Illegal immigration statistics show border arrests down to 1970′s levels

Only 327,577 people were caught crossing illegally from the Mexican border last year--a number that hasn't been so low since the days of Richard Nixon's presidency, according to the Washington Post.
The Department of Homeland Security says total border apprehensions for fiscal year 2011, which ended last September 30, are down 53.5 percent from 2008.
In 2000, when far fewer Border Patrol officers were stationed on the Southern border than today, a record-breaking 1.6 million illegal immigrants were caught trying to cross. Experts say three major factors are slowing illegal border-crossing: the stagnant American economy; a border that is manned with more officers and better technology; and the new hazards associated with crossing illegally since drug gangs have seized control of human smuggling routes.

Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, told the New York Times in July that "net migration" from Mexico is at about zero for the first time in 60 years. Mexico is wracked by drug violence, but economic opportunities have been increasing there, as well. Average family income has increased by more than 45 percent since 2000 as the birthrate has plunged to an average of two children per woman, the paper reported.
As the potential economic benefit of crossing into America has decreased, it's become more dangerous to do so. In the past year, pits of human remains have been found near the U.S. border, and authorities say the bodies had been immigrants either captured by drug cartels, or double-crossed by cartel members who promised to guide them into America. As we reported last year, human smuggling is now completely dominated by drug cartels--a marked departure from the earlier immigration routes controlled by freelancing coyotes. The beefed-up presence of the  U.S. Border Control has also pushed illegal immigrants to dangerous Arizona crossings, where hundreds each year die of dehydration.
Even with immigration on the downswing, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are about 11.2 million adult illegal immigrants in the country right now. Of the 10.2 million who are 18 or older, 35 percent have been in the country for 15 years or more, while another 28 percent arrived 10 to 14 years ago. The share of illegal immigrants who arrived in the country five or fewer years ago has dropped from 32 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2010.
The number of agents on the Southern border is 18,152 today--nearly double what it was in 2004--but most of the border is still not under full control. The U.S. Border Patrol says it has about 873 miles, or 44 percent, of the border under "operational control," according to the AP--meaning that Border agents can detect and respond to all illegal activity there. Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have all vowed to build a full 1,950-mile fence along the border if elected president.

Mysterious planet-sized object spotted near mercury

Is a giant, cloaked spaceship orbiting around Mercury?
That's been the speculation from some corners aftera camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft caught a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun and hitting Mercury.
Theorists have seized on the images captured from the "coronal mass ejection" (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Specifically, the solar flare washing over Mercury appears to hit another object of comparable size. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," YouTube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has generated hundreds of thousands of views this week. Now, how this user was able to determine that the object was "obviously" a cloaked spaceship with no other natural explanation remains as much a mystery as the object itself.

Of course, there's another scientifically sanctioned explanation for the curious images, though we're not certain that skeptics and UFO enthusiasts such as SiniXster will endorse it. Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries put the question to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). They're the people who analyze data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1)--better known in this context as the camera that shot the footage in question.

Head NRL group scientist Russ Howard and lead ground systems engineer Nathan Rich say the mysterious object is in fact Mercury itself. And what we're seeing in the footage is the equivalent of Mercury's wake, "where the planet was on the previous day," as it travels through the solar system on its natural gravitational path:

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

The analysts say the practice works even better when applied to far-off objects such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But for moving objects, especially planets, the process is a little more complicated. And making matters even trickier is Mercury's staus as the closest planet to the sun.
"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich explained in an email.

Leonardo da Vinci to get second life as automaton

(Reuters) - Don't let the retro look of the mechanical men built by Swiss artisan Francois Junod deceive you -- they fascinate tech fans from Silicon Valley to Asia and will no doubt gain broader popularity after this week's launch of Martin Scorsese's film "Hugo" about a secret hidden in an automaton
The latest of Junod's time-consuming projects is an 80 cm wind-up Leonardo da Vinci figure that will be able to do intricate drawings and write mirror-inverted texts in Latin.
"I have been working on the sculpture for ten years and on the mechanism for six years. I do not have a buyer yet so I can take my time," said Junod, surrounded by a mishmash of tools, machines and sketches in his workshop in the village of Sainte-Croix perched high up in the Swiss Jura mountains.
His most complicated creation so far, an Alexander Pushkin animated by a complex mechanism enabling it to write down 1,458 different poems, was bought last year by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur for a price kept secret.