Jewish & World News

The shock wave from Friday's (Feb. 15) meteor explosion above Russia sent subsonic waves through the atmosphere halfway around the world. Up to 11 sensors in Greenland, Africa, Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and other far-flung regions detected the Russian meteor blast's infrasound, or low-frequency sound waves. The sensors are part of the global network of 60 infrasound stations maintained by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

A team of scientists and space enthusiasts is aiming to make Israel the third country to reach the moon, with a little help from an entrepreneur donor. Team SpaceIL has developed a nanorocket, and is entering the Google Lunar X Prize - a global lunar competition whose prize is a whopping $30 million.

The oldest known living wild bird in the world has given birth to a healthy hatchling. The 62-year-old bird, “Wisdom,” last made headlines in 2011, when the albatross survived the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami. Wisdom has defied the odds in many aspects: She’s already lived nearly twice as long as the average Laysan albatross. She was given her name after being tagged by a U.S. Geological Survey researcher in 1956. The USGS said in a statement that since being tagged, Wisdom has flown an estimated 2 million to 3 million miles, or “four to six trips from the Earth to the Moon and back again with plenty of miles to spare.”

The Curiosity rover, currently on Mars after recently landing in a tricky operation controlled by National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) technicians, includes a refrigerator manufactured in Israel. The refrigerator was developed in the northern Israeli kibbutz Ein Harod (Ihud), Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

In the realm of deadly natural disasters, the landslide has been underappreciated, indicates a newly assembled database of landslide fatalities. The database, called Durham Fatal Landslide Database, puts the death toll across the globe as much as 10 times higher than previously estimated.

In the first sign that the Fukushima nuclear disaster may be changing life around it, scientists say they've found mutant butterflies. Some of the butterflies had abnormalities in their legs, antennae, and abdomens, and dents in their eyes, according to the study published in Scientific Reports, an online journal from the team behind Nature. Researchers also found that some affected butterflies had broken or wrinkled wings, changes in wing size, color pattern changes, and spots disappearing or increasing on the butterflies.

Sipping a cold glass of freshly filtered water? Give NASA a high-five. Kicking back and tuning in to 500 channels of satellite television? Send a thank-you fruit basket to NASA.

Hundreds of astronomy fans will gather in Mitzpe Ramon on Sunday evening to watch a meteor shower in the Negev skies. Mitzpe Ramon's unique desert location and high altitude make it a perfect observation spot.

George Cardel’s final wish died with him — doomed by his hefty 300-pound frame. The Queens mechanical engineer had hoped to donate his body to science, but that dream was dashed when a medical school rejected his corpse because of its girth, a $2 million lawsuit claims.

An eighth-grader at the San Diego Jewish Academy won a science prize at the second annual Google Science Fair competition. Jonah Kohn, 14,  won a $25,000 scholarship for his device that uses tactile sound to enhance music for people with hearing loss.

Researchers have updated HadCRUT - one of the main global temperate records, which dates back to 1850. One of the main changes is the inclusion of more data from the Arctic region, which has experienced one of the greatest levels of warming. The amendments do not change the long-term trend, but the data now lists 2010, rather than 1998, as the warmest year on record.

There was a battle of robots on the West Side and it didn’t involve the “Transformers.” Hundreds of high school students displayed their technical skills at the Javits Center. There were over 200 teams from Brazil, Canada, Jamaica, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the U.S. The teams designed, built and programmed robots to compete in the “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology” challenge also known as “First.”

An annual inventory of newly discovered species lists more than 19,000 –  half of them insects. A total of 9,738 insect species were first identified in 2009, the most recent year of data compilation. And that's not even counting spiders. The 2011 State of Observed Species report, released Jan. 18 by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University , categorized 19,232 species that became known to science during the 2009 calendar year.

Why is the moon sometimes out during the day? Why is the sky blue? Will we ever discover aliens? How much does the Earth weigh? How do airplanes stay up? Those are the five questions kids most often ask their parents, and in that order, according to a new survey conducted in the United Kingdom . Unfortunately, they're tough nuts to crack — probably why kids find them so universally puzzling in the first place. Of the 2,000 parents of children ages 5 to 16 who were surveyed about their kid's queries, two-thirds said they struggled with the questions. One-fifth of the parents admitted that if they don't know an answer, they sometimes make up an explanation or pretend that no one knows.

If you walk away from holiday dinners fuming that conservative Uncle Morton just can't see your point of view, or that liberal Aunt Betty just doesn't get it, a new finding may make it easier to cool your jets. According to the study, conservatives and liberals pay attention to their environments differently, meaning the two sides of the political spectrum quite literally don't see eye-to-eye. Conservatives pay more attention to negative stimuli compared with liberals, the study found.

Counter to what logic might suggest, warm summers actually trigger cold winters, according to a new study. The study, detailed in the Jan. 13 issue of the journal Environmental Research Letters, offers an explanation for the recent harsh winters in the Northern Hemisphere: Increasing temperatures and melting ice in the Arctic regions are creating more snowfall in the autumn months at lower latitudes, which, in turn, affects an atmospheric pattern that leads to colder winters.

A piece of a Russian satellite that came crashing back to earth in Siberia after a failed launch smashed into a house located on "Cosmonaut Street," the Interfax news agency reported Saturday. The Meridian-series communication satellite was launched aboard a Soyuz-2 carrier rocket Friday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome based at Arkhangelsk in northern Russia . The satellite, which was designed to provide communication between ships, planes and coastal stations on the ground, failed to reach orbit and crashed in the Novosibirsk region.

Two small frogs found in southeastern New Guinea are said to be the world's smallest, measuring about 0.4 inches or 8 to 9 millimeters in length. They belong to a group that has small fingers and so they are not expert climbers.

The March 2011 megaquake off the coast of Japan opened up fissures as wide as 6 feet (3 meters) in the seafloor, a new study finds. The fissures now scar the seafloor where peaceful clam beds once lay, according to Takeshi Tsuji, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan . Along with seismic studies, the fissures, revealed by manned submersible vehicles that investigated the seafloor after the quake, show how the crust around the quake's epicenter expanded and cracked.

Would you choose to take someone's life in order to prevent the deaths of several other people? A new study using 3D simulations found that nine out of 10 people would answer "yes." In the experiment, subjects donned a head-mounted device that placed them in a 3D setting with realistic digital characters. The participants also wore sensors attached to their fingertips to monitor their emotional arousal.