awesome

less a home is tricked out with security cameras or police can find clear evidence, if a burglar breaks in, there's no way of knowing whodunit. Even if a victim sees the perpetrator and sits down with a sketch artist, memory can be faulty or biased—just ask the countless black men who've "fit the description."

A group of Penn State University researchers have developed a technological solution that uses the one part of us that never lies: DNA. Led by anthropologist Mark Shriver, the research team has created computer software that generates a 3-D facial model. All it needs is something—a hair, a fingernail, or saliva—with your genetic code.

Via Phys.org:

The barrier to the particle motion was discovered in the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped rings above Earth that are filled with high-energy electrons and protons, said Distinguished Professor Daniel Baker, director of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). Held in place by Earth's magnetic field, the Van Allen radiation belts periodically swell and shrink in response to incoming energy disturbances from the sun.

As the first significant discovery of the space age, the Van Allen radiation belts were detected in 1958 by Professor James Van Allen and his team at the University of Iowa and were found to be comprised of an inner and outer belt extending up to 25,000 miles above Earth's surface. In 2013, Baker—who received his doctorate under Van Allen—led a team that used the twin Van Allen Probes launched by NASA in 2012 to discover a third, transient "storage ring" between the inner and outer Van Allen radiation belts that seems to come and go with the intensity of space weather.