(Image Credit: Facebook)

Rusty Foster discovered he was dead last week, at least according to Facebook. He had been locked out of his account, which had been turned into a “memorial page,” because someone had reported the Maine man as deceased to the social media site.

He tweeted Thursday, “Facebook thinks I’m dead. I’m tempted to just let it,” then “Did you know that you can report any of your Facebook friends dead & Facebook will lock them out of their account with no evidence needed?”

As one of Foster’s friends discovered, it doesn’t take much to convince Facebook that somebody is dead. By simply going to the “Memorialization Request” page and filling out a form, including a link to an obituary, anybody can take someone else off Facebook.

                                                                                                               (Image Credit: Facebook)

The obituary needs to have the same name (or at least a close name), but doesn’t need to match any other details on the profile. The obituary Foster’s friend used to prove Foster’s death was for a man who was born in 1924 and died in 2011 in a different state than the one Foster lists on Facebook as his home state.

Foster, 36, said he never got any notification his account was going to be locked, and only discovered it when he attempted to log in. He filled out a form to report the error, and received a response that began with “We are very sorry to hear about your loss.”

More than a full day later, Foster’s account still hadn’t been unlocked. Buzzfeed, tipped off by Foster, posted an article in which one editor “killed” another editor, John Herrman, on Facebook. According to the article, about an hour after Herrman reported the error to Facebook, his profile was reactivated. About an hour after that, 27 hours after Foster first reported his erroneous death, he was “resurrected” by Facebook and allowed back into his account.

Foster does not know the total amount of time he was “Facebook dead.” He told ABC that nothing was different with his account when he logged back in, only that some of his friends had a little fun with his status.

“The only thing that happened was some of my friends posted little mock-eulogies for me, because word got around that I was locked out, due to a temporary case of death,” Foster wrote in an email with the subject line, “Rusty, the Facebook zombie.”

When pages are memorialized, they are removed from sidebars, timelines and friend suggestions and searches. This is likely to prevent people from seeing their friends who have died pop up on their newsfeed, and to prevent people from hacking into the accounts of dead people.

Foster said he understands the position Facebook is in when it comes to the death of one of its users, but believes there are better options for the social media site.

“There ought to be an email sent to the account’s email address informing it that the account has been reported dead and providing a link or something to dispute the report before any action is taken,” Foster wrote.

Foster said the most frustrating part was not being able to get into his account to “click the ‘I’m not dead’ button that should also be there.”

This has apparently been the same “memorialization” process since at least 2009, when another user took to his personal blog to write about his experience of being “Facebook dead.” In his case, the obituary his friend used to have him declared dead wasn’t even close to his real name. Instead, the man who performed the funeral services had a similar name.

In a statement to ABC News, Facebook said the system is in place in order to respect the privacy of the deceased.

“We have designed the memorialization process to be effective for grieving families and friends, while still providing precautions to protect against either erroneous or malicious efforts to memorialize the account of someone who is not deceased,” the statement reads. “We also provide an appeals process for the rare instances in which  accounts  are mistakenly reported or inadvertently memorialized.”

(Image Credit: Kyle Gough/Youtube)

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!

A life-size, radio-controlled model of the caped crusader was spotted flying over a beach in Carlsbad, Calif., last week.

Footage of Superman soaring over the water has since gone viral after a stunned onlooker took cell phone video and posted it to YouTube.

It turns out it wasn’t Superman’s first jaunt through the Southern California sky.

Otto Dieffenbach III, the pilot of Superman, told the San Diego Union-Tribune he has been flying different versions of the superhero, usually at a local soccer field, for a year and a half without getting much attention.

“It took a bicyclist with a cellphone [to gain notoriety],” he said. The video, which was taken by Kyle Gough, has garnered more than 300,000 views on Youtube.

 Superman isn’t the only character in the engineer’s collection.

Dieffenbach told ABC News’ San Diego affiliate KGTV he has built a dozen radio controlled characters, including a superwoman pin-up girl and Iago the parrot from the Disney film “Aladdin”.

The former U.S. Air Force test pilot said that in a few months he and his partner plan to start selling their figures for under $500 each.

                              Polaroid debuts 'Fotobars' in the U.S. and Canada this year                                  Image credit: Polaroid

Tired of storing all those edited photos on your Smartphone?  What to share your favorite photo on your friend’s physical wall versus just their Facebook wall?

Polaroid is offering a solution in Fotobars–the photo giant’s latest venture to make the photo-sharing process easier and more accessible.

“The idea spawned when I witnessed firsthand the human obsession with taking pictures over a year ago,” said Warren Struhl, founder and CEO of Fotobar, LLC. “I’d ask people if that picture lives in a physical form and 9.9 out of 10 people said, ‘No.’”

Struhl said the frustration over not being able to physically share a photo was a ‘pain-point in people’s lives’ and created the concept of Fotobars to ‘simplify the process.’

Fotobars will offer users the ability to come in, sit down at a bar-top work station and turn their favorite photos into digital art.  At the fotobar a patent-pending technology will give customers the option to send their images wirelessly from their Instagram, Facebook, Picasa and other social photo platforms. Once the photos are uploaded, users can work with experienced photo guides called ‘phototenders’ to help with the editing and ordering process.

RELATED: Instagram Not Selling Photos, It Says After Backlash

Just this year past December, Instagram found itself in hot water when the two-year-old company announced changes to its terms of service notifying users it would sell their photos and possibly place them in future ads.  The backlash was so intense, the company decided to retract its announcement and amend the changes in its terms of service. Struhl says Fotobar and Polaroid “have nothing to do with that issue.”

“We’re camera agnostic meaning we don’t care what camera or platform you’re on–Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Picasa,” said Struhl. “Those are social media companies. We’re in the physical media business.”

Fotobars will give customers the option to order their favorite image and transfer it onto an array of materials–including wood, acrylic, and metal substrates. Before confirming their order, customers can preview their photo beforehand as each store will feature examples of real digital artwork.

“In just five minutes, in a few clicks, you can create exactly what you’re going to get,” said Struhl.

Fotobars will also frame, mat and print your images onto different types of material and ship your photo art in a few days. Customers will be able to turn their favorite Instagram image into a high-quality Polaroid created and developed in-house while you’re shopping. Prices range from $14.95 to $2,000 for a 7 x 4 foot piece of ultra-thick acrylic glass photo art.

“Polaroid has always been about much more than just taking pictures,” said Polaroid CEO Scott W. Hardy in a statement. “Polaroid is about sharing life’s most precious and memorable moments. We have been, and continue to be, about self-expression, creativity and fun. Polaroid Fotobar retail stores represent a perfect modern expression of the values for which we have stood for 75 years. We are very excited about the opening of these stores, and the opportunities they will create for millions of consumers to have classic Polaroid experiences.”

Aside from Fotobars serving as a retail store for Polaroid–the company is also introducing ‘The Studio’, a multi-purpose space where photo enthusiasts can host kid and adult parties, enroll in free photo classes and display high-quality photos in a museum/gallery type setting.

Polaroid plans to announce the project during the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show and will debut the first Fotobar in Delray Beach, Fla., in February. The Florida location will serve as the test store for future Fotobar locations set for later this year in New York, Boston and Las Vegas. Polaroid’s hope is that the stores reflect a cool, hip and experimental feel for those who love to snap and share photos.

(Kibum Park/Raad, LLC)

Imagine an inviting green park with tall, shady trees and wide swaths of grassy lawn where you can hear live music or see theater or simply sit quietly soaking up the noonday sun.

Now, imagine that all underground in an old disused parking garage … but still with trees and grass in the bright sunlight — a little less bright, of course, on cloudy days.

This paradoxical vision is already halfway to becoming a reality in downtown Manhattan, a dream made possible partly by fiber-optic technology that can capture sunlight on high rooftops and literally pipe it down to shine further from big underground “skylights.”

Dan Barasch and James Ramsey envisioned it all in 2008 when they teamed up with an idea to transform an abandoned trolley terminal, a 1.5-acre lot underneath the Williamsburg Bridge and next to the Delancey St. subway station.

They dubbed their underground park the “Lowline,” a nod to Manhattan’s popular Highline Park that transformed another swatch of urban blight — in that case an unused and overgrown elevated rail bed.

PHOTOS: Lowline Park Project

Since they teamed up, Ramsey, an architect and principal at RAAD Studio, and Barasch, formerly VP of strategic partnerships for PopTech, have raised more than $500,000 for the project, including a Kickstarter campaign that totaled $155,000.

This past September, Ramsey and Barasch also staged an exhibit at a warehouse on Essex Street, just above where the proposed park would exist, in an effort to show the public what the Lowline could look like.

But lighting the underground space is a challenge and that is where Ramsey’s background in engineering comes in; the former NASA employee turned architect had already been working on a way to collect and funnel light when he approached Barasch about the idea of an underground park.

Ramsey and Barasch explain their concept and in more detail here:

The technology consists of fiber optic cables attached to devices Ramsey refers to as remote skylights. Equipped with GPS, these solar collectors follow and capture the sun funneling it down through the cables. The glass surface of the skylights filters out infrared and UVA rays, but still harvests the light necessary for photosynthesis to take place.

For the exhibit, Ramsey and Barasch, alongside a team of volunteers put this technology to the test; together with their team they hand fit together 600 pieces of anodized-aluminum sheets to create a curved dome, a silver canopy that cast the light down on the warehouse space. On the warehouse roof, 20 feet above, six tracking systems collected the light and piped it down to the space below.

“We looked to the way that they build space telescopes to actually cobble together a mesh of flat pieces to create a very completed curved surface, and that curved surface is calibrated to actually deploy the light,” said Ramsey, who worked with infrared spectrometry while at NASA.

With the help of volunteers, including engineers and team members from RAAD Studio, the duo created a mock-up complete with moss-covered knolls and Japanese maples. For their installation, they partnered with Sun Central, a Canadian-based solar technology firm, and Arup, a design and engineering firm that is also working on the Second Avenue subway line in Manhattan.

“All of a sudden you have this idea beginning to emerge where you can take this ancient disused space underneath the city and actually turn it into a public space, a garden really, for everyone to enjoy,” Ramsey said.

Both Barasch and Ramsey point out despite their success so far, they still have a long way to go before making the Lowline a reality; first, they need to convince city and MTA officials (and ultimately the state) to let them use the site, a process that Barasch says requires both political and public support.

Barasch, who resigned from his position at PopTech in March, is devoting his efforts full time to the project focusing on fundraising and engaging with members of the community.

“This is not a short-term project,” Barasch said. “It’s very big in terms of its integration with the overall ecosystem of the space, the neighborhood, the subway line, the community and the city and we want to do this right.”

If they gain control of the terminal, Ramsey and Barasch estimate the project would cost $50 million in capital costs for construction and may take five to eight years to complete. Nevertheless, both remain determined to see the Lowline complete.

“It taps into this thing that every human actually just needs, which is public space and some semblance of being outdoors as well as being inspired by making the city more beautiful, more livable,” Barasch said.

For now, the trolley terminal remains an empty, shadowy cavern with an undetermined future, but one in which Ramsey and Barasch hope they can play a part.

“It was amazing,” said Bowman, who witnessed the bloom during an expedition in 2009. “I had never heard of these things before. … Seeing them out there for the first time and realizing how ubiquitous these structures are to the new sea ice environment really blew me away.”

Image credit: Matthias Wietz

Frost flowers are ice crystals that form in the frigid air above the ocean surface, and they are not rare in the Arctic. According to Deep Sea News, the air must be -7.6 degrees Fahrenheit, with calm winds so the flowers don’t blow away. They usually survive no longer than two weeks.

From a physical standpoint the ice clusters are not that different from frost that would form in any cold environment.  However, they contain a surprising amount of salt and bacteria.

“Scientists prize frost flowers because they are so salty. These blossoms suck up seawater, concentrate the salt and have three times the salinity of the ocean. You could think of them as beautiful pickles,” NPR’s Robert Krulwich wrote.

Image credit: Matthias Wietz

Bowman said he often tastes the flowers to determine whether he has found a good patch.

“When they are so salty that you can’t hold it in your mouth, you’ve found a good one,” he told ABC News.

Each flower contains one to two million bacteria and scientists are studying which bacteria are there, how they got there and what they are doing.

“It’s an extremely stressful environment for organisms to live  in,” Bowman said. “The bacteria have mechanisms for dealing with different stresses and they may give us clues as to how our own bodies deal with different stresses.”

Image credit: Matthias Wietz

Four students in the 3D animation and digital design program at the National Animation and Design Centre, or Centre NAD, in Montreal, created the video, the school said in a blog post on its website today.

The school spoke out after the video went viral, garnering more than 2 million views and 11,000 comments since it was uploaded by the four students on Tuesday.

“When we saw the reach that the video had received and all the questions that it had triggered, it seemed obvious to us that we had to take ownership of it, if only to show how realistic 3-D animation can be,” Claude Arsenault, a public relations manager for the university told ABCNews.com today.

The 59-second clip — in which a baby is snatched up by the eagle in a park and then dropped back to the ground a few feet away, as an adult runs to help — took the four students behind it nearly 400 hours to create.  The eagle and the baby were created using 3D animation and then added into the film, Arsenault said.

The university, which provides bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 3D animation and digital design, also responded to concerns for the baby’s welfare by headlining today’s post, “Centre NAD reassures Montrealers: no danger of being snatched by a royal eagle.”

Last December, students in the same production simulation workshop class as the four students behind the eagle prank —  Normand Archambault, Antoine Seigle, Loïc Mireault and Félix Marquis-Poulin — released a video of a penguin escaping the Montreal Biodôme, according to the school.  That video garnered more than 30,000 views on YouTube.

“The goal in that class is to push 3-D animation to its limits and to show how believable 3-D animation can be as well,” Arsenault said.

“I think that they achieved that,” she said of the four students behind the eagle hoax.  “The video and all of the comments and all of the questions it triggered speaks for itself.”

Kukulkan pyramid, Yucatan, Mexico. Jeremy Woodhouse/Getty.

We’ll never know if they were wrong.

NASA has quietly published a web video explaining why the world did not come to an end “yesterday,” Dec. 21, 2012.

The date of its release, December 11, was no mistake, even if doomsayers would likely call it one last act of earthly hubris. NASA uploaded the four-minute “ScienceCasts” explainer, titled “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday,” in an effort to answer hundreds of calls and emails they receive daily. It also has a dedicated website that’s received at least 4.6 million visitors — people asking if the Maya prophecy is coming true and what they should do about it.

“If there was anything out there, like a planet headed for Earth, said NASA Astrobiologist David Morrison, it would already be one of the brightest objects in the sky,” the narrator explains in a cheerfully pedantic voice. “Everybody on Earth could see it. You don’t need to ask the government, just go out and look. It’s not there.”

(Note: Still not convinced? Consider this: Even if the Maya, a declining Mesoamerican civilization wiped almost entirely off the map by 17^th century Spanish conquistadors, are to be trusted with this kind of high-stakes stuff, scientists agree that reports concerning their prediction of our collective demise have been greatly exaggerated, if not fabricated. Anthropologists say the Mayan calendar was cyclical, and frequently restarted without ending.)

As for rumors about solar flares and reports the sun is reaching the “max of its 11-year solar cycle,” well, that’s all true. But NASA calls is it the “wimpiest cycle” of the past 50 years.

Anyway, “the sun has been flaring for billions of years and it has never, once, destroyed the world.”

Dwayne Brown, a senior public affair officer at NASA, said the space agency felt a sense of duty as the date neared. People have been calling in to headquarters “who want to do harm to their families” in an effort to protect them from the unknown horrors expected to arrive with the Maya apocalypse, he said.

“As the attention on the issue is growing,” the video’s producer and director Michael Brody said, “we didn’t want the rumors growing…. The idea is to take a straight, stoic, standard [scientific] look… and give it a hook.”

“You’re the smart guys, you know what’s up in space,” Brown said, his way of distilling public sentiment toward NASA.  “Well, we do!”

READ: Apocalypse Believers Flocking Here: Why?

And what they know is quite simple. The world might end on a Friday, but it won’t be tomorrow or the one after. Most scientists agree we have about five billion years of battery life, in the form of the sun, to go before the time comes to get nervous.

Brown’s best advice: “Let’s take it day-by-day.”

A giant squid, like the one seen here, is the focus of an upcoming Discovery documentary about the elusive deep-sea creature.

On Jan. 27, the world will finally see footage of an animal that’s captured people’s imaginations for centuries, but which has been seen alive only once, and never previously captured on film – the giant squid.

The Discovery Channel, along with Japanese partner NHK, will air video of the animal, an elusive deep-water predator that can grow up to 60 feet, with eyes as large as dinner plates.

Despite its huge size, and its claim as the world’s largest living invertebrate, the giant squid was seen alive only for the first time by a crew of Japanese scientists in 2006. It’s unclear whether the video to be aired in January is of this particular squid.

PHOTOS: Amazing Animals

Nearly as long as a school bus and weighing up to a ton, the squid’s eight arms and two tentacles are covered in barbed suction cups, which it uses to force  prey — fish, other squid, possibly small whales — into its razor-sharp beak.

Eileen O’Neill, group president of Discovery and TLC Networks, called the footage ground-breaking in a statement, adding, ” Our crew came face-to-face with the giant squid.”

The orbit of asteroid Madisonvillehigh, shown on website of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA/JPL.

Madisonville, Texas, is not big sky country.  Mushrooms are a major crop in the surrounding countryside, 90 miles up Interstate 45 from Houston.  At Madisonville High School, a fair number of students are from low-income families and qualify for subsidized lunches.

But Madisonville is a special school.  Three hundred million miles away in space is an asteroid that that has just been named for it: 269323 Madisonvillehigh.

“Small-town Madisonville found a big discovery out in the ginormous universe,” said Kaitlynn Ogg, a senior interviewed by ABC station KTRK.

To understand how a Texas high school ends up with a celestial connection, it is useful to meet Denise Rothrock, an astronomy teacher who, back in 2008, was teaching general science at the local junior high.  The school was signed up for the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, a program directed by Patrick Miller of Hardin Simmons University, which sent it telescope images shot for research. Rothrock started a morning astronomy club to analyze them.

“A good program that gets middle schoolers to come in before school starts?” she said in an interview with ABC News.  “That’s worth doing.”

The images that were sent to the school showed small patches of the night sky in rapid sequence, taken 15 seconds apart.  They were not specifically shot for asteroid hunting, but they were useful: Compare the images to each other, and if anything in them moves from one picture to the next to the next, it may be an asteroid.

Rothrock’s students, mostly in eighth grade at the time, did, in fact, see one dot moving across the sky.  They sent their results to the International Astronomical Union, which analyzed the fast-moving object at — well, the speed of science.

Now, four years later, it has confirmed that the dot is an asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The students, as its discoverers, got to propose a name.

Several of them are now high school seniors, some with big dreams.

“I want, in the end, to be the head engineer of a satellite that goes into space,” said Libby Schmitt, a student who, according to her teacher, has applied to some big-name university engineering programs

If her applications say, “helped discover asteroid,” they may stand out.

Composite image of continental United States at night. NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC.

Earth-watching scientists over at NASA today rolled out what they call the “Black Marble,” a series of new images and video featuring Earth as seen from space at night.

The images come from a new sensor on board the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (NPP) launched last year by NASA and NOAA.

NASA’s composite animation was stitched together with images gathered over 312 satellite orbits.  It took that many passes to get cloud-free images of every continent and island on the planet.

NASA claims the new sensor — called VIIRS, or the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite — is so sensitive it can pick up the light of a single ship in the middle of the ocean.

Scientists say the capability to observe Earth at night will help them get a more complete view of storms and other weather conditions that can’t be seen as well with other sensors used in daylight. Images from VIIRS are being used to forecast low clouds and fog at coastal airports like San Francisco, NASA said.

The satellite also captured Hurricane Sandy as it bore down on the east coast in October.

NASA

NASA has, over the years, released daytime versions of the entire Earth from space, dubbed the “Blue Marble.”

The new images were released in San Francisco today at an annual meeting of earth scientists held by the American Geophysical Union.