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Conniving “burglary tourists” are coming from other parts of the world through a visa program and targeting luxurious homes in the US — with some even using ghillie suits as they wait for the perfect time to strike, one prosecutor told CNN. Police and prosecutors in different high-end communities are trying to keep up with international heist rings that come into the nation, loot pricey items from wealthy homeowners and sell the swiped goods with the money sent back to their home countries, mostly to South America. “They take advantage of the fact that most people don’t have window sensors...

STORY: Volcanic vortex rings are natural, near-perfect circles of gas emitted from a volcano under specific conditions and scientists say Mount Etna emits more than any other volcano on earth. It is a relatively rare phenomenon caused by a constant release of vapours and gases. The gaseous mass ascends rapidly through the central part of the conduit, promoting the formation of rings by wrapping the gas upon itself in a vortex motion. Giuseppe Barbagallo, of the South Etna Alpine Guides Group, said the last time this happened at the Etna volcano was last December. The rings have led locals to...

SUPER BOWL I 1966: GREEN BAY PACKERS Bart Starr, QB Designed by Packers coach Vince Lombardi and teammates Willie Davis and Bob Skoronski, Starr was beyond proud of his Super Bowl I ring. "I think Bart just brought it home one day when they gave it to him at the Packers' office," said Starr's wife Cherry. It was pretty enough, with a one-carat diamond set in a globe of white gold. But Starr preferred wearing his Super Bowl II ring with three diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires. One day Cherry got a call claiming that Bart's original Super Bowl II...

Saturn's rings are heating its atmosphere, according to a new study. Scientists announced the finding on March 30, which they say has never been seen before in our solar system. A NASA spokesperson said: "The secret has been hiding in plain view for 40 years. But it took the insight of a veteran astronomer to pull it all together within a year, using observations of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and retired Cassini probe, in addition to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and the retired International Ultraviolet Explorer mission. "The discovery: Saturn's vast ring system is heating the...

Explanation: Seen from ice moon Tethys, rings and shadows would display fantastic views of the Saturnian system. Haven't dropped in on Tethys lately? Then this gorgeous ringscape from the Cassini spacecraft will have to do for now. Caught in sunlight just below and left of picture center in 2005, Tethys itself is about 1,000 kilometers in diameter and orbits not quite five saturn-radii from the center of the gas giant planet. At that distance (around 300,000 kilometers) it is well outside Saturn's main bright rings, but Tethys is still one of five major moons that find themselves within the boundaries...

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

TEL AVIV: Five days ago, an undisclosed intelligence agency intercepted a telephone call made by the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in which he was heard ordering his proxies in Iraq to attack the U.S embassy in Baghdad, as well as other Israeli and American targets, with the aim of taking hostages, Israeli sources say. It’s unclear whether this was a lapse in tradecraft on the part of the usually savvy Soleimani or whether the notorious Iranian military leader’s phone calls were being routinely intercepted. Nor is it clear whether it was the US or another...

Saturn's rings make it one of the most striking planets in the solar system, but scientists believe they could disappear in less than a 100 million years -- which isn't all that long when you consider that the gas giant itself is more than 4 billion years old. New research from NASA shows that the rings, made predominantly of water ice, are being pulled apart by the planet's gravity and onto Saturn's surface as deluges of "ring rain." "We estimate that this 'ring rain' drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings...

It’s Official: Saturn’s Rings Are Young January 3, 2018 | David F. Coppedge There’s no stretching the truth any more. Cassini data have led all the ringmasters to the conclusion that the rings of Saturn are not billions of years old. For over 15 years, Creation-Evolution Headlines has reported the tug-of-war between planetary scientists on the age of Saturn’s rings (e.g., 2/12/02). Indications that the rings are much younger than Saturn’s assumed age (4.5 billion years) go back to the Voyager missions. Several lines of evidence pointed to youth, but planetary scientists tugged back at the evidence, inventing ways to...

Images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show the closest-ever views of Saturn's swirled atmosphere and its massive hurricane. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute ================================================================================================================================ NASA's Cassini spacecraft is giving earthlings their closest-ever views of Saturn's swirled atmosphere and its massive hurricane, beaming a trove of images and data back to Earth after the craft made its first dive between Saturn and its rings Wednesday. Cassini is "showing us new wonders and demonstrating where our curiosity can take us if we dare," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. The raw images are being fed into a photo stream on NASA's website,...

Look to Venezuela for your future under Hillary. As it is, under Obama we're almost there. And...Hillary will provide the final solution If ever there was proof that the establishment (aka “leftist”) members of the Republican Party are working with the Clinton Campaign, their faux horror over the Donald Trump male locker-room talk and huffy holier-than-thou departure from supporting him is the kicker…either that or they’ve not been around actual men much. They are the ones dividing and destroying the Republican Party. Not Trump. And, it most certainly seems that all of the GOP’ers (those who had already expressed their...

Ants Circling My Phone - Mysterious video of ants circling my iPhone

An Arkansas woman who went to pick up the class ring she ordered from Walmart left disappointed, after store officials told her the retailer's new policy barred them from turning the item over -- because it bore an image of the Confederate flag. Elaine Glidewell told KFSM someone from the store in Fort Smith called her to pick up the ring she'd ordered for her nephew, but when she arrived on Tuesday, a clerk told her she couldn’t have it. The ring had been ordered before Walmart stopped selling items bearing images of the flag, in the wake of controversy...

The moons that orbit Saturn may be increasing by one -- an icy, pint-sized object that astronomers have named “Peggy.” NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has spotted evidence that a mysterious object measuring perhaps half a mile across is disturbing the outer edge of Saturn’s large, bright A ring. The object’s gravity seems to have roughed up the ring’s usually smooth profile. As a result, a stretch of the A ring that measures 750 miles long and 6 miles wide is now about 20% brighter than it would typically appear. The fuzzy blob on the A ring’s edge was imaged by Cassini’s...

Astronomers announced a contest today to name the two itty-bitty moons of Pluto discovered over the past two years. Three Pluto moons already have names associated with Hades and the underworld: Charon, the ferryman of Hades; the half-human, half-fish spirit Nix; and the multi-headed monster Hydra. The two unnamed moons need similarly shady references. Right now, they go by the bland titles of P4 and P5. They're no more than 15 to 20 miles across. Online voting will last two weeks. Twelve choices are available at plutorocks.com,

LOS ANGELES (AP) — There’s something lurking around distant and icy dwarf planet Pluto: a fifth moon. A team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope said Wednesday they have discovered the tiniest moon yet around Pluto. That brings the number of known moons to five. The mini-moon is estimated to be 6 to 15 miles across, smaller than the one that scientists spotted last year, which is 8 to 21 miles wide. Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is about 650 miles across. Until the newly found moon gets a name, it will be known as P5.

Explanation: Why does Jupiter have rings? Jupiter's rings were discovered in 1979 by the passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but their origin was a mystery. Data from the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 later confirmed that these rings were created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons. As a small meteoroid strikes tiny Adrastea, for example, it will bore into the moon, vaporize, and explode dirt and dust off into a Jovian orbit. Pictured above is an eclipse of the Sun by Jupiter, as viewed from Galileo. Small dust particles high in Jupiter's atmosphere, as well as...

NASA's Kepler space telescope... has identified 2,326 candidate planets, nearly doubling its haul since February. But what has puzzled observers and theorists so far is the high proportion of planets -- roughly one-third to one-half -- that are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune... Their very existence upsets conventional models of planetary formation and, furthermore, most of them are in tight orbits around their host star, precisely where the modellers say they shouldn't be. "It poses a challenge," says Douglas Lin, a planet-formation modeller and director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing,...

There have been some amazing photographs taken of Saturn over the years, but none quite like this.

Kepler has found the darkest known planet in universe--a Jupiter-sized exoplanet some 750 light-years away that is so black that it reflects just one percent of the light that reaches it. TrES-2b is so black that it’s darker than coal, or any other planet or moon that we’ve yet discovered. It’s less reflective than black acrylic paint. To summarize: it’s really, really black. But TrES-2b is not completely black. It emits an extremely faint red glow, like that of a hot ember. And it turns out that heat is the main culprit behind this darkest of dark planets. TrES-2b orbits...