A shooting star brighter than the sun on the very day an asteroid flyby is predicted. A most remarkable coincidence. And to add to our amazement, the rock whizzing through the skies didn't illuminate a distant ocean or some remote desert, but rather showed its spectacle above one of the very few areas in the world populated by people driving dashcams around 24 hrs a day. No screenwriter would get away with such an unlikely scenario.

But how likely are meteor event like the one in Russia? What are the chances a similar event will occur this century? And what about even bigger events? What was the power of the blast from the Russian meteor? How does it compare to the explosions we humans create?

As most of the entire world knows by now, Mother Nature gave us a bit of a surprise this week - a meteor exploded in the atmosphere and shattered windows and injured hundreds of people in the  Chelyabinsk region of Russia.

With just the concussive force of the meteorite explosion shattering things, you can imagine what would have happened if a meteorite hit a building - one meteorite did land, thankfully in a lake near Chebarkul rather than on a house.

The Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at the University of Southern California, US, is one of the few, perhaps the only human-centered information processing lab to have built and tested an ‘Automatic Sarcasm Recognizer’.

Heightened regulation, increased lawsuits and a resulting lack of venture capital has meant the western pharmaceutical industry faces a looming crisis but companies outside America and Europe may pick up the slack - new targets/drugs remain an evergreen medical idea elsewhere, especially to address the unmet need of drug resistance in the treatment of cancer.  

Bisphenol A, widely known as BPA, has recently become a controversial science issue, along with climate change and every food, energy and medicine study. In the modern world, the only legitimate science is the science that agrees with well-funded activist organizations. BPA is a component of plastic bottles and canned food linings that have helped make the world's food supply safer but has recently come under attack because some studies have found it has the potential to mimic the sex hormone estrogen if blood and tissue levels are high enough.

An analysis of almost 150 BPA exposure studies shows that in the general population, people's exposure may be many times too low for BPA to effectively mimic estrogen in the human body. 

The world produces a lot of food, but it is not produced equally. Agriculturally rich areas like American and Europe can fret about whether natural or synthetic toxins are on their food, and how much water a toilet flush should be, while a billion people elsewhere have inconsistent diets.

Paul Ehrlich, legendary doomsday prophet, now has a new concern that will kill the planet if it is not addressed - equal rights for women. 

A group of political scientists says a growing field of research has found links to genetics and political preferences - well, sort of.

Forcepflies, commonly known as earwigflies, because the males have a large genital forceps that resembles the cerci of earwigs, are part of a family that was widespread  from Australia to Antarctica and over the Americas during the Jurassic period and extant members are rare now.

In the ongoing quest to optimize alternative energy sources like biofuels, researchers are looking more to plants that grow in the wild, such as switchgrass. But domesticating wildgrowing plants has a downside - it could make them more susceptible to any number of plant viruses.

"Most wild plants are perennials, while most of our agriculture crops are annuals,"  Michigan State University plant biologist Carolyn Malmstrom
said in her statement regarding her talk at the AAAS meeting in Boston. "Sometimes when you mix the properties of the two, unexpected things can happen."