Can People Live on Only Sunlight and Water?

A woman in Seattle who believes she can live without food is trying to prove it, and promoting her claims through social media.

According to a story on Fox News, “Navenna Shine, the founder and subject of the Living on Light experiment, plans to spend the next four to six months abstaining from food of any kind and living on only light, water and tea. According to her website Livingonlight.com, Shine started the experiment in an attempt to follow a group of obscure Yogis, who for thousands of years have claimed the ability to live on light.”

The claimed ability to survive without food (and sometimes without water as well) is called inedia, and those who attempt it are called “inediates” (among other things). One common version of inedia includes a belief called breatharianism, which teaches that humans can be trained to survive just on water and sunlight.

Apple iOS 7 Is Even Better Than We Could Have Dreamed

Today at Apple’s much-anticipated Developer’s Conference, WWDC, CEO Tim Cook announced iOS 7, “the most significant iOS update since the original iPhone.” iOS 7 is packed with new features, from a completely rethought design featuring new typography, brighter colors, and improved functionalities to additions to the iOS app family you’re going to love. Though earlier we live-blogged an overview of new iOS features, here we give you a more in-depth look at the changes coming to your iOS device this fall.

Control Center

Devices running iOS 7 will feature Control Center. Simply swipe from the bottom of your screen to reveal access to controls for Airplane Mode, WiFi, Bluetooth, and or Do Not Disturb. You can also adjust your phone’s brightness and control music playback with buttons for pause, play, and next. Control Center also offers quick access to often-used apps like Clock, Camera, Calculator, and Flashlight.

Notification Center

In iOS 7 Notification Center will be available directly from the Lock screen, displaying all your notifications such as missed calls and recent emails. The new Today feature provides an at-a-glance view of the weather, traffic status, upcoming appointments, and your friends’ birthdays the day-of.

Improved Multitasking

While previous versions of iOS gave multitasking access only to certain apps, iOS 7 will enable developers to enable background multitasking for any app with Apple’s new API. iOS 7 does this without losing battery performance by measuring how you use your apps and, accordingly, using intelligent scheduling to update your running apps in the background. iOS will also respond to push triggers so your most-used apps are always up-to-date.

iTunes Radio

A music streaming service called “iRadio” similar to Pandora’s was long-rumored to be announced at WWDC. Though Apple enthusiasts may have failed at guessing the right name, Apple’s new music streaming service is indeed quite similar to Pandora. iTunes Music features over 200 stations, like “Summer Songs” and “Artists on Tour,” created by Apple supported by iTunes’ music catalog. Just like Pandora, iTunes Music will allow you to create stations based around particular artists, songs, or genres and will feature options similar to Pandora’s for favoriting songs you like and blocking playback of songs you don’t like. When you tap a song in iTunes Radio Apple presents you the option to purchase the song from iTunes, share the song with a friend, or create a new station around that song. What’s more, iTunes Radio keeps track of all the songs you’ve listened to on all of your devices so you can continue to preview songs and, if you like, purchase them through iTunes.

'Crazy' ants arrive in U.S. from Argentina and Brazil with taste for machinery and mayhem

The Nylanderia fulva, or 'tawny crazy ant,' is messing with the ecosystem in the U.S., according to a new study.

"Crazy" ants are eating their way across the U.S., driving humans nuts.

Despite being only one-eighth of an inch long, the ants are making a big stink in four states, eating everything from machinery to livestock. The species is known as the Nylanderia fulva, or "tawny crazy ant."

The ants wreaked havoc in their native Argentina and Brazil before finding new homes in Texas, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to ABCNews.com. The only way they could have reached the U.S. was with the unwitting help of travelers, according to a new study published in the Biological Invasions journal.

China set to launch longest-ever space mission

In the next step toward its own space station, China will launch spacecraft Shenzhou 10 on Tuesday, June 11, at 5:38 p.m. Beijing time (5:38 a.m. EDT). The three-astronaut crew consists of Nie Haisheng, a Chinese military pilot and China National Space Administration (CNSA) astronaut, Zhang Xiaoguang, a Chinese pilot and ex-air force squadron commander, and Wang Yaping, a former air force pilot and the second Chinese woman to travel to space.

Shenzhou 10 will rendezvous and dock with the Tiangong 1, translated “Heavenly Palace 1,” space module, which has been in orbit since September 2011. During the 15-day mission, Shenzhou 10 will dock twice with Tiangong 1: once manually, and once automatically. Wu Ping, spokeswoman for China’s human space program, explained, “Up to now, we have only conducted three automated rendezvous and dockings and one piloted rendezvous and docking. We need more flight tests for verification.” While Tiangong 1 was originally designed to last two years, part of the mission will be to evaluate whether it is suitable for an extension.

Saturn’s Moon Dione May Possess Subsurface Ocean

Saturn’s moon Dione may possess a subsurface ocean, one which may have at one time been geologically active, new images obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggest.

The new images are of Dione’s rather strange 500-mile-long mountain — Janiculum Dorsa. After analysis by researchers on the Cassini science team, it’s been concluded that the images suggest that the moon may have once been very similar to its sister moon — Enceladus, the ice-geyser moon.

“There may turn out to be many more active worlds with water out there than we previously thought,” stated Bonnie Buratti, the lead researcher on the Cassini science team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In recent years subsurface oceans have been discovered on quite a few of Saturn and Jupiter’s moons — suggesting that such watery-moons may be very common in the larger universe. The moon’s that stand out the most in the public perception are no doubt Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan and Jupiter’s moon Europa — all of which may potentially harbor life. “These geologic hotspots have garnered the interest of scientists searching for the building blocks of life beyond Earth. If Dione turned out to have a liquid layer under its crust, that would increase the moon’s chances of supporting life,” as Space.com notes.

Hurricanes Have A Lot Of Energy -- So Why Aren't We Harvesting It?

Tropical Storm Andrea is ushering in the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season this weekend, delivering heavy rains and the threat of power outages to towns all along the East Coast. But could a hurricane ever restore power, instead of taking it away? If wind power is one of the great green energy hopes of the future, why not look to the fiercest storms?

Hurricanes do pack a lot of power. Thanks largely to its immense size, the total energy of Superstorm Sandy (what researchers call the “integrated kinetic energy”) was pegged at about 140 terajoules, or about twice the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That’s a lot of energy, but it’s not atypical for a hurricane, according to University of Miami meteorologist Brian McNoldy.

“At any given moment, many hurricanes contain more energy than an atomic bomb in their surface winds alone (even excluding winds at higher elevations and latent heat energy),” McNoldy wrote in the Washington Post last November.

While that might sound like an untapped resource, at present most scientists say it’s pretty much infeasible to use current wind farm technology to harvest all that power. Hugh Willoughby, a Florida International University hurricane expert and former research meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is especially skeptical -- to put it mildly.

Carbon emissions helping to make Earth greener

THE planet is getting lusher, and we are responsible. Carbon dioxide generated by human activity is stimulating photosynthesis and causing a beneficial greening of the Earth's surface.

For the first time, researchers claim to have shown that the increase in plant cover is due to this "CO₂ fertilisation effect" rather than other causes. However, it remains unclear whether the effect can counter any negative consequences of global warming, such as the spread of deserts.

Recent satellite studies have shown that the planet is harbouring more vegetation overall, but pinning down the cause has been difficult. Factors such as higher temperatures, extra rainfall, and an increase in atmospheric CO₂ – which helps plants use water more efficiently – could all be boosting vegetation.

To home in on the effect of CO₂, Randall Donohue of Australia's national research institute, the CSIRO in Canberra, monitored vegetation at the edges of deserts in Australia, southern Africa, the US Southwest, North Africa, the Middle East and central Asia. These are regions where there is ample warmth and sunlight, but only just enough rainfall for vegetation to grow, so any change in plant cover must be the result of a change in rainfall patterns or CO₂ levels, or both.

Mars Sample Return: Bringing the Red Planet to Earth

Meet the scientists planning the next step in Martian exploration.

A space probe crashes in the desert. Something deadly on board wipes out almost the entire population of a small town. The government instigates an emergency protocol and top scientists gather at a secret underground quarantine facility to contain this killer germ from outer space.

Will they be able to save the planet from disaster?

To find out, read Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain – an adventure with heroic scientists. This terrifying tale of alien microbes, bringing instantaneous death to (almost) every living creature they come into contact with, was published weeks before the first Apollo lunar landing. But Nasa had already predicted this worst-case scenario of bringing back material from another world.

On their return to Earth, the Apollo 11 astronauts were locked away in a converted Airstream caravan - the Mobile Quarantine Facility. Lunar rocks and soil were sealed in bags and only opened in airtight laboratories. Even the Apollo capsule was wiped with bleach to destroy any stray Moon bugs. In retrospect, these precautions look rather quaint and the whole rigmarole was abandoned after Apollo 14, when scientists concluded that the Moon was completely devoid of life.

But now, 40 years on, Nasa is dusting down those quarantine procedures for a new challenge: returning rocks from Mars.

A so-called Mars sample return mission is the next step in the exploration of the red planet, coming between the existing rover missions, such as Curiosity, and future human exploration. It may also, finally, answer one of the biggest questions about Mars: is there life?

“The Curiosity rover does not have the instruments to answer the ‘are we alone’ question by itself,” says David Beaty, chief scientist for Nasa’s Mars Exploration Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “All it can do is understand the environment. Testing for ‘is there evidence of life?’ requires another mission and the best way to do that is by collecting samples and returning them to Earth.”

Human-Scale Invisibility Cloak Unveiled

Researchers demonstrate an invisibility cloak that can be scaled to almost any size and say it could be used to hide orbiting satellites

In the last decade or so, invisibility cloaks have captured the imagination of researchers and the public alike. The excitement is based on two advances.

The first is the idea of “transformation optics”–the ability to bend light around a region of space to make it look as if it weren’t there. The second is the creation of metamaterials, synthetic substances with optical properties unknown in nature that can be designed to achieve this goal.

One of the goals in this area is to create a Harry Potter-style cloak capable of hiding a human at all optical frequencies in all directions. A bonus would be the ability to make this device as big or small as required so that it can hide objects of any size.

Achieving all these features is currently impossible. There is always a compromise. The first cloak worked only at a single microwave frequency. More recent cloaks work over the entire a range of optical frequencies but can only hide tiny objects over a limited viewing angle.

Today, John Howell at the University of Rochester in New York, and Benjamin Howell, show how to make simple cloaks that hide huge objects over the entire optical spectrum, albeit with a significant compromise. One of their devices is big enough to cloak a person.

Martian Rock Another Clue to a Once Water-Rich Planet

A view from the Mars rover Opportunity. The rover sampled a rock containing abundances of elements like aluminum, calcium and magnesium, which adds to a portrait of a planet that was once a water-rich world with conditions amenable for life.

The discovery of what appears to be a clay-rich rock on Mars adds to the portrait of the planet as one that once — in its youth, more than three and a half billion years ago — was a water-rich world with conditions amenable for life, NASA scientists said Friday.

The rock in question, about the size of a person’s forearm, was examined by the Mars rover Opportunity, the older of the spacecraft still in operation on the planet. The newer rover, the Curosity, landed last August and has been hogging the headlines ever since; in a news conference on Friday, NASA officials proudly called attention to the fact that the Opportunity, launched nearly a decade ago, was still soldiering on with valuable field work.

The newly discovered rock, which scientists named Esperance, is one of the oldest rocks that the Opportunity has looked at during its nine and a half years on Mars. From the abundances of elements like aluminum, calcium and magnesium, the mission’s scientists concluded that the rock is very rich in clay minerals, which could have formed from copious water running over volcanic rocks.

“This is powerful evidence that water interacted with this rock and changed its chemistry, changed its mineralogy in a dramatic way,” said Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator.