Free Republic

Foreign intelligence services are using "spy turtles" and "spy fish" to snoop on China, the country's Ministry of State Security said Friday. "An unseen covert war of espionage is currently unfolding" in the seas around China's coast, the ministry wrote in a post on the WeChat social media platform. In recent years, overseas spy agencies have been "continuously collecting and stealing sensitive maritime data through various new types of espionage equipment," it said, including "spy turtles and spy fish." In certain Chinese waters, "relatively large living marine animals have been fitted with sensors to swim in specific areas, collect ocean...

An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday. Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036. Although the odds of an impact by this particular asteroid are low, a recent congressional mandate for NASA to upgrade its tracking of near-Earth asteroids is expected to uncover hundreds, if not thousands of threatening space rocks in the near future, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart...