John Reece Roth, 71, a prominent plasma physicist was sentenced to four years in prison for 18 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and violations of the Arms Export Control Act, after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones.

“The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,” David Kris of the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a statement, “We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.”

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached its destination just last week, is already showing its stuff.

The space agency switched on the LRO's cameras two days ago and today released the first images from the orbiter's mission, which is intended to pave the way for the return of astronauts to the moon.

The LRO snapped surface images near the Sea of Clouds (Mare Nubium) in the moon's southern hemisphere as day gave way to night. The intense shadowing caused by the sun's low angle makes for a dramatic moonscape that exaggerates the contours of the surface features.

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Although China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) earlier this week granted PC makers a reprieve from having to include the Green Dam-Youth Escort Internet filtering software with every PC sold in the country, the government today made clear that it's only a matter of time before the mandate is reinstated.

Citing an anonymous MIIT official, the state-run China Daily newspaper reports that large domestic PC makers, including Lenovo Group, Tsinghua Tongfang, Founder Technology Group and Haier Group, will "install the filter as they were told." Some manufacturers have included a disclaimer with new PCs that the makers would not be responsible for damage caused by Green Dam, which has been criticized as insecure, flawed and intrusive.

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The arid Negev Desert in southern Israel is no match for the desert rhubarb, which plant researchers say has found a unique way to water itself.

The plant (Rumex hymenosepalus) has mastered collecting moisture in a region that receives just two to six inches [50.8 to 152.4 millimeters] of rainfall a year. According to Simcha Lev-Yadun, an author of the study published in Naturwissenschaften, the plant captures water from rains so light they don’t even wet the soil.

The plant does it with large round leaves and a long vertical root, odd adaptations for desert plants. More often desert flora has small leaves--think cactus--to minimize water loss, and two types of roots to maximize water capture.

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Bigger had always been better for sheep living on the remote, windswept Scottish island of Hirta.

So why have the animals been getting smaller lately? One possible explanation, say scientists studying the sheep, is climate change.

An international team of researchers tracked the population of Hirta’s Soay sheep over 24 years and found that average body size mysteriously shrank 5 percent, despite the apparent evolutionarily benefits of being larger. They report their findings today in the journal Science.

“As climate changes, the way selection operates changes as well,” says Tim Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and principal investigator on the study. The island’s longer springs and warmer winters mean less competition for food because there’s more of it. Living conditions are also better for weak animals. “Sheep that are a little bit smaller are no longer as disadvantaged as they were when winters were longer and harsher,” he says.

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Those ants crawling across your picnic table this weekend might be members of a massive, transnational ant mafia, recently reported by researchers in Japan and Spain.

Billions of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) from North America, Europe and Japan are not only interrelated, but when introduced to foreign cousins they get along like old amigos—an unusual reaction for this otherwise hostile breed—reports the BBC.

The conquering colony is composed of three distinct super-colonies—one in California (560 miles, or 900 kilometers, long), one along the Mediterranean coast (3,700 miles, or 6,000 kilometers, long) and one in Kobe, Japan—that all share similar genetic make-ups, and therefore familiar chemical cues.

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Forget about climate change for a moment, the biggest threats to the world’s imperiled species are deforestation, pollution, poaching and invasive species.

Those are the findings of an analysis by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Published every four years, the report examines the state of globally threatened species.

Habitat loss and pollution pose the greatest extinction risk for currently threatened amphibians, while the deadly chytrid fungus remains a lesser but still potent threat. As for threatened mammals, habitat loss and poaching may be the biggest factors wiping them off the map.

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Last month we reported on bald eagles and other birds found dead after a rat eradication project in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., has confirmed that the birds were casualties of brodifacoum, the poison used in bait scattered around Rat Island by helicopter.

“Every one of the liver samples tested positive for brodifacoum,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Bruce Woods told Scientific American. Fish and Wildlife law enforcement agents are investigating whether there were any egregious errors and to assess that the poison drop was conducted according to an approved protocol, Woods said.

For two centuries, invasive rats on the island have ravaged populations of ground-nesting seabirds. In September, Island Conservation, the Nature Conservancy, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropped rat poison from helicopters after an environmental assessment concluded birds were unlikely to be harmed because the rodents would perish in their burrows.

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On this day three decades ago, Sony's original blue-and-silver Walkman went on sale in Japan, launching an era of personal, portable music and generations of oblivious subway riders and pedestrians.

The first Walkman, called the TPS-L2, cost 33,000 yen (roughly $150) in Japan and didn’t make it to the U.S. until 1980. In case you forgot, the original cassette-playing device had some quaint features, including a pair of headphone jacks that allowed two people to listen simultaneously and a "hotline" switch that activated a microphone to pipe in ambient sound instead of music.

For the price of a 1979 Walkman, you can get a Walkman Video MP3 Player today, with four gigabytes of memory that stores up to 40 hours of music and 10 hours of video, capabilities that were inconceivable during the disco era.

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Advances in memory and processing power have transformed mobile phones from bricklike boxes to gadgets about the size of a deck of cards.

But BlackBerry user David Fitzherbert has got to be happy his smart phone wasn't any thinner. The 52-year-old Englishman credits his BlackBerry with breaking a life-threatening fall into a narrow crevasse while he was skiing in Switzerland, The Sun of the U.K. reports.

As Fitzherbert traversed a glacier last month, he fell 70 feet (21.3 meters) before becoming wedged between the crevasse's walls, thanks in part to the half-inch thick BlackBerry in his breast pocket. The phone was just thick enough to keep him from falling another 700 feet (213.4 meters).

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