Yesterday, as a run-up to Obama's State of the Union address, The Guardianpublished an interactive infographic called "The state of our union is … dumber: How the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined."

The chart plotted the reading level of every SOTU address since the country's founding along a timeline. Each bubble represents a single speech, with the height of the bubble indicating grade level, and the bubble's size indicating speech length. With the exception of a few outliers--Madison blew everyone away in 1815 with a speech targeted for an audience in grade 25.3; Lincoln delivered an address in 1862 of exceptionally low standard--the trend is indeed clear: the annual State of the Union had gotten progressively dumber over time.

Pretty scary, huh? At least, it would be scary if the chart were actually showing the declining linguistic standard of presidential speeches. But, in fact, it's the graphic itself--or, at least, The Guardian's packaging of the graphic--that is doing the dumbing-down, by using the simplistic Flesch-Kincaid readability test as a metric for the "linguistic standard" of presidential rhetoric.

In reality, the Flesch-Kincaid readability test measures two things: the length of the words in a piece of prose, and the number of words per sentence. As columnist and linguist Ben Zimmer explains, the test was developed in the 1970s, not as a metric for the intelligence, complexity, or lingual eloquence contained in a text, but as a "rough and ready analytical tool" for assessing the appropriateness of texts for different grade levels. If a book or article or written speech scores a 5, a fifth-grader should be able to get through it without getting lost in a sea of clauses and semicolons.

So, what does this graphic really tell us? Words and/or sentences have been getting shorter. And what does that mean? Well, it could mean that the English language is being reduced to an ugly nonsense heap of monosyllabic words. Except, when you break the State of the Union addresses down by both word length and sentence length, as linguist Mark Liberman did a while back in response to another linguistic hell-in-a-handbasket Guardian article, the actual trend becomes a lot clearer:

Okay, so word length has decreased slightly over time, and sentence length has decreased dramatically. That trend may denote a stylistic shift in political rhetoric, says Zimmer, but it tells you very little about the quality or intellectual prowess of each sentence's content. Instead, it probably reflects the fact that politicians have caught on to the idea that audiences don't really want to walk away from a speech in awe of the orator's masterful use of the semi-colon; they want to walk away knowing what the orator was talking about.

Maybe The Guardian knew that it was grossly overstating things with its "declining linguistic standard" headline; perhaps it knew that its audience didn't want to click on an article called "The State of the Union: Sentences Just Keep Getting Shorter And Easier To Follow Over Time."

Instead, The Guardian chose to reinforce the ancient, cherished myth of cultural/societal degeneration, because that's what people wanted to hear. Responses to the graphic on Twitter yesterday reflect people's readiness for the news that we're all getting lazier and dumber: "Wow, proof intelligence is on the decline"; "pretty scary"; "exactly what I'd expect."

Next time, how about reprinting an excerpt from "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue"? It was written by the exquisite grammarian Jonathan Swift back in 1712, when the English Tongue was much Purer:

In his State of the Union Address last night, Obama highlighted the need for better America cyber defense:

There's a reason Obama emphasized defense in his speech: America is already pretty good at offense. America's STUXNET attack on the Iranian nuclear program is probably the best-known example, but it's hardly the only thing out there. The Air Force specifically and the Pentagon more broadly have made acquiring cyber weapons an explicit goal. Cyberweapons have even made their way to the Army, which wants to give cyber tools to generals fighting wars oversees. These capabilities are all about striking at enemies, and focus on breaking the networks or tools they need to function.

Relatively speaking, breaking something is easy. Protecting American assets through better cyber defense, however, has presented a challenge. Since so much of the vulnerability is in private businesses and institutions, defense isn't a task (like launching attacks) that the government can assume on its own. That is why yesterday's Executive Order on cybersecurity is so important. By setting up information-sharing programs with private business, Obama is creating a way for cyber-threats collected by intelligence agencies to fall into the hands (and the IT departments) of the businesses that most need that information.

This latest executive order comes five months after the Obama Administration's first presidential directive on cybersecurity, and while the improvements have yet to be implemented, the structure of defense is taking shape.

Josef Bless, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway, was listening to music on his phone when he noticed the similarity between what he was doing and the research he conducted in his lab every day.

Bless's research group, the Bergen fMRI Group, regularly uses a test called dichotic listening to measure brain function. Each ear hears a different syllable at the same time. The syllable the listener hears the clearest indicates which side of the brain is more active during language processing.

So Bless and his fellow researchers developed iDichotic, an app released for the iPhone/iPod in 2011. Using their phones, the app's users can participate in the group's research without ever having to go into the lab. About half of the 1,000 users who have downloaded the app submitted their results to the Bergen fMRI Group.

Since the app's release, the researchers having bee analyzing the first 167 results they received from iDichotic, comparing them to individuals tested in traditional laboratory environments. They found that the smartphone results were just as reliable as controlled lab tests, opening up the possibility for wider smartphone use in psychological testing. Their results are published this month in Frontiers in Psychology.

Gathering data through an app allows research to gather larger volumes of data cheaply, and changes the circumstances under which you're tested. Most psychology experiments take place in the lab, where everything can be controlled, but we do most of our cognition in the noisy, chaotic environment of the outside world. An app-based cognitive test that can be undertaken in any environment allows researchers to replicate real-life situations more closely.

The good news for mice is that humans have spent billions of dollars to solve their illnesses. But it seems researchers have tortured mice in vain for decades in the search for drugs to help humans recover from certain traumas, like severe burns, blunt force, and sepsis. Mouse genes just don't react the same way as human genes in all cases--in fact, sometimes they are contrary to one another. But we shouldn't get rid of our fuzzy friends entirely.

A whopping 39 researchers representing dozens of schools (including Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Florida) have found genetic evidence that mice aren't anything like people in some important cases. The science community shouldn't necessarily be shocked by the finding; we've been aware for awhile that mice may not be a precise analogue for humans. What makes this study interesting is that the doctors have studied specific diseases to find out exactly how widely the genetic response diverges between mice and men.

This study was birthed out of rejection. The researchers' original work focused on human white blood cells' genetic response to life threatening traumas. But when an undisclosed journal demanded they verify the findings in mice, the researchers started wondering if that would actually prove anything. So they began to dig deeper, and the study became more about mice than the original study. The researchers published this study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month.

The scientists analyzed a decade of research from trauma centers. They looked to lab data for mouse genes changes after severe burns, blunt trauma, or sepsis. Of particular interest was which genes cells turned on after burns, trauma like car accidents, and sepsis. Sepsis is an overreaction by the immune system to microbes or human proteins--it's almost like the body self-destructs, causing a cascade of responses that ends with a rapid and severe drop in blood pressure that can lead to organ failure.

Researchers even injected four healthy volunteers--yes, human volunteers--with low doses of bacterial toxins to monitor gene response. Then they compared this with genetic data from mice they afflicted with similar troubles. By the end of the study, the researchers looked at some 5,000 genes that overlap humans and mice. The genetic changes similar in both people and mice barely hit the 50 percent neighborhood, which is like random chance. One gene activated in mice, were not even expressed in humans. Another gene that helped mice recover, harmed humans.

Scientists now are beginning to understand why 150 of the drugs that worked in mice for sepsis failed when tested on humans. And that's incredibly valuable; researchers may be wasting millions of dollars and years of resources working on cures that work on mice, when those same cures may not work on humans.

Bear in mind, this research only applies to these three diseases, so in some cases mice do prove good analogs. Still, there may be implications for other illnesses that involve genes, like cancer, that are studied extensively in mice. The clear takeaway is that scientists need to evaluate molecular models more closely when choosing test subjects. Volunteers for lab humans?

[New York Times]

While most of the US military is bracing itself for the belt-tightening that will come with scheduled budget cuts, Cyber Command is looking to expand, going from 900 members at present to an expected several thousand.

Most of the new jobs are slated to go to members of the military, whether active duty or reserves, with one fifth set aside for civilians. The new posts are expected to be fought over, as the skill set has the potential to be very transferable to the private sector when soldiers leave the military. The civilian hires, in turn, are an attempt to find people already skilled in this.

This hiring spree comes with the admission that, while there are people serving who know their way around code and viruses, the military hasn't quite found them yet, and their abilities may go underutilized. Expanding cyber command through a hiring initiative gives the Pentagon a way to bolster it's offensive cyber capabilities with some of its own. More broadly than that, expanding Cybercom by several thousand is the strongest sign yet that military officials are convinced this will be a new facet of war, and they want to make sure they're prepared.

In the race to find Earth's chilliest and deepest life forms, one team has jumped out ahead and proven it has found life. For the first time, scientists have confirmed with multiple tests that they have captured swarms of microbes living deep in the dark wetlands beneath half a mile of glacier ice.

Late last month, we reported that American scientists from the National Science Foundation and NASA-funded WISSARD Project found what they believed to be microbes by drilling a 2.5-foot-wide hole in the ice. At the time, the scientists conducted a preliminary test in which DNA-sensitive dye made cells in the sample glow green under a microscope, suggesting life. The problem: that test doesn't always produce accurate results. So the scientists subjected the sample to six additional verification methods, and now they know for sure: It's life!

One of the key verification methods was measuring the microbes' growth rates, according to Montana State University's Dr. John Priscu, the lead scientist. In addition, scientists were able to see bacteria of various shapes in the microscope. They further confirmed the presence of enzymes in the water, which power living cells and which point to a cellular metabolism in the lake. Further tests will provide a clearer picture of what kind of bacteria they're looking at, and how it works.

"We have extracted DNA and will be shipping it back to the US for sequencing--this will tell us who is there and provide us with info on how they make a living," wrote Priscu, in an email to PopSci.

The findings could help scientists better understand how organisms survive in cryoecosystems when deprived of light and warmth, and smashed under tremendous pressure. The discovery could also provide new ideas about life on other planets.

Confusion abounds when it comes to the microscopic critters in the lakes beneath the coldest continent. Here's a quick scorecard of some of the major projects on the hunt for life in the lakes of Antarctica:

The British Antarctic Survey's equipment failed on Christmas day last year at Lake Ellsworth after 300 meters of drilling.

The Russian Antarctic Expedition drilled Lake Vostok, but found they may have contaminated with their use of kerosene to get through the ice. They went back to get fresh samples and have not yet analyzed the results.

The Desert Research Institute drilled Lake Vida at the end of 2012 and published their findings of bacteria. The only thing is Lake Vida is only a 65-foot scratch below the surface compared to these much deeper digs. Deeper means more extreme conditions, and perhaps more resilient mechanisms to survive.

Priscu said the researchers had packed up the station and are headed home. But they're not returning empty-handed. They packed hundreds of samples for the long journey back to Montana and Louisiana State University in a downright balmy bath of 40-degrees Fahrenheit.

The Times published a scathing review of a test drive in the new Tesla Model S, in which reporter John Broder described the futuristic electric supercar (itself a winner of a Popular ScienceBest Of What's New award) repeatedly losing its charge, behaving oddly, and shutting down during a long-distance road trip along the Northeast Corridor.

In response, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, wrote a furious blog post in which he, in no uncertain terms, accused Broder of lying, of fudging his numbers. More about that here.

One of the most interesting things about this very interesting (and ongoing) story is the news that Tesla has begun implementing detailed tracking systems in their test cars specifically when those cars are lent to journalists. That way they can know exactly what happened during the test, and in the case of a potentially inaccurate review, they have proof of what really happened.

This is totally unprecedented, but I suspect it will become more commonplace very soon. Most consumer products now have the capability to record data--there's no reason why, say, Apple can't do this when they send out review units of the new iPhone. That way when a reviewer says the battery life could hardly make it through a day, Apple can check to make sure the phone was fully charged at the beginning of the day, or that the way the phone was used is representative of a normal daily use case.

And this could be done for just about any review. Restaurants could have temperature gauges in plates and utensils. ("According to the smartfork, the veal was 44 degrees C when it touched the reviewer's tongue. Hardly 'tepid.'") Books could communicate whether the reviewer really did finish the book, and how quickly. Clothing could measure whether wear and tear were natural. Travel reviewers could have GPS trackers to make sure they actually visited the places they say they did. It's creepy, sure, but reviewers have a responsibility to the public to get things right.

The other side of this is that, unlike what Gizmodo blogger Jesus Diaz suggests, of course you can argue against data. Data lies all the time! In the case of Elon Musk and the New York Times, a perfect example is that Broder, the Times writer, describes his Model S running out of charge and having to be lifted onto a flatbed and towed to a charging station. In his response, Musk writes: "As the State of Charge log shows, the Model S battery never ran out of energy at any time, including when Broder called the flatbed truck." Seems pretty cut and dried, right? Broder must have lied!

But not necessarily! Electronic items, including electric cars but also items like smartphones, will shut down with some charge remaining, perhaps even up to five percent. That's so the gadget can maintain its memory, and also sometimes because the gadget in question needs more than that very low percent of charge to operate properly. It is totally factually possible that Broder's Model S never ran out of energy, even while on the flatbed--but that also doesn't mean the car could actually drive. And in fact, Jalopnik reports that the towing company says the Model S was, in fact, dead when they arrived.

Data can have the potential to keep reviewers precise and honest. And as a reviewer myself, I don't fault Tesla at all for wanting to track the test drive--in fact, I'm surprised other companies don't also do this, and I wouldn't mind if the gadgets I test were also tracked. But as this kind of debate happens more and more, it's important to remember that raw data isn't always a smoking gun. It illuminates, but can also obscure.

This morning, I was speaking with Brian Mech, the vice-president of the medical device company Second Sight, when his land-line rang. Mech had just been telling me about the fifteen years his company has spent developing the Argus II, a retinal prosthesis that restores partial sight to people with a degenerative eye disease called Retinitis pigmentosa (RP). It had been a long process, Mech said, but he can count on one hand the number of days he hasn't woken up excited about the work ahead. And they were nearing the end--Europe approved the Argus II in 2011, and the FDA was expected to give the green light some time soon.

When his other line rang, Mech excused himself and set down the phone. I could hear a muffled version of his other conversation. After a few seconds, I heard "I gotta go," and then he was back. "Emily," he said, "I'm going to have to run: FDA approval just came through."

And with that, the U.S. has its first bionic eye.

The Argus II works by substituting a small array of electrodes for the light-sensing cells that normally react to light by sending an electric signal toward the back of the retina. Those signals are relayed to the optic nerve behind the eye, and travel back along the nerve to the brain. In people with the genetic disease Retinitis pigmentosa, which affects about 100,000 people in the U.S. today, those light-sensing cells gradually stop working, resulting in total blindness.

In addition to the electrode array, which is implanted in the retina at the back of the eye, the Argus II system consists of a small video camera attached to a pair of eyeglasses and a visual processor the user carries around their waist. Data from the video camera is sent to the visual processor and then back to the glasses, where it is transmitted wirelessly to the embedded electrodes.

The system works for people with RP because the disease affects the light-sensing cells in the retina, but leaves the rest of the visual system--including the optic nerve, which carries visual signals from the retina to the brain--intact. The electrode array acts as a substitute for the eye's photoreceptors by directly stimulating the retina's remaining cells, which pass the signal on to the optic nerve.

Of course, an array of 60 electrodes cannot restore high-resolution vision--it's like watching TV on a screen with just 60 pixels--but it can supply enough information to allow people to move around without aid.

Some hefty rumors have been tossed around lately about a smartwatch project supposedly in high gear at Apple. Smartwatches are the James Bondian ideal of high tech--a wrist-based gadget that can sync with your phone (or not), display information, play music, or...well, do stuff other than tell time, basically.

Until now, they have all sucked. They have been ugly and bulky and garish and overcomplicated and difficult to use and expensive and awful. I have no idea if Apple is actually building one; I wouldn't be surprised at all if they're working on one, but I have no insider information from sources familiar with any sort of project like that. But! I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, if Apple would just do these five things.

Make It Look Good

The iPhone is a good-looking phone. There are a few other good-looking phones, too--HTC's 8X for Windows Phone and the One line for Android are nice--but the majority of smartphones, even the good ones, range from ugly to inoffensive. That doesn't matter so much with a phone, because it's often in your pocket anyway, and even though yes, it can be a fashion statement, it's a tool first and foremost. A watch is jewelry, so it needs to be very handsome above all else.

Apple's current aesthetic--glass, aluminum, monochrome--could work for a nice, simple, minimalist watch. That won't be to everyone's taste, but it'll be to a lot of people's taste. More than Samsung's cheap rounded plastic, Motorola's hypermasculine sharp angles, or HTC's adequate oval blobs, anyway. The Pebble Watch, a smartwatch that made about a bazillion dollars on Kickstarter, is about as good-looking as it gets--Apple can do better, I think.

Size is also very key with watches, much more than with phones, which can vary from a 3.5-inch iPhone 4S to a gargantuan 5.5-inch Samsung Galaxy Note. Smartwatches often end up oversized--big watch-faces, and very thick. Apple would do better to either keep it small or offer two sizes, because a watch that fits Kristen Bell won't necessarily fit Lebron James.

Give It Body-Monitoring Powers

There needs to be a reason you're wearing a tinier, less capable version of your phone within three feet of your actual phone. Which means it can't just be a conduit for information that's already on your phone--it needs to offer something new. The Basis Band, our favorite fitness tracker, does this really well. It has a perspiration tracker and an optical heart rate sensor, two things a pocketed phone can't have, since a phone isn't in constant direct contact with your skin. A fitness-tracker smartwatch can add to your digital experience, not just mirror it. And presumably there are ways to go even further--could a smartwatch monitor blood pressure? Blood sugar, for diabetics? Body mass index?

Keep Its Battery Going

We're not used to charging our watches. It's weird and you'll forget to do it. We might get used to it, eventually, the same way that we got used to charging our smartphones every night just after we'd gotten used to charging our candybar Nokias twice a month and our (now digital) books once a month. But you'll want to be wearing your watch all the time, so a smartwatch has to last for much longer than a smartphone. I'd say you shouldn't have to charge it more than once a week--once every five days, at the most. The Basis Band needs charging about once every three or four days, which is fine but not quite enough. Perhaps it can harvest a bit of kinetic energy from the user to supplement its battery? Or temperature differential? Who knows!

Remove Features

And here's the most important part. Most smartwatches try to do too much. This one, for example, is an entire Android phone crammed into a device that makes for a monstrously large watch and a ludicrously small phone. It looks absolutely awful to use! In fact, I'd say that a good smartwatch should do very, very little. It should have a button to show the time, an up/down button to scroll through notifications, and, really, that's about it. It should not have any way to enter text. Entering text on a watch would be a horrible experience. Remember, the whole point of this is that your phone is still in your pocket or bag--the watch would just be a quick at-a-glance notifications screen. Keep it as simple as possible. If you're not sure if a feature should be in it? Take it out.

Have A Great App

You'll use your smartphone to control your smartwatch, because, as we already established, the smartphone is an excellent, capable tool, and the watch is a mere conduit. That means the app has to be simple to use, but full-featured enough to handle everything the smartwatch can do. I would actually look to Samsung, of all companies, for this one--the TecTiles app on its Galaxy phones, which controls how the phone interacts with NFC-enabled stickers, is just about perfect. Super simple, just a grid of features you want the watch to do. Easy!

In the depths of winter, nothing seems as tempting as the inability to feel how frostbitten your toes are. Thanks to a group of neuroscientists at the University of California, that could soon be possible (though maybe not advisable.) They were able to identify the specific neurons that transmit cold sensations and shut them off in adult mice.

In his previous research, neurobiologist David McKemy had found a link between the ability to sense cold and the receptor for menthol (the ingredient that makes mint cool), a protein called TRPM8.

To test the specific function of TRPM8, McKemy and his colleagues depleted the neurons that express TRPM8 in a group of mice, and watched how they responded to low temperatures. They describe their findings in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience this week.

The mice were allowed to roam freely on a multi-temperature surface with regions that ranged from 32 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. While the control mice preferred to stay in the area comfortably heated to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, the mice without TRPM8 neurons didn't mind the cold plates, even at dangerously low temperatures that should have been painful. They could still feel heat and touch, but couldn't distinguish between cold and comfortably warm sensations.

The point of all of this isn't to engineer a way for you to wear shorts comfortably in freezing temperatures, but to develop more nuanced pain medications. The mice couldn't feel cold pain associated with inflammation and nerve injury, a discovery that could lead to more effective pain drugs.

Pain treatments typically either reduce inflammation or block all sensation, but by isolating the neurons that feel certain types of pain, scientists could develop medications that address discomfort without numbing the entire area.

[Medical News Today]

Thousands of years ago, a hurt and confused Babylonian man used a triangular stylus to jab a message to his lover into a small piece of wet clay:

The story of how three unlikely fellows--a bookkeeper, a chemist, and a scholar--teamed up to decipher this ancient love letter appeared in the September 1939 issue of Popular Science. But the more romantic story of Gimil and Bibea remains buried by more than four millenia. Why didn't Bibea meet Gimil in Babylon as planned? Had she rejected him, or did some accident or illness keep two soulmates apart?

You can read the rest of the story, and more emotional messages from long-dead Babylonians, over in the archives.

UPDATE, 6:30pm Thursday: The Army confirmed that the LEMV airship project has been canceled. Here's the statement an Army spokesman emailed us:

--Dov Schwartz
Army Public Affairs

InsideDefense is reporting that the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), the U.S. Army's hybrid airship and a Popular Science Best Of What's New winner in 2012, has been canceled. The U.S. Army did not immediately return a call for confirmation.

Designed to stay aloft for 21 days and provide continuous surveillance, the LEMV was heavier than expected and could only "stay aloft for about five or six days," despite two years of development and $356 million having been spent on it so far, InsideDefense reports.

Problems with development are not the only reasons for cancellation, the news site says. Designed to serve in Afghanistan, a firm 2014 deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces from the country means that the airship was a tool without a mission. Another potential problem that had not yet been overcome in development was bandwidth. As anyone who has ever tried to stream a Netflix film over a weak wireless connection knows, it can be tricky to get video to work over distances. Recording and streaming 21 days straight of video would pose a new level of technical challenges, ones that had not yet been resolved.

The end of the LEMV would mark the third modern airship to be canceled by the military, following the Navy MZ-3A airship, which was mothballed in February of 2012, and the Air Force Blue Devil 2, whose funding disappeared from the Air Force's 2013 budget.

That said, don't rule out the modern airship revival entirely. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is already becoming a home for Predator Drones, may appreciate the possibilities afforded by a potential 21-day continuous stare. When talk in Washington turns away from budget cuts, expect the idea of a surveillance airship to be floated again.

And the battle between Tesla's Elon Musk and the New York Times's John Broder continues! Broder just published a point-by-point response to Musk's inflammatory blog post, and it mostly seems reasonable. Broder explains that his half-mile drive around a Connecticut parking lot was simply an attempt to find the "not prominently marked" charger. Broder can't explain the discrepancy between his claims of setting the cruise control at 54mph and Musk's data showing that he actually drove at around 60mph.

Broder's statements are much clearer than Musk's; the Tesla founder's blog post referenced image captions, quotes, and assumptions without much transparency, and Broder's is a very clear response to individual comments. There's certainly some weird numbers stuff going on here, with some of Broder's notes not matching up exactly with the data taken by Tesla, but it also seems like Musk attacked the Times article based on some assumptions he drew rather than on what's in the piece, and also that Musk is manipulating a bit of the data or at least misrepresenting it. For example, Broder did not fully charge the Model S at each stop. That's true! But Tesla's representatives told Broder specifically that he had charged the car enough, and that he could proceed comfortably to his next stop. And given that the Model S takes hours to charge, why would Broder charge it longer than necessary?

Clearly Musk is unhappy with the article. I think this is a very telling excerpt, from that post Musk published yesterday:

Tesla pitched the Times a story that would suit them, a puff piece. "Hey guys, want to write about the future of our groundbreaking technology?" And then the NYTimes took the access and wrote the piece they wanted to write. Yes, Tesla would have preferred that the Times write nothing but positive things about the company, but that's not how journalism works; if you're a subject, you don't get to choose the story. And it's increasingly looking like Musk is merely lashing out.

The same day that an asteroid half the size of a football field will narrowly miss Earth, a different space rock exploded over three cities in western Russia. The fireball went down during the region's morning commute today, sending drivers scrambling to upload their in-dash videos to the web.

Fireballs bursting over the Earth is nothing unusual. What is rare is to catch them on camera -- from perhaps hundreds of vantage points.

Here's why there are so many videos of the Russian meteorite. Crooks in that country will do anything for a ruble, including throw themselves into a moving car to extort money from drivers. Russian traffic laws make it practically impossible for drivers to defend themselves in court without video evidence, however, which is why most Russian drivers today have wide-angle video cameras on the dash.

So, when this morning's meteorite exploded 12 miles above the ground, users flooded Twitter and YouTube with footage of the astronomical event. (See below.)

Russia Today's news report suggests that the space rock ultimately crashed through the wall of a zinc factory in Chelyabinsk, spraying bricks onto a road. One image in that story, taken from Twitter, shows a smoldering, gaping hole in the factory's roof. Other images show shattered windows and contrails left by the speeding meteorite. Reports of injuries also abound -- roughly 400, according to one news source.

But the details and numbers could change, as news of the meteorite is still breaking. Early reports from panicked citizens alleged that the meteorite was a UFO, a crashing military aircraft, or even a missile intercepting the asteroid en route to the ground. (The most recently updated Russia Today news story discounts these tales.)

It's worth pointing out the comically coincidental timing of this fireball. It occurred within the same 24 hours that a 160-foot-wide asteroid, called 2012DA14, is scheduled to swing within 14,913 miles of Earth -- thousands of miles closer than any geosynchronous communications satellite. Now is also a time when asteroid hunting is ramping up and about to become a privatized affair.

But enough with the words. Watch these videos and be amazed.

Legit fireball Yes, this video looks like a scene out of a blockbuster movie. But unless the fireball is a truly cosmic joke by Russia on the rest of the world, no, it's not fake. (There are simply too many videos of this thing from countless vantage points circulating on the web at one time.) Video: Андрей Борисович Королев/YouTube

Crazy commute Another stunning view of the Russian meteorite from a driver's dash-mounted HD camera. Video: NEproskochil/YouTube

KABOOM! Listen to this one. We detect not one, not two, but at least three loud concussions from the fireball, plus the shimmer of breaking glass (and, of course, the blare of car alarms). Video: Григорий Ченцов/YouTube

Space rock yonder Men working in a yard seem oblivious to the fireball in the distance. Video: NEproskochil/YouTube

Blinding flash Skip about 40 seconds into this video of an intersection. The fireball bursts, coloring the scene orange and red, and then blinds the camera with intense light.
Video: NEproskochil/YouTube

3:15 p.m. EST:Russia Today writes that the estimated cost of damage has been revised down from 1 billion rubles to 400 million rubles, or about $13 million.

2:38 p.m. EST:The Wall Street Journal is reporting it's 3,000 buildings that were damaged by the meteorite.

2:27 p.m. EST: A video look at the crater left in Chebarkul Lake.

1:54 p.m. EST: Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Today to give some context on how common a meteorite like this is (maybe a once-a-decade event) and why we didn't spot it (too small).

1:10 p.m. EST: Big update from Russia Today: There are reportedly 1,200 injuries in the Chelyabinsk region. The (admittedly early) estimated cost for repairs will be about 1 billion rubles, or about $33 million. There are some conflictingreports on damage to buildings, but the latest figure from Russia Today puts the number of damaged buildings in the region at about 300.

1:00 p.m. EST: This photo, taken from European weather satellite Meteosat-10, shows the vapor trail left behind the meteorite. (It's small, in the center of the photo.)

12:35 p.m. EST: Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's deputy prime minister, wants countries to come together and build a system that can intercept objects from space, the International Business Times is reporting.

12:25 p.m. EST: The Russian government's response to the meteorite has been appropriately huge. CNN reports that "20,000 emergency response workers have been mobilized."

11:48 a.m. EST: Photos of a heavily damaged zinc plant are circulating. We've seen this one on Reddit, and another on CNN.

11:10 a.m. EST:From Nature: This "was the largest recorded object to strike the Earth in more than a century, scientists say." It was much more powerful than North Korea's recent nuclear weapons test and the biggest meteorite collision since a 1908 crash over Siberia's Tunguska river.

10:57 a.m. EST: NASA confirms the meteorite was unrelated to the asteroid passing earth today.

Scientists say Russian meteorite unrelated to asteroid 2012 DA14: on very different paths. DA14 misses us today. go.nasa.gov/Y5Zsoe

— NASA (@NASA) February 15, 2013

10:55 a.m. EST: The bulk of the damage apparently happened in the city of Chelyabinsk. It's about 950 miles east of Moscow and has a lot of defense production factories, including nuclear weapons factories, the Times reports. It doesn't look like the damage caused any radiation leaks.

10:41 a.m. EST: Another video of the shockwave, followed by the sound of car alarms and shattered glass.

10:30 a.m. EST: Phil Plait over at Slate writes that the meteorite "is almost certainly unrelated to the asteroid 2012 DA14 that will pass on Friday." Most we're seeing about that right now is a New York Times report saying it's "possible that the meteorite may have been flying alongside the asteroid."

10:12 a.m. EST: Russia Today is reporting that this image, of Chebarkul Lake, is a crater from where part of the meteorite fell.

10:09 a.m. EST: Thousands of buildings have been damaged in six different cities, according to Forbes. At last count, 112 have been hospitalized.

9:51 a.m. EST: The stats on the meteorite, via The Guardian, are unbelievable. The space rock weighed 11 tons and hit the atmosphere going at least 33,000 mph. Also, for context: "Something like this probably happens every decade but usually takes place over an unpopulated area."

9:45 a.m. EST:The AP is reporting that the injury toll has reached "nearly 1,000."

8:35 a.m. EST: Meteorite strikes are actually pretty common, the AP says: "Experts say smaller strikes happen five to 10 times a year. Large impacts such as the one Friday in Russia are rarer but still occur about every five years, according to Addi Bischoff, a mineralogist at the University of Muenster in Germany. Most of these strikes happen in uninhabited areas where they don't cause injuries to humans."

7:53 a.m. EST:Reuters is reporting that more than 500 people are injured: "514 people had sought medical help, mainly for light injuries caused by flying glass... 112 of those were kept in [a] hospital." No fatalities have been reported.

7:15 a.m. EST: A meteorite whizzed through the sky early Friday morning, exploding over central Russia and sending fireballs crashing to the ground. Damaged buildings, shattered glass and disrupted phone networks were reported. We'll keep you updated with news, videos and more.