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In a total lunar eclipse, the full moon turns a coppery red as it passes into Earth's shadow, called a "blood moon." 

Late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, those in North and South America had optimal seats to the sky show.

Lots of people took photos, but the best one we've seen comes from an unlikely source: MySpace's Tom Anderson.

He tweeted:

— Tom Anderson (@myspacetom) April 15, 2014

Here's a bigger photo:

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Kurion is a technology company with an eye toward handling the safe, permanent disposal of nuclear waste, so it answered the call from Fukushima, Japan, to build a robot that can help repair the reactor that failed after the earthquake and tsunami.

We spoke to Marc Rood, Kurion's director of business development, who told us that their solution is a robot that resembles "a large refrigerator." It sports a powerful arm with 7 degrees of freedom (the same as a human arm) and can reach 16 feet vertically and 14 feet horizontally. Sensors on the arm are used to identify cracks in the reactor, and a second robot to be deployed next year will actually be going through to do the repairs.

The radioactivity around the power plant is still high enough that humans working in full hazmat gear only have a 10-minute window before having to worry about exposure. But this robotic arm is "rad-hardened," as Rood explained. "All components will be able to withstand radiation for enough of a duration that nothing will be affected. The only electrical portions of systems are the camera and gripper at the end of the arm."

This is what the robot looks like. It's not mobile, but is instead put into position by a human worker wearing a hazmat suit.

Here's what the robot arm looks like as it scopes the reactor for any cracks:

SEE ALSO: MIT scientists have built a voice-controlled robotic wheelchair that could revolutionize elder care

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The U.S. Coast Guard seized 3,300 kilos of cocaine from southwestern Caribbean waters over the past month, and they unloaded the drugs in Miami on Tuesday, according to the Miami Herald.

To put that into perspective, 3,300 kilos is equal to about 7,275 pounds.

The cocaine is worth about $110 million.

Here's what that looks like (via the U.S. Coast Guard Southeast):

Some of the cocaine was seized in a March 15 bust south of Jamaica, while the rest of it was taken from a ship in the waters between Colombia and Honduras.

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Meaghan Gies talked to the Herald about the drug seizure:

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Your feelings of hunger or fullness are not just based on what you eat, but on what you think you're eating, too, according to a recent study.

If you believe your meal is healthy, it may leave you feeling hungrier than when you've pigged out on food you think is unhealthy.

Psychologist Alia Crum figured this out in a clever experiment where she had participants drink milkshakes labeled either as an "indulgent" 620-calorie shake or a 140-calorie "sensible" shake (labeled as 104 calories above).

The secret? The beverages were actually identical, coming in at 380 calories. The surprise was that their actual caloric content had little effect on if the drinker felt full — it only mattered what the drinker thought the shake contained. The result wasn't just mental, either. Their bodies physically responded differently to the two shakes.

When participants thought they had indulged in a high-calorie shake, the researchers saw a steep drop in the hormone that makes us feel hungry, ghrelin. In those who thought they were eating a healthy, low-calorie shake, their levels of ghrelin hardly budged, meaning they still felt hungry after finishing it.

If your body feels hungry, it has to prepare for the possibility that you won't find food any time soon. That means that those high levels of ghrelin do more than stimulate your appetite — they also slow your metabolism, Crum explained to NPR.

While we still need more research into this mysterious effect, it's really just a particularly striking example of a placebo: Your mind can really control your body — even, it seems, your appetite.

The research doesn't mean that higher-calorie meals are healthier than lower-calorie meals, only that our feelings about food may actually play a role in how we respond to them. If you can convince yourself that a healthy salad is actually a gut-busting indulgence, you might be able to leverage this finding to your advantage.

Here's NPR's full walkthrough of the experiment.

SEE ALSO: Why Diets Fail

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The jet-powered sky crane that lowered the one-ton Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface in 2012 just won't do when it comes time to put the first humans on the Red Planet.

To deliver heavier cargoes to Mars, NASA needs to develop technologies that can slow down large payloads traveling at supersonic speeds and be able to land them at a safe speed on Mars.

To try these new technologies, NASA has developed a disk-shaped test vehicle as part of the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project, run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The vehicle looks like a giant flying saucer. NASA will test out a new inflatable drag device, or decelerator, on the saucer from Hawaii in June.

"The LDSD crosscutting demonstration mission will test breakthrough technologies that will enable large payloads to be safely landed on the surface of Mars, or other planetary bodies with atmospheres, including Earth," NASA wrote in a statement.

According to a preliminary flight plan, a giant balloon would lift the saucer test vehicle to a height of around 120,000 feet. At that altitude, rocket engines should fire to accelerate the saucer to high speeds. As the vehicle descends, the decelerator should inflate around the vehicle to slow it from around Mach 3.5 to Mach 2 or lower. A parachute would also deployed to further slow the vehicle down from Mach 2 to subsonic speeds. The balloon and test vehicle would then be recovered from the ocean.

Here's a diagram of the flight plan:

NASA's new landing devices are being designed to handle 2 to 3 metric tons of weight (double or triple the weight of Curiosity).

According to NASA, testing is expected to continue through 2015, and could be used on Mars missions as early as 2018.

SEE ALSO: NASA's Experimental Lander Just Completed One Of The Coolest Launches We've Ever Seen

MORE SPACE: 'The Most Fascinating Experiment In The History Of Astronomy' Is Happening Soon

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Hey there.

We feel lost.

Solar Impulse is a Swiss aircraft designed for long-range flights, traveling under the power of nothing more than sunlight, and it's gearing up to complete a flight around the world in 2015.

The plane employs 17,248 solar cells to harness the sun's energy. As the sun sets, the plane switches over to the energy stored in its batteries. Solar Impulse can, in theory, perpetually stay aloft for as long as a pilot wants to fly.

This is a project dreamed up by Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss who co-piloted a non-stop balloon flight around the world in 1999, and André Borschberg, a Swiss businessman.

Piccard has a family history of exploring — his father was a noted undersea explorer and his grandfather was a prominent balloonist too. Borschberg leads the technical team that actually builds the systems that make Solar Impulse work. The two undertook the project as a means of demonstrating that "pioneering spirit, innovation, and clean technologies can change the world."

Swiss businessman André Borschberg is co-founder of the Solar Impulse project.

It's also led by Swiss psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, who previously co-piloted the first balloon to travel around the world non-stop.

Here's the public unveiling of the airplane's design in 2007. Check out that wingspan!

Scientists recently announced that they had successfully created lab-grown vaginas for a small group of women with a physical anomaly called Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome.

"Typically, women with MRKH lack a fully functional uterus, cervix and upper vaginal canal," explains Beautiful You MRKH Foundation. "They have normal external genitalia and breast development, and often have a small external vaginal opening, called a 'dimple,' that looks like a hymen."

About 1 in 4,500 girls are born with this condition. So what's it actually like?

Because they don't have a uterus, women with MRKH can't carry a pregnancy and usually don't menstruate. They do, however, have functional ovaries and fallopian tubes, and can often have biological children through assisted reproduction. Since an upper vaginal canal may be missing completely, intercourse, to the extent that it's possible, is usually painful.

Women with MRKH may also have problems with their kidneys, experience skeletal abnormalities, hearing loss, and heart defects. Still, some describe the psychological toll on teenagers — when women typically are diagnosed — as the hardest part.

"Young women diagnosed with MRKH syndrome suffer from extreme anxiety and very high psychological distress when they are told they have no uterus and vagina," researchers noted in a recent study of the syndrome.

"I was suddenly and shamefully different," wrote one woman, in an essay about her diagnosis.

In 2013, the newly crowned Miss Michigan, Jaclyn Schultz, came out publicly to say that she was born with MRKH. "It's really isolating, and it's scary," Schultz told U.S. News, recalling her diagnosis as a teenager. "I'm coming out with it [now] because it's really nothing to be ashamed about."

Here's a full video of her speaking with U.S. News:

Schultz, who became a spokesperson for Beautiful You MRKH Foundation, also sat with her mother for an interview with ABC News in Detroit. Her mother explained her bewilderment when doctors asked if her teenage daughter had undergone a hysterectomy. "I'm not sure what I'm looking at," she recalled one doctor saying.

Traditional interventions for MRKH had a complication rate of up to 75%, The Verge noted, which makes the possibility of the new technique promising — even though the recent pilot study was very small. Doctors will have a better sense of how effective the new treatment is after it's been used in more — and more varied — patients.

Still, the new procedure has been very successful in the four women, who have now been living with the lab-grown vaginas for as many as eight years.

"When I discovered that there was this possibility available to me, I was very happy," said one of the patients, whose name was withheld, in a video interview. "It is important to let other girls that have the same problem know that it doesn't end knowing that you have the disease, because there is a treatment and you can have a normal life."

"Truly I feel fortunate because I have a normal life," she added. "Completely normal."

SEE ALSO: Lab-Grown Vaginas Have Been Successfully Implanted In Four Teenage Women

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