SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, billionaires are playing God. They’re backing new geoengineering investments scarier plots than new weapons in James Bond’s “Skyfall.” Yes weapons: Foreign Policy warns they’re “Playing God.” Stanford Social Innovation Review calls “Climate Science a Culture War.” And the Guardian reports billionaire “Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering.” Yes war on Earth: Plans to dump millions of tons of sulphur high in the sky. Sure sounds like a diabolical terrorist plot. Megarisks with unintended, terminal and irreversible consequences, a hot plot ripe for a future “007” film. But be warned: billionaire investors see geoengineering as the solution to the threat of climate change. Geoengineering: new Big Oil trick to protect profits But the reality is, geoengineering is a smokescreen, a strategic diversion by Big Oil to protect its $150 billion in annual profits. Yes, they’re perpetuating their myth: “Climate Science is …

The launch of the third Air Force X-37B spaceship, a secret space plane used for classified missions in Earth orbit, has been postponed, officials said. The liftoff of an Atlas 5 rocket set to carry the robotic X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-3), which looks like a mini space shuttle, has now been slipped to Nov. 27, pending confirmation that the rocket range can support the launch. According to a statement on Nov. 2 from spokesperson Jessica Rye of United Launch Alliance (ULA), which builds the Atlas 5, the leadership at ULA and the Air Force agreed to postpone the launch of the X-37B for two weeks. The postponement stems from an ongoing investigation of an engine glitch during an Oct. 5 flight of a Delta 4 booster, a relative to the Atlas 5. That launcher experienced a lower-than-normal upper-stage engine chamber pressure when it launched to place a Global Positioning …

A team of researchers have created a proof-of-concept piece of malware that can give attackers control of USB smart card readers attached to an infected Windows computer over the Internet. The malware installs a special driver on the infected computer which allows for the USB devices connected to it to be shared over the Internet with the attacker’s computer. n the case of USB smart card readers, the attacker can use the middleware software provided by the smart card manufacturer to perform operations with the victim’s card as if it was attached to his own computer, said Paul Rascagneres, an IT security consultant at Luxembourg-based security auditing and consulting firm Itrust Consulting, last week. Rascagneres is also the founder and leader of a malware analysis and engineering project called malware.lu, whose team designed this USB sharing malware. There are already documented cases of malware that hijacks smart card devices on the local …

Researchers have figured out how to recreate the bright, beautiful colors of butterfly wings, as well as their ability to strongly repel water. The colors of a butterfly’s wings are the result of an unusual trait—the way they reflect light is fundamentally different from how color works most of the time. A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has found a way to generate this kind of “structural color.” Shu Yang, associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering, led the research. She and colleagues report their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. “A lot of research over the last 10 years has gone into trying to create structural colors like those found in nature, in things like butterfly wings and opals,” Yang says. “People have also been interested in creating superhydrophobic surfaces which is found in things like lotus leaves, and in butterfly wings, too, …

Perhaps reminiscent of the infamous Montauk monster, a giant eyeball has washed up on a Florida beach (as if Florida needed anything else weird). The Internets are buzzing with questions: whose eye is it? What is it? To us, it looks an awful lot like the giant squid eyeball we recently saw on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian. To find out, we inquired with some of our intrepid National Geographic grantees. But first, where did the eye come from? According to news reports, the mysterious eye washed up on Florida’s Pompano Beach, where it was found by a beachcomber. Instead of whisking it away, as was the case in Montauk, the fine citizen handed it over to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Wednesday. Those scientists put the softball-size eye on ice and sent it to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. A …