TV News LIES

This summer's record-breaking arctic melt is accelerating, with sea ice becoming significantly thinner and more vulnerable, Norwegian researchers say. Scientists with the Norwegian Polar Institute said the annual thaw of the region's floating ice reached the lowest level since satellite monitoring began more than 30 years ago.

"It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago," the institute's international director, Kim Holmen, told the BBC. "And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us."

More...

Scientists who helped pioneer BioWatch, the government's system for detecting a biological attack on the U.S., knew from the start that it was prone to false alarms, records show.

Between 2003, when the nationwide network of air samplers was first deployed, and 2006, officials at the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory filed five patent applications aimed at improving BioWatch's reliability.

The U.S. Air Force plans a key test of an experimental aircraft designed to fly at six times the speed of sound, or about 3,600 mph (5,800 kph). The unmanned X-51 WaveRider was expected to reach Mach 6 after it's dropped by a B-52 bomber and takes flight off the Southern California coast near Point Mugu.

Engineers hoped the X-51 would sustain its top speed for five minutes, twice as long as it's gone before. The B-52 took to the skies, but no other information about the test flight was available, John Haire, a spokesman for Edwards Air Force Base in California, said in an email.

More...

U.S. Navy researchers stumbled upon the concept of radar when they noticed that a plane flying past a radio tower reflected radio waves.

Scientists have now applied that same principle to make the first device that tracks existing Wi-Fi signals to spy on people through walls.

A team of astronomers has detected the "death cry" of a star being devoured by a supermassive black hole. The black hole had been sitting quietly -- almost lying in wait, as it were -- until its gravity reached out and shredded a passing star, pulling the star into its death grip and causing it to emit a characteristic signal.

"You can think of it as hearing the star scream as it gets devoured, if you like," said astronomer Jon Miller of the University of Michigan, lead author of a report appearing in Science Express.

Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form.

It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs. But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it.