Hunting mystery giant lightning from space
Thunderstorms are some of the most spectacular events in nature, yet what we can see from the surface of our planet is only the beginning.
There are bizarre goings on in Earth's upper atmosphere, and a new mission aims to learn more about them.
Launched to the International Space Station on Monday, the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) will observe the strange electrical phenomena that occur above thunderstorms.
Sky lab
Orbiting at an altitude of just over 400km, the ISS provides the perfect view of Earth's turbulent weather systems.
ASIM will be deployed aboard the station later this month.
The electrifying effects of storms are frequently observed from the space station.
Yet when lightning strikes downward, something very different is happening above the cloud tops.
Known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), these unusual features were first spotted by accident in 1989.
Minnesota professor John R Winckler was testing a television camera in advance of an upcoming rocket launch, when he realised that two frames showed bright columns of light above a distant storm cloud.
Sprites, elves and jets
So, what's causing these events?
"They are slightly different to lightning," Dr Neubert told BBC News. "It's a pulse of the electric field that travels up. For the sprite - when the atmosphere gets thin, the field can get a discharge."
Sprites appear milliseconds after a powerful cloud-to-ground lightning strike.
Elves, on the other hand, are caused by the electromagnetic pulse the strike produces. A brief, aurora-like expanding halo in the ionosphere, they occur too quickly to be spotted by the human eye and last less than a millisecond.
Although they are more elusive, "elves are incredibly well understood," says Dr Martin Fullekrug from the University of Bath.
They are the most common TLE, thought to occur twice as often as sprites
Blue jets - upward electrical discharges from cloud tops - are the least well known.
"The jets are not very well studied because they're very faint. They're mainly blue. Also they're not necessarily associated with lightning. They pop up now and again and they're very mysterious," Dr Fullekrug added.
While elves are mainly spotted over warm ocean waters, sprites tend to occur over land.
North America, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa are all good places to see them.
"In Britain we also have [these storms] from time to time," explained
Dr Fullekrug. "We're conducting research on one that happened in May last year. It produced a wonderful sequence of sprites [over Cornwall]."
Dr Fullekrug. "We're conducting research on one that happened in May last year. It produced a wonderful sequence of sprites [over Cornwall]."
The sprites were spotted by meteor observers, who had cameras trained on the sky to follow the trails of shooting stars.
Stormchasing from space
ASIM's main goals are to study the physics of TLEs, and the characteristics of thunderstorms that produce them.
The payload includes two cameras, which can capture 12 frames per second,
plus X-ray and gamma ray detectors.
plus X-ray and gamma ray detectors.
This will allow the international team of researchers, for many of whom this is the culmination of decades of work, to determine where in the cloud sprites or jets
originate.
originate.
With the aid of the European Space Agency, ASIM's minimum mission length is two years.
During this period, it is expected to
observe a minimum of one TLE per day, although it is thought that they occur
at least every minute, somewhere in the world.
observe a minimum of one TLE per day, although it is thought that they occur
at least every minute, somewhere in the world.
For Dr Neubert, this will be an incredibly exciting time.
"We don't really know what's inside lighting. It happens so fast and it's so dangerous... it's hard to get to the real inside physics," he said.
In the thin upper atmosphere, TLEs are larger and easier to measure.
"To me," he added, "they represent a window to the inside of lightning."
Facebook to verify major page owners
Facebook will verify the identity of people running popular pages, as part of its continued efforts to stem fake news and propaganda.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said all “large” pages would be audited - any which did not clear the process would be prevented from posting.
The move is designed to prevent users who run pages using fake accounts from hiding their true identity.
Mr Zuckerberg said he backed proposed political ads regulation.
It would require technology companies to collect more data on the source of those advertisements.
"Election interference is a problem that's bigger than any one platform," he wrote.
"And that's why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online."
Also announced today, Facebook will add more transparency over the funding of "issue-based" political ads.
"These steps by themselves won't stop all people trying to game the system," Mr Zuckerberg said.
"But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads."
Russian manipulation
The firm will ask those placing political ads for a US government-issued ID and a physical mailing address. A unique code will be sent to the address - and will need to be inputted before the advertising is allowed to run.
The measures are to counter some of the tactics apparently used by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll farm” said to have manipulated Facebook in order to target American voters.
One of the group’s most effective techniques was to set up pages that appeared to be run by passionate US-based campaigners. In some cases, these pages successfully encouraged people to take to the streets and engage in protests.
A spokeswoman told the BBC that Facebook had not finalised what would qualify as a large page, but that it would include other indicators as well as simply the number of followers a page has.
It will also make it clear if the page has changed its name. It is understood Russian trolls used innocuous titles to attract followers to a page, only to then switch the page into promoting a political view.
Facebook already verifies the identity of celebrities and other public figures, and the system for verifying page owners will likely work a similar way, the spokeswoman said.
Crunch hearings
The changes have been announced ahead of a critical week for Facebook. On Tuesday, Mr Zuckerberg will begin a round of Congressional hearings into Facebook’s handling of data and other issues.
It will be the first time the 33-year-old has personally appeared to represent the social network he founded, and comes following intense pressure to do so. Likely on the minds of senators and representatives will be the extent to which Facebook is able to prevent attempts to manipulate voters in the future.
In October 2017, the company began forcing those placing ads to support specific candidates to make it clear who was funding that promotion.
“We're extending that requirement to anyone that wants to show 'issue ads’ - like political topics that are being debated across the country,” the company said.
"We are working with third parties to develop a list of key issues, which we will refine over time. To get authorised by Facebook, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location.
"Advertisers will be prohibited from running political ads - electoral or issue-based - until they are authorised."
Perhaps foreshadowing Mr Zuckerberg’s response to politicians next week, the statement admitted this system would not solve the problem entirely.
"We know we were slow to pick-up foreign interference in the 2016 US elections.
"Today's updates are designed to prevent future abuse in elections - and to help ensure you have the information that you need to assess political and issue ads, as well as content on pages.
"By increasing transparency around ads and pages on Facebook, we can increase accountability for advertisers — improving our service for everyone."
Menendez brothers convicted of killing parents reunite in jail
The Menendez brothers, who once shocked the nation in the brutal killing of their parents, have reunited behind bars more than two decades after they were convicted for murder.
Erik Menendez, 47, and Lyle Menendez, 50, who are serving life sentences for the 1989 killings, gripped the country during the 1990s in the widely-watched double murder trials - which included a mistrial.
The brothers, ages 18 and 21 at the time of the killings, shot their wealthy parents Jose and Kitty Menendez at point-blank range in their Beverly Hill mansion.
They reportedly "burst into tears" upon their first meeting on Wednesday in a San Diego prison housing unit.
"They can and do interact with each other, all the inmates in that facility," state corrections department spokeswoman Terry Thornton told the Associated Press on Thursday.
As partners in crime, the brothers had been deliberately kept apart since the last time they saw each other in 1996.
Killed for 'greed'
Prosecutors argued during the high-profile trial that the the young men had killed their successful parents to inherit their multi-million-dollar estate.
The brothers' defence lawyers claimed that it was revenge for sexual abuse, but no molestation was ever proven in court.
Their father, a 45-year-old Hollywood executive, was shot six times with a shotgun the brothers had purchased days before the attack.
Their mother died after suffering 10 shotgun blasts to several parts of her body.
The two told police they had returned home to find their slain parents.
"I've been in this business 33 years and I've heard of few killings as savage as this one," then Los Angeles police chief Marvin D Iannone told the Associated Press in 1990.
They were arrested after the girlfriend of a psychologist that had been treating Erik Menendez went to police to say that he had physically threatened the doctor.
Taped sessions with the doctor, in which the killings were discussed, were later ruled admissible in court by a trial judge.
The trial began in 1993 and resulted in two deadlocked juries in 1994 before the case was retried in 1995.
Separated for more than 20 years
The two were separated during their detention after a detective who investigated the slayings said they may conspire to escape if housed together.
In February 2018 Lyle Menendez was moved from the from Mule Creek State Prison in Northern California to San Diego's RJ Donovan Correctional Facility, after his security level was lowered.
The prison houses 3,900 male inmates, but the two were not kept in the same unit and were unable to interact with each other before Wednesday.
According to Robert Rand, a journalist who has covered the case since 1989 and was a consultant for a 2017 television programme about the brothers, the pair both "burst into tears immediately" upon their reunion.
While serving time in separate prisons, the two had been banned from talking on the phone, he told ABC News.
But they reportedly wrote letters and played chess by sending their moves through the mail, according to Mr Rand.
Lyle Menendez told ABC News in an interview last year that he and his brother wrote letters and that their "bond is really strong".
He also spoke about his mother to NBC's Today programme in September.
"I love my mother, and I still cry over my mother, and I don't forgive her,'' he told NBC.
"Her life ended and our lives essentially ended all because of this fateful decision. There had to be a series of decisions she made of not to tell what was happening.
"What kind of mother lets it happen?"
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