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 Soon, the growing capability of your smartphone could be harnessed to detect cosmic rays in much the same way as high-end, multimillion-dollar observatories.

With a simple app addition, Android phones, and likely other smartphone brands in the not-too-distant future, can be turned into detectors to capture the light particles created when cosmic rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere.

“The apps basically transform the phone into a high-energy particle detector,” explains Justin Vandenbroucke, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of physics and a researcher at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). “It uses the same principles as these very large experiments.”
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Seven months after the Malaysian airline flight 370 went missing without a trace, the mystery surrounding its disappearance is no closer to being solved.

Until now, the most widely-held belief is that some sort of incident occurred onboard, causing the plane to be placed on autopilot until it finally crashed into the Indian Ocean, but this theory has now been dismissed by the boss of Emirates Airlines, Sir Tim Clark, who has said he thinks it extremely unlikely that the plane was lost in this way.
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In 1930, Albert Einstein was asked for his opinion about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. “Other beings, perhaps, but not men,” he answered. Then he was asked whether science and religion conflict. “Not really, though it depends, of course, on your religious views.”

Over the past 10 years, astronomers’ new ability to detect planets orbiting other stars has taken this question out of the realm of philosophy, as it was for Einstein, and transformed it into something that scientists might soon be able to answer.
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New statistics just released indicate that the average American is destined to live a much longer life than his grandparents; in fact, in 2012, the average life expectancy in the United States rose to a record high of 78.8 years.

The latest report on US mortality in the USA has just been issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. As in previous years, women are shown to have an increased life expectancy of 81.2 years, whereas men have a typical lifespan of 76.4, with no change in the differential of 4.8 years.
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