Whitley Strieber has just posted a beautiful video about his new novel Hybrids, in bookstores NOW. Go to the Hybrids website to watch it and to listen to Whitley read the first three chapters of the book.read more

Using two of its new telescopes –one on the ground and one in space– NASA have seen one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts ever observed, which seems to be the destruction of a massive star. Astronomers say they have never seen anything this bright, long-lasting and variable before. Usually, gamma-ray bursts mark the destruction of a massive star, but Flaring emissions from these events never last more than a few hours, but high-energy radiation from it continued to be seen from it for more than a week afterwards. read more

A zebra’s black-and-white stripes resemble a barcode–now biologists are USING them that way, to identify individual zebras from a photo. In StripeSpotter, a scientist draws a rectangle around an image of the zebra’s side in a photo, then this part of the image is automatically sliced into a number of bands. Each zebra’s "barcode" is then entered into a database, so individual zebras can be identified from photos–an ideal way to keep track of the herd.read more