of previous sexual partners could be passed on to future children. Telegony was first hypothesized by Aristotle and was a widely held belief in the Middle Ages and up until the 19th century. The theory was discredited by the advent of genetics, but may have some truth to it after all. Scientists at the University of New South Wales discovered that, for fruit flies at least, the size of the young was determined by the size of the first male the mother mated with, rather than the second male that sired the offspring.

"We know that features that run in families are not just influenced by the genes that are passed down from parents to their children. Various non-genetic inheritance mechanisms make it possible for environmental factors to influence characteristics of a child. Our new findings take this to a whole new level - showing a male can also transmit some of his acquired features to offspring sired by other males," says lead author Dr Angela Crean.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11133203/Could-previous-lovers-influence-appearance-of-future-children.html

Over the past ten years, there has been a stunning surge in the volume of used lead acid batteries exported from the U.S. Between 2002 and 2013 U.S. exports increased a staggering 19,902%. Last year alone, U.S. companies exported 639,670 metric tonnes of batteries, with as much as 92% going to Mexico.

The impact of this exodus is two-fold. From industry's standpoint, domestic recyclers are seeing a constant erosion of their feedstock, resulting in excess capacity that endangers jobs and the survival of domestic recycling. From a broader viewpoint, it imperils Mexico's environment and the health of workers due to the country's poor track record of secondary lead smelting oversight and regulation.

While EPA's June release of a final rule restricting the export of lead-containing CRT displays offers some encouragement, it is hard to ignore the double standard. Why focus the effort on obsolete CRTs when America has more cars than people?

http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/print/volume-15/issue-4/features/trash-talking.html

Astronomers have been left baffled by the rise and subsequent fall of a huge feature in a sea on Saturn's moon Titan. In July 2012 a giant feature 100 square miles (260 square kilometers) in area - roughly the area of 58,000 football fields - is seen surfacing from under the liquid before partially disappearing again. No definitive explanation is yet apparent. Several theories currently exist including surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface or 'something more exotic' according to NASA.

The mysterious feature appears bright in the radar images, suggesting it has a somewhat similar composition to the land nearby in the image. This supports one theory that it may be a solid structure - potentially an island - that surfaced from under the liquid before sinking again for an unknown reason.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2774811/Mystery-moving-island-Titan-Giant-object-58-THOUSAND-football-fields-size-rises-sinks-Saturn-s-moon.html

Think of it as a Goodyear blimp for the era of alternative power. A kind of giant tubular helium balloon with a three-bladed turbine inside, floating as much as 2,000 feet in the air so it can capture energy from winds that blow stronger and more steadily than they do at ground level. The system is designed to deliver energy to a ground station via one of the cables that would tether the balloon to Earth. It could be inflated, tethered to a ground station built on a trailer platform, then deflated and moved.

With the aid of a $740,000 grant from the Alaska Energy Authority - which is interested in power sources for the state's many communities that are off the electrical grid - Altaeros is working on a commercial BAT that will house a 30-kilowatt turbine, which could power about a dozen homes. Later versions, Rein said, would be 200-kilowatt models, big enough to compete with generators that typically power remote mines and construction sites. "We're not trying to replace wind turbines," Rein says. "We're trying to expand wind energy to places where it doesn't work today."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-lighter-than-air-turbine-to-harness-high-altitude-winds/2014/09/29/c4b0c912-4416-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html

After Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which the NSA had unfettered access to corporations' internal networks, and several high-profile hacker data leaks, technology companies have stepped up efforts to shield their customers' data. Apple's IOS8 and Google's Android L both encrypt user data if the user selects a pass-phrase, making it inaccessible to 3rd parties.

But in a move reminiscent of the Clinton-era clipper chip initiative (which would have required all cryptographic software to provide the US Government with unfettered access to your encrypted data) US Law enforcement agencies are pushing back, calling for Apple and Google to weaken or eliminate the new security features. U.S. Justice Department and FBI officials are trying to understand how the new Apple and Google Android systems work and how the companies could change the encryption to make it accessible when court ordered.

This comes after years of the FBI, TSA, ICE, and police departments across the country routinely appropriating all the data on personal electronic devices, without a warrant, of anyone they stopped to search for any reason. Only recently have some of these warrant-less searches been ruled illegal by unanimous supreme court decision.