A previously undiscovered asteroid came within 14,000 km (8,700 miles) of Earth last week, and astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before closest approach. On Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST a 7 meter asteroid, now called 2009 VA, came only about 2 Earth radii from impacting our home planet. This is the third-closest known non-impacting Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid.

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An American science student has captured images of the curvature of the Earth after sending a balloon into space on a shoestring budget. Oliver Yeh spent less than $150 on a secondhand camera, a GPS-enabled mobile phone, a weather balloon and a polystyrene coolbox which he launched from a field in Massachusetts as part of a science project.

The result was a time-lapse array of stunning photographs from the edge of space that could easily have come from Nasa, with its $17bn annual budget.

Yeh, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, enlisted two friends to help with Project Icarus, which he dreamed up to prove that it was possible to reach the upper levels of the atmosphere even on a tight budget. “For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do,” the 20-year-old said. “Before, people were just kind of, ‘That’s a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.’”

The camera, which Yeh bought on eBay, was positioned inside the coolbox to protect it from -40C temperatures 17.6 miles above the Earth’s surface. He cut a small hole for the lens then hooked the camera up to a computer programme that instructed it to take photographs every five seconds. He also placed a phone inside that broadcast its co-ordinates to help the team find and retrieve the device when the helium-filled balloon popped and it returned to Earth on a parachute.

The students launched the balloon on 2 September near their college. They expected the flight to last five hours, but soon lost contact with it, fearing that the low temperatures had frozen the phone’s battery. They later rediscovered the signal and found the camera undamaged 25 miles from the launch area. The team has since collated the hundreds of photographs taken during the flight into a video that they posted on YouTube and on their own website.

Yeh says his favourite image is the one taken at the peak of the flight, 17.5 miles from the Earth’s surface, just as the balloon popped and the camera began its descent.

A 13-man British caving team has claimed that they have discovered the world’s largest cave, called the Hang Son Doong cave or Mountain River Cave, in the jungles of Hang Son Doong, in Vietnam.

The British team was assisted by representatives of the Hanoi University of Science in the expedition.

Reports say that the Hang Son Doong (Mountain River cave) measures more than 650 ft in height and 500 ft in width.

The Hang Son Doong cave is said to be nearly twice the size of the current largest cave in the world, the Deer Cave in Sarawak, Malaysia this is over 100 yards high and 90 yards wide.

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A great Brazilian environmental commercial “One day it will return to you. Conserve your planet; there’s still time.”

Planet Earth — in motion. Timelapse ice flows over the Arctic, billowing storm clouds over the Caribbean and beautiful blooming algae off the west coast of Southern Africa. BDH’s meticulous work involved stitching many high resolution photographs from NASA, to create these real images within our computers. Other work involved the planning and steadying of many timelapse sequences and the sensitive matching of atmospheric effects. Planet Earth is an 11 part series and the world’s first television series produced nearly entirely on HD. BDH worked in collaboration with the production team for over 4 years on these breathtaking hi-resolution images.