TV News LIES

Weather scientists are retracing the footprints of this week's monstrous tornadoes the way detectives would investigate a crime scene: talking to witnesses, watching surveillance video and taking the measurements of trees ripped from the ground.

The result will be a meteorological autopsy report on the disaster, revealing how many twisters developed and how powerful they were.

In the mountains of Northern California, a field of radio dishes that look like giant dinner plates waited for years for the first call from intelligent life among the stars. But they're not listening anymore.

Cash-strapped governments, it seems, can no longer pay the interstellar phone bill. Astronomers at the SETI Institute said a steep drop in state and federal funds has forced the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array, a powerful tool in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, an effort scientists refer to as SETI.

Mars today has a brutal environment — frigid, arid and, because of its very thin atmosphere, constantly bombarded by lethal radiation. But it was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a far dustier, stormier atmosphere.

“It was an unpleasant place to hang out,” said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The private rocket company SpaceX says its next rocket will be the most powerful in the world. The new rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, is designed to carry up to about twice as much weight as a NASA space shuttle can take to orbit. It's expected to be at the launchpad at the end of next year for its first flight, with the launch likely coming in 2013.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described his company's new rocket during a press conference in Washington, D.C. He says it will be able to take about 117,000 pounds to orbit.

It  looks like a giant potato in space. And yet, the information in this model is the sharpest view we have of how gravity varies across the Earth. The globe has been released by the team working on Europe's Goce satellite.

It is a highly exaggerated rendering, but it neatly illustrates how the tug we feel from the mass of rock under our feet is not the same in every location.

Gravity is strongest in yellow areas; it is weakest in blue ones.

A team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed what it describes as the first practical artificial leaf. The device, made from silicon, electronics and catalysts, is the same size and shape as a playing card, but thinner.

It splits water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. These are then stored in a fuel cell and used later to generate electricity. "It's really cool stuff -- they're taking a solar cell and turning it into a battery," Carl Howe, director of anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld.