Data-wiping algorithm cleans your cellphone

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

Mailing your cellphone to a recycling company might make you a few pounds, but it can leave you at risk of identity theft. The deletion techniques recycling companies use are meant for hard discs, and so don't work on the solid-state flash memory used in mobile phones. That means personal data like banking info, texts, contacts and pictures can end up in the hands of, well, anyone the phone ends up with.  

To remedy the problem, British company BlackBelt Smartphone Defence of Skelmersdale, Lancashire claims to have developed a software algorithm that can securely delete data on cellphone memory chips. The trouble with data in a flash memory chip is that it is protected by an on-chip protection algorithm called the wear leveller. This hard-coded routine does its best to ensure the chip's lifetime is maximised so that each memory cell's ability to store charge is not worn out.

"The problem is that the wear-levelling algorithm ends up working
against the data wiping technique used for hard drives, which tries to
overwrite all the data,"
says the company's Ken Garner.

What the firm has done is write their own algorithm, called BlackBelt DataWipe, that works with,
rather than against, the leveller routine to render data
irrecoverable. "It is like having a shredder for personally identifiable
data," says Garner.

However, they don't yet know if their method is proof against sophisticated, nation-state level attacks - which might use electron microscopes
to read the last vestiges of the zeros and ones on a memory chip. "I imagine
if you're GCHQ you'll probably have technology that could get around
this and recover it in some way," says Garner.

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Venezuela devalues currency 32% against US dollar

CARACAS: Venezuela said Friday it is devaluing its currency by 32 per cent against the dollar on the orders of cancer-stricken President Hugo Chavez, in part to trim a bloated budget deficit.

The bolivar will go from 4.3 to 6.3 to the dollar at the official exchange rate. The move was announced at a press conference by Planning and Finance Minister Jorge Giordani. He said it will take effect on Wednesday.

The goal is to "minimize expenditure and maximize results." One effect of a devaluation is to make a country's exports cheaper and thus more enticing to buyers.

But another effect is to cut the deficit, which in Venezuela last year was estimated to be nearly 10 per cent of GDP.

The economy grew 5.5 per cent last year and inflation was 20 per cent. That was down seven points from the previous year and hit the government target, but was still the highest official inflation rate in Latin America.

Venezuela is South America's largest oil exporter and has the world's largest proven reserves. Its oil transactions are dollar-denominated, so the bolivar-value of those sales will now be higher, boosting state revenues on paper.

The change had been widely expected by analysts and business leaders since last year. This is Venezuela's fifth currency devaluation in a decade.

But a side effect of the new one will be higher inflation, economists warned.

Giordani said the government would honour dollar purchase requests made before January 15 requests at the old exchange rate.

Chavez is convalescing in Cuba, where he underwent a fourth round of cancer surgery on December 11.

Vice President Nicolas Maduro, who visited Chavez this week, said at the same press conference Friday that Chavez is concerned about the Venezuelan economy and called for a "major effort" to maintain its pace of growth.

Chavez established currency controls in 2003 and the government sets the rate to curb capital flight.

But the existence of a strong black market for the dollar shows the continuing desire for hard currency.

Economist Jesus Casique warned the devaluation would have a major inflationary side effect and the government should not see it as the main tool for trimming the deficit.

Rather, it should take other steps such as clearing away red tape that makes it hard for business to obtain dollars and encouraging Venezuelan non-oil exports.

"The measure should come hand in hand with others," Casique said.

Out on the street, there was little enthusiasm for the devaluation.

"This is bad news," said businessman Jorge Martinez, walking past the Venezuelan central bank with his wife. "We have been number-crunching because in a month we are going to travel to Spain, and now we do not have enough money."

- AFP/xq

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Yelp CEO takes $1 salary

Add Jeremy Stoppelman, chief executive of business reviews site Yelp, to the list of CEOs who are willing to work for $1.

Stoppelman will take a $1 base salary for 2013, according to information in Yelp's 8-K document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The itsy-bitsy take-home pay makes Stoppelman just like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who have also preferred to work for just a buck.

Both Stoppelman and Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker reduced their base salaries to $1 for 2013. Stoppelman's 2012 salary was $300,000, according to public documents. The Yelp CEO made $220,000 in 2009, 2010, and 2011.

Of course, Stoppelman isn't working for free. Far from it. The chief executive's real payment for 2013 consists of 665,000 options that will vest at different rates.

One twenty-fourth of the 90,000 options Stoppelman was granted will vest each month for the next two years, which works out to be a relatively generous vesting schedule. When all 90,000 of those shares vest in 2 years, they'll be worth around $2 million, should Yelp's stock price remain stable.

Yelp's value, however, is a huge variable as share prices have bounced around between $14 and $32 a share since the company's initial public offering 11 months ago. Just this week, the reviews business bummed out investors when it reported a net loss of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter. Yelp's share price took an instant hit but recovered to close today at $21.85 a share.

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Space Pictures This Week: Sun Dragon, Celestial Seagull

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Solar Dragon

  Image courtesy SDO/NASA

  Resembling a dragon's tail, remnants of a solar filament strain to escape the sun's gravity in an image released this week by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

  Most of the electrically charged gas, imaged in extreme ultraviolet light, was unsuccessful in its escape attempt and fell back into the sun.

  Filaments form when magnetic field lines push out of the sun in loops, holding dense gas above the surface of the sun. (Read about a huge solar filament that erupted in August 2012.)

  —Jane J. Lee and Christine Dell'Amore

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Aurora On The Road

  Photograph by Marcel Mivelaz, My Shot

  Northern lights writhe behind a thin cloud layer above a road on Ringvassoya Island, Norway, in this picture submitted to National Geographic's My Shot photography community on January 31.

  Born of violent eruptions of plasma from the sun's surface, auroras occur when the ejected gas slams into the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field. (Watch a video about the birth of auroras.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Celestial Seagull

  Image courtesy ESO

  Like a parrot perched on a pirate's arm, the Seagull Nebula resides in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

  This new image, released by the European Southern Observatory on February 6, shows a closeup of one of the "wings" of the Seagull Nebula. Red clouds of hydrogen gas glow from the intense ultraviolet radiation given off with the birth of stars.

  The entire nebula is actually comprised of three large gas clouds arranged in the shape of a bird. (See pictures of other nebulae.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Saturn's North Pole

  Image courtesy Caltech/SSI/NASA

  Saturn's hexagon-shaped north pole is lit by the sun now that spring has come to the planet's northern hemisphere, as seen in a NASA picture released this week.

  The 15,000-mile-wide (25,000-kilometer-wide) cloud formation, captured by the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera in November, was initially spied during the Voyager missions in the 1980s. (See another Cassini picture of the hexagon.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Martian Avalanches

  Image courtesy U. Arizona/NASA

  A 2011 frost avalanche kicks up dust on Mars in a picture released this week by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera team.

  Frost avalanches usually occur at the onset of the Martian spring, when layers of carbon dioxide frost warm, causing ice and dust to cascade off of cliffs.

  "While HiRISE has captured other frost avalanches before, they never cease to amaze, since it demonstrates that there are indeed active processes on the red planet," according to the HiRISE website. (Related: "First Mars Avalanches Seen In Action.")

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Luminous London

  Photograph courtesy NASA

  London gleams in a nighttime picture taken from the International Space Station on February 2.

  Expedition 34 Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield captured the English city while flying about 240 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESA

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  

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Great Energy Challenge Blog

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'Stay Home': Northeast Shuts Down as Blizzard Hits

A blizzard of possibly historic proportions began battering the Northeast today, and could bring more than two feet of snow and strong winds that could shut down densely populated cities such as Boston and New York City.

A storm from the west joined forces with one from the south to form a nor'easter that will sit and spin just off the East Coast, affecting more than 43 million Americans. Wind gusts were forecast to reach 50 to 60 mph from Philadelphia to Boston.

Cape Cod, Mass., could possibly see 75 mph gusts. Boston and other parts of New England could see more than two feet of snow by Saturday.

The storm showed the potential for such ferocity that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency Friday afternoon and signed an executive order banning vehicular traffic on roads in his state effective at 4 p.m. ET. It was believed that the last time the state enacted such a ban was during the blizzard of 1978. Violating the ban could result in a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $500 fine.

"[It] could definitely be a historic winter storm for the Northeast," said Adrienne Leptich of the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y. "We're looking at very strong wind and heavy snow and we're also looking for some coastal flooding."

Airlines began shutting down operations Friday afternoon at major airports in the New York area as well as in Boston, Portland, Maine, Providence, R.I., and other Northeastern airports. By early evening Friday, more than 4,300 flights had been cancelled on Friday and Saturday, according to FlightAware. Airlines hoped to resume flights by Saturday afternoon, though normal schedules were not expected until Sunday.

The snow fell heavily Friday afternoon in New York City and 12 to 14 inches were expected. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said clearing the roads was his main concern, and the city readied 1,700 snow plows and 250,000 tons of salt to clear the streets.

Hurricane Sandy Victims Hit Again, Survivors Prepare for Worst Watch Video

Weather Forecast: Blizzard Headed for Northeast Watch Video

New York City was expecting up to 14 inches of snow, which started falling early this morning, though the heaviest amounts were expected to fall at night and into Saturday. Wind gusts of 55 mph were expected in New York City.

"Stay off the city streets. Stay out of your cars and stay at home while the worst of the storm is on us," Bloomberg said Friday.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy declared a state of emergency, deploying National Guard troops across the state to assist in rescues and other emergencies. Schools and state courthouses were closed, and all flights after 1:30 p.m. at Bradley Airport, north of Hartford, Conn., were cancelled. The state's largest utility companies planned for the possibility that 30 percent of customers -- more than 400,000 homes and businesses -- would lose power.

Malloy also directed drivers to stay off the state's major highways.

"Please stay off of 95, 91, 84, Merritt Parkway and any other limited-access road in the state," he said Friday evening.

PHOTOS: Northeast Braces for Snowstorm

Boston, Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., and other New England cities canceled school today.

"Stay off the streets of our city. Basically, stay home," Boston Mayor Tom Menino warned Thursday.

On Friday, Menino applauded the public's response.

"I'm very pleased with the compliance with the snow emergency," he said. "You drive down some of the roadways, you don't see one car."

As of 4:30 p.m. Friday, according to the Department of Defense, 837 National Guard soldiers and airmen under state control had been activated in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York in anticipation of the storm -- 552 in Massachusetts, 235 in Connecticut and 50 in New York. The extra hands were helping with roadways, transportation, making wellness checks on residents and other emergency services.

Beach erosion and coastal flooding is possible from New Jersey to Long Island, N.Y., and into New England coastal areas. Some waves off the coast could reach more than 20 feet.

Blizzard warnings were posted for parts of New Jersey and New York's Long Island, as well as portions of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, including Hartford, New Haven, Conn., and Providence. The warnings extended into New Hampshire and Maine.

To the south, Philadelphia was looking at a possible 4 to 6 inches of snow.

In anticipation of the storm, Amtrak said its Northeast trains would stop running this afternoon.

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Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

MEMORY is a strange thing. Just using the verb "smash" in a question about a car crash instead of "bump" or "hit" causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There's a way around it, however: get a robot to ask the questions.

Cindy Bethel at Mississippi State University in Starkville and her team showed 100 "witnesses" a slide show in which a man steals money and a calculator from a drawer, under the pretext of fixing a chair. The witnesses were then split into four groups and asked about what they had seen, either by a person or by a small NAO robot, controlled in a Wizard of Oz set-up by an unseen human.

Two groups - one with a human and one a robot interviewer - were asked identical questions that introduced false information about the crime, mentioning objects that were not in the scene, then asking about them later. When posed by humans, the questions caused the witnesses' recall accuracy to drop by 40 per cent - compared with those that did not receive misinformation - as they remembered objects that were never there. But misinformation presented by the NAO robot didn't have an effect.

"It was a very big surprise," says Bethel. "They just were not affected by what the robot was saying. The scripts were identical. We even told the human interviewers to be as robotic as possible." The results will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.

Bilge Mutlu, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that robots may avoid triggering the misinformation effect simply because we are not familiar with them and so do not pick up on behavioural cues, which we do with people. "We have good, strong mental models of humans, but we don't have good models of robots," he says.

The misinformation effect doesn't only effect adults; children are particularly susceptible, explains the psychologist on the project, Deborah Eakin. Bethel's ultimate goal is to use robots to help gather testimony from children, who tend to pick up on cues contained in questions. "It's a huge problem," Bethel says.

At the Starkville Police Department, a 10-minute drive from the university, officers want to use such a robotic interviewer to gather more reliable evidence from witnesses. The police work hard to avoid triggering the misinformation effect, says officer Mark Ballard, but even an investigator with the best intentions can let biases slip into the questions they ask a witness.

Children must usually be taken to a certified forensic child psychologist to be interviewed, something which can be difficult if the interviewer works in another jurisdiction. "You might eliminate that if you've got a robot that's certified for forensics investigations, and it's tough to argue that the robot brings any memories or theories with it from its background," says Ballard.

The study is "very interesting, very intriguing", says Selma Sabanovic, a roboticist at Indiana University. She is interested to see what happens as Bethel repeats the experiment with different robot shapes and sizes. She also poses a slightly darker question: "How would you design a robot to elicit the kind of information you want?"

This article appeared in print under the headline "The robot inquisition"

It's all about how you say it

When providing new information, rather than helping people recall events (see main story), a robot's rhetoric and body language can make a big difference to how well it gets its message across.

Bilge Mutlu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison had two robots compete to guide humans through a virtual city. He found that the robot which used rhetorical language drew more people to follow it. For example, the robot saying "this zoo will teach you about different parts of the world" did less well than one saying "visiting this zoo feels like travelling the world, without buying a plane ticket". The work will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Tennis: No Serena, no Sharapova in tweaked Fed Cup

PARIS: The 2013 Fed Cup World Group gets underway on Saturday with the tournament missing marquee names Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova and with a late format tweak aimed at boosting the event's appeal.

Both Williams and Sharapova featured in the 2012 Fed Cup, partly to meet Olympic Games qualifying criteria, but will not be involved when the United States tackle Italy and Russia welcome Japan this weekend.

Williams, who has played just six ties since 1999, has a back injury while Sharapova, whose Fed Cup record stretches to a meagre three appearances since her 2008 debut, was left out of the Russian squad.

Their absences have cut the number of players from the top 10 competing in the four World Group One ties to just three -- number seven Sara Errani of Italy, eighth-ranked Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic and number nine Samantha Stosur of Australia.

Wary of the growing demands placed on time and physical endurance by the professional tour, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) announced on Thursday changes concerning dead rubbers in the tournament.

Under the new policy, if a tie is decided after the third singles rubber, the fourth singles rubber will not be played and the dead doubles rubber will be played instead.

However if the tie is only decided after the fourth singles rubber, the dead doubles rubber will still be played with a match tiebreak (first to 10 points) replacing the third set.

"The enhancement of the dead rubber policy came in response to requests from players, captains and National Associations following its successful introduction in Davis Cup," said ITF executive vice-president Juan Margets.

"This is part of the ITF's continued effort to make Fed Cup more player friendly, while maintaining a good spectator experience on the Sunday."

Former Wimbledon champion Kvitova leads defending champions Czech Republic against Australia in Ostrava where she will be playing her 14th Fed Cup tie since 2007.

However, she has struggled this season, a shock second round exit at the Australian Open followed by a quarter-final loss in Paris last week where she was second seed.

"My results are not exactly what I want them to be, but I still believe it will be OK. I know I can play tennis, and I like Fed Cup," said the 22-year-old.

In the absence of the Williams sisters, as well as Australian Open semi-finalist Sloane Stephens, the 17-time champions US will be led by world number 21 Varvara Lepchencko when they face Italy in Rimini.

Italy, with Errani and world number 16 Roberta Vinci likely to play singles and doubles, beat the US in the 2009 and 2010 finals.

Even without Sharapova, Russia, the four-time winners, should be too strong for Japan in Moscow.

Maria Kirilenko, at 13, Ekaterina Makarova, the world number 20, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the 31st-ranked player and number 32 Elena Vesnina, are all higher up the WTA pecking order than Japan's top singles player Ayumi Morita, the world 57.

In Nis, 2012 runners-up Serbia, who are likely to be without world number 14 and former French Open champion Ana Ivanovic with a shoulder injury, tackle Slovakia.

- AFP/xq

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Top five Thunderbolt storage devices: Performance meets capacity

The Thunderbolt technology can be applied to a lot of things, but currently, the most popular use is in storage products. In this regard, it's similar to USB 3.0 but offers about twice the transfer speed, and you can also daisy-chain as many as five storage devices together using a single Thunderbolt port without degrading the data rates.

Despite the fact that now Thunderbolt has gone multiplatform, most Thunderbolt storage devices are geared toward Macs. And their pricing, while progressively getting lower since Thunderbolt was first introduced a few years ago, is still quite high when compared to USB storage devices. The good news is now most, if not all, Thunderbolt storage devices on the market come with a Thunderbolt cable included, which would cost another $50 if you had to buy one yourself.

That said, if you own a Thunderbolt-enabled computer -- especially a
Mac -- and need a superfast storage device for professional needs such as video editing or backups, Thunderbolt storage is worth the investment. The following are the top five storage devices of this type, designed for desktop use, that I have reviewed, sorted with the most recently reviewed first. This list will be updated on a regular basis as I review more of them.

---

LaCie 5big Thunderbolt
Introduced at
CES 2013, LaCie's 5big Thunderbolt is the first five-bay Thunderbolt storage device that doesn't offer RAID 5. Instead, it's just a JBOD device that relies on Mac OS's software RAID to manage its internal drives. This is similar to the Pegasus J4 and hence offers only RAID 0 and RAID 1. Since this is a five-bay device, the best use of it is a dual-RAID configuration with two drives in RAID 1 for important data and the other three in RAID 0 for fast access.

The trade-off for the lack of RAID 5 support is the fact that the 5big Thunderbolt is comparatively affordable, with the 20TB version costing $2,200. The RAID 5-capable Pegasus R6 offers just 12TB at the same price.

In my testing, the 5big Thunderbolt offered excellent performance, making it one of the fastest storage device on the market. The 5big Thunderbolt also comes in a 10TB version that costs $1,200. Read the full review of the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt.

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WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo
The My Book VelociRaptor Duo is the second Thunderbolt drive from Western Digital, the first being the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo. Unlike the Thunderbolt Duo, which uses energy-efficient WD Green hard drives, the new My Book uses two of the latest 1TB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 as its storage. In case you haven't heard, WD VelociRaptor internal hard drives are arguably the fastest and most reliable on the market. The result: the My Book VelociRaptor Duo is by far the fastest dual-bay Thunderbolt drive I've tested. This, plus the fact that a Thunderbolt cable is included, makes the My Book VelociRaptor totally worth its $850 street price.

And since the drive can offer top performance only when its two internal drives are set up in RAID 0, you should get two of them, daisy-chained together, for backup purposes. Read the full review of the WD My Book VelociRaptor Duo.

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Promise Pegasus J4 The Pegasus J4 is a somewhat smaller version of the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt above. This is because it uses 2.5-inch (laptop) drives, and while it's a four-bay device, it also doesn't support RAID 5. Instead, it also a JBOD storage device that relies on the Mac operating system to offer RAID 1 or RAID 0.

The advantage of the J4 is the fact that's very compact, just about the size of the
Mac Mini. It offered very fast performance in my testing, considering it supports laptop hard drives, which tend to be slower than desktop drives. Advanced users can also use it with solid-state drives (SSDs) for even faster performance. Read the full review of the Pegasus J4.

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WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo
The WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo is the first Thunderbolt storage device from Western Digital. The drive is basically the Thunderbolt version of the My Book Studio Edition II. It has two drive bays accessible from the top. Inside, you'll find two SATA hard drives of 2TB, 3TB, or 4TB each, so the Duo can offer 4TB, 6TB, or 8TB of storage space when formatted in RAID 0. In RAID 1, you'll have half of that.

The My Book is shipped with low-powered hard drives, an in my testing, it was the slowest Thunderbolt storage devices on the market, although still much faster than any other non-Thunderbolt external hard drive. What makes it one of the best deals, however, is its pricing. At $800 for 8TB, it's the most affordable among all Thunderbolt storage devices, in terms of cost per gigabyte. Read the full review of the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo.

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Promise Pegasus R6
The Promise Pegasus R6 is the thoroughbred of the Thunderbolt standard. It's the first Thunderbolt storage device, and up to now it's still the fastest of its type. On top of that, it's one of the only two multiple-bay Thunderbolt storage devices (the other being the four-bay Pegasus R4) on the market that has built-in hardware RAID and therefore offers all types of RAID configurations, including advanced RAID setups such as RAID 5 or RAID 6. The device's six included hard drives are user-serviceable and can be hot-swappable in case failure occurs.

The negatives of the R6 include its high cost (about $2,200 for 12TB), and the noise and the vibration it generates during operation. But if you want something that's for now the be-all and end-all of Thunderbolt-based storage, this is the one. Read the full review of the Promise Pegasus R6.

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Looking for specs and pricing? Compare these storage devices head-to-head.

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Cop Shooting Rampage: Dorner's Truck Found

The truck owned and driven by suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner during his alleged rampage through the Los Angeles area was found deserted and in flames on the side of Bear Mountain, Calif., this afternoon.

Heavily armed SWAT team members descended onto Bear Mountain from a helicopter manned with snipers today to investigate the fire. The San Bernadino Sheriff's Department confirmed the car was Dorner's.

Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is believed to have killed one police officer and injured two others early this morning in Riverside, Calif. He is also accused of killing two civilians on Sunday after releasing a scathing "manifesto" alleging grievances committed by the police department while he worked for it and warning of coming violence toward cops.

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Heavily armed officers spent much of Thursday searching for signs of Dorner, investigating multiple false leads into his whereabouts and broadcasting his license plate and vehicle description across the California Highway System.

Around 3:45 p.m. ET, police responded to Bear Mountain, where two fires were reported, and set up a staging area in the parking lot of a ski resort. They did not immediately investigate the fires, but sent a small team of heavily armed officers up in the helicopter to descend down the mountain toward the fire.

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The officers, carrying machine guns and searching the mountain for any sign of Dorner, eventually made it to the vehicle and identified it as belonging to Dorner. They have not yet found Dorner.

Late this afternoon, CNN announced that Dorner had sent a package containing his manifesto and a DVD to its offices.

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Police officers across Southern California were on the defensive today, scaling back their public exposure, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outdoors.

Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be targets of Dorner's alleged rampage.

"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today, and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses," said Chief Sergio Diaz of the police department in Riverside, Calif., where the officers were shot. "We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today."

Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles Police Department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."

Early Thursday morning, before they believe he shot at any police officers, Dorner allegedly went to a yacht club near San Diego, where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.

He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was then that he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.

"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," said Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department.

Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.

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