Lunar New Year 2014 in numbers

Phones could replace hotel keys

This Aloft in Cupertino, California, will be one of two hotels getting smartphone room keys in the next three months.

• A hotel chain is testing an app that sends virtual room keys to your phone


• Starwood Hotels & Resorts has more than 1,150 hotels


• Two hotels will get the technology in the next three months


• System would allow guests to bypass front desk and go straight to their rooms

(CNN) -- Got a smartphone? Never lose your hotel key, or even have to stop at the registration desk, again.

That's the vision of a hotel chain that plans to send digital keys to guests' phones via an app instead of making them check in and get the traditional (and famously lose-able) plastic swipe cards. Arriving guests could bypass the front desk and go straight to their rooms.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which owns more than 1,150 hotels in nearly 100 countries, plans to debut the system in the next three months at two of its Aloft hotels -- in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City and Cupertino, California.

Cupertino is likely no accident -- being, of course, the home of Apple's headquarters.

If all goes well, the company says it could have the feature in all of its hotels by next year.

A spokeswoman said the app will initially be compatible with recent iPhone models (4S and newer) and newer Android phones. The app will use Bluetooth technology to unlock the room with a tap.

"We believe this will become the new standard for how people will want to enter a hotel," Frits van Paasschen, Starwood's CEO, told The Wall Street Journal. "It may be a novelty at first, but we think it will become table stakes for managing a hotel."

Starwood, a chain that's heavy on boutique hotels, has a history of tech innovation and employs its own digital team.

Just last year, the company launched a plan to develop solar power at its hotels, offered discounts during a "Cyber Monday" sale and premiered an iPad-specific mobile app. Starwood also announced Instagram integration on its websites, which lets visitors see images that guests have posted.

Super Bowl: 7 commercials to watch

Budweiser's 2014 Super Bowl ad focuses on the friendship between a puppy and its signature Clydesdale.

• Part of the fun of the Super Bowl is watching the ads


• A number of them have been released before the big game


• These seven are ones we can't wait to watch again

(CNN) -- Our favorite Sunday of the year will arrive on February 2, and we're already armed with snacks and snark to dissect the best part of Super Bowl XLVIII: its commercials.

There will be the usual deluge of movie trailers -- expect to see clips for Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" movie as well as Kevin Costner's "Draft Day" -- plus the ad spots shilling beer, M&Ms and everything else.

Here are seven clips that we're looking forward to watching all over again:

Budweiser's puppy love

C'mon people. This has small furry creatures, adoption and interspecies bonding. We've long awaited the moment when the Super Bowl gives up on football and just makes the Puppy Bowl the main event, and we consider this Budweiser commercial to be the first step toward that glorious day.

The Muppets steal a car

The Muppets are mostly around for fun, but they often sneak in a lesson or two while they're at it. With their Super Bowl commercial, they impart a very useful one: do not, under any circumstances, pull over for a Muppets bus -- unless you want them to hijack your car. (On the other hand, if your car is hijacked by Muppets, at least you'll get a groovy song out of it.)

Anna Kendrick's 'non-Super Bowl' Super Bowl commercial

We love this Newcastle Brown Ale ad for so many reasons, but we're only going to give you our top three: 1) It stars Anna Kendrick. 2) It stars Anna Kendrick basically giving the "am I beer commercial hot?" monologue we give ourselves every morning. 3) It stars Anna Kendrick giving the only appropriate response to that: "I mean I'm hot ... But like ... beer commercial hot? No. But I love a challenge."

The 'Full House' reunion

We haven't seen Bob Saget, Dave Coulier and John Stamos -- aka "Full House's" Danny Tanner, Uncle Joey and Uncle Jesse -- together like this since "Full House" went off the air almost 19 years ago, so excuse us while we're going to soak up as much of this minireunion as possible. If we're lucky, maybe Saget and Coulier will join Stamos in his Dannon Oikos spokesman duties full-time.

'Draft day' trailer

If the marketing team behind Kevin Costner's upcoming dramedy "Draft Day" didn't find a way to advertise during the Super Bowl, we'd question their devotion to the job. The film, directed by Ivan Reitman and also starring Jennifer Garner and Ellen Burstyn, features Costner as the general manager of the Cleveland Browns as he grapples with the responsibility of having the No. 1 draft pick. We're getting shades of "Jerry Maguire" from this movie, and we like it.

'Noah' trailer

Admittedly, the promotion for "Noah" is a bit of a downer (#TheFloodIsComing? That's a great thought to have during the Super Bowl), but we can't help but be excited to see what Darren Aronofsky's going to do with this classic Biblical story. Stars include Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Emma Watson. The film will arrive in theaters on March 28.

Ellen's Beats Music commercial, with bears

Ellen DeGeneres is a self-described fan of the new Beats Music app, and she shot a Super Bowl ad to show just how much she loves it. Playing what appears to be a modern-day Goldilocks who likes to hang out at a place called The Woods (we think we've been there ...), DeGeneres grooves to pop music with some hipster bears.

Which commercials are you looking forward to watching on Sunday?

Are you a Super Bowl ad expert?

Solar system full of 'rogue' asteroids

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a never-before-seen set of six comet-like tails radiating from a body in the asteroid belt, named P/2013 P5. The asteroid was discovered as an unusually fuzzy-looking object with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System survey telescope in Hawaii.

A diagram shows the orbit of an asteroid named 2013 TV135 (in blue), which made headlines in September 2013 when it passed closely by Earth. The probability of it striking Earth currently stands at 1 in 63,000, and even those odds are fading fast as scientists find out more about the asteroid. It will most likely swing past our planet again in 2032, according to NASA.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 about 3.75 million miles from Earth. The white dot is the moon, or satellite, orbiting the asteroid.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 made a record-close pass -- 17,100 miles -- by Earth on February 15. Most asteroids are made of rocks, but some are metal. They orbit mostly between Jupiter and Mars in the main asteroid belt. Scientists estimate there are tens of thousands of asteroids and when they get close to our planet, they are called near-Earth objects.

Another asteroid, Apophis, got a lot of attention from space scientists and the media when initial calculations indicated a small chance it could hit Earth in 2029 or 2036. NASA scientists have since ruled out an impact, but on April 13, 2029, Apophis, which is about the size of 3½ football fields, will make a close visit -- flying about 19,400 miles (31,300 kilometers) above Earth's surface. The images above were taken by the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory in January 2013.

If you really want to know about asteroids, you need to see one up close. NASA did just that. A spacecraft called NEAR-Shoemaker, named in honor of planetary scientist Gene Shoemaker, was the first probe to touch down on an asteroid, landing on the asteroid Eros on February 12, 2001. This image was taken on February 14, 2000, just after the probe began orbiting Eros.

The first asteroid to be identified, 1 Ceres, was discovered January 1, 1801, by Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo, Sicily. But is Ceres just another asteroid? Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show that Ceres has a lot in common with planets like Earth. It's almost round and it may have a lot of pure water ice beneath its surface. Ceres is about 606 by 565 miles (975 by 909 kilometers) in size and scientists say it may be more accurate to call it a mini-planet. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on its way to Ceres to investigate. The spacecraft is 35 million miles (57 million kilometers) from Ceres and 179 million miles (288 million kilometers) from Earth. The photo on the left was taken by Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The image on the right was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

One big space rock got upgraded recently. This image of Vesta was taken by the Dawn spacecraft, which is on its way to Ceres. In 2012, scientists said data from the spacecraft show Vesta is more like a planet than an asteroid and so Vesta is now considered a protoplanet.

The three-mile long (4.8-kilometer) asteroid Toutatis flew about 4.3 million miles (6.9 million kilometers) from Earth on December 12, 2012. NASA scientists used radar images to make a short movie.

Asteroids have hit Earth many times. It's hard to get an exact count because erosion has wiped away much of the evidence. The mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona, seen above, was created by a small asteroid that hit about 50,000 years ago, NASA says. Other famous impact craters on Earth include Manicouagan in Quebec, Canada; Sudbury in Ontario, Canada; Ries Crater in Germany, and Chicxulub on the Yucatan coast in Mexico.

NASA scientists say the impact of an asteroid or comet several hundred million years ago created the Aorounga crater in the Sahara Desert of northern Chad. The crater has a diameter of about 10.5 miles (17 kilometers). This image was taken by the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994.

In 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia, scientists theorize an asteroid flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of forest in and around the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.

What else is up there? Is anyone watching? NASA's Near-Earth Object Program is trying to track down all asteroids and comets that could threaten Earth. NASA says 9,672 near-Earth objects have been discovered as of February 5, 2013. Of these, 1,374 have been classified as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, or objects that could one day threaten Earth.

One of the top asteroid-tracking scientists is Don Yeomans at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by the California Institute of Technology. Yeomans says every day, "Earth is pummeled by more than 100 tons of material that spewed off asteroids and comets." Fortunately, most of the asteroid trash is tiny and it burns up when it hits the atmosphere, creating meteors, or shooting stars. Yeomans says it's very rare for big chunks of space litter to hit Earth's surface. Those chunks are called meteorites.

Asteroids and comets are popular fodder for Earth-ending science fiction movies. Two of the biggest blockbusters came out in 1998: "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon." (Walt Disney Studios) Others include "Meteorites!" (1998), "Doomsday Rock" (1997), "Asteroid" (1997), "Meteor" (1979), and "A Fire in the Sky" (1978). Can you name others?

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• Gravity of Jupiter has influenced movement of asteroids


• There are more than 500,000 known rocks in main asteroid belt


• Study in journal Nature throws a new light on this belt

(CNN) -- If you want to find an asteroid, the region between Mars and Jupiter is a great place to look. That area where asteroids hang out is called the main asteroid belt

A study in the journal Nature throws a new light on this strip of our solar system, where most of the asteroids in our solar system reside. Whereas scientists once believed that these asteroids formed more or less in place, new modeling suggests they have been scattered all over.

Scientists believe "the asteroid belt is a melting pot of bodies that formed all over the solar system," said Francesca DeMeo, lead study author and an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Back in the 1980s, when only about 10,000 asteroids were known, it seemed that asteroids that appeared to have formed in a cold environment were farther away from the sun, while those that formed in a hot environment were closer to the sun.

Defending earth from asteroids

Could we really capture an asteroid?

But DeMeo and co-author Benoit Carry of the Paris Observatory studied hundreds of thousands of asteroids and they found that this trend did not hold. Instead they spotted many "rogue" asteroids: Rocks formed in hot environments that were in regions where cold-environment-formed asteroids were expected, and so on.

The main asteroid belt is much more diverse than originally thought, the study shows. Dante Lauretta, lead scientist on the asteroid sample return mission OSIRIS-REx and professor at the University of Arizona, said in an e-mail that the study "represents a new paradigm in our understanding of the compositional diversity of the asteroid belt." Lauretta was not involved in the Nature study.

Although astronomers cannot directly measure temperatures of asteroids, they can infer a rock's origin through geology. For instance, an asteroid with a lot of carbon probably formed far from the sun, in colder temperatures.

The theory is that the planets of our solar system have moved over time. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system and the one with the most gravitational pull, had a big part to play. As Jupiter moved toward the sun, it scattered asteroids, "like a snow globe," DeMeo said.

Over time, she said, there was "a big mess of asteroids everywhere." The only place for them to remain was the asteroid belt.

Why asteroids don't surprise us anymore

Near-Earth asteroids, space rocks that approach our planet's orbit, originated between Mars and Jupiter, she said. By understanding the diversity of the main asteroid belt, we can understand better the asteroids that come close to Earth, DeMeo said.

Such a large amount of mixing in the asteroids is not surprising, Lauretta said.

"This study shows that, indeed, a dynamical process has stirred the asteroid pot, so to speak," he said.

Computer simulations called dynamical models simulate the behavior of thousands of asteroids over time -- even over millions of years. In this way, scientists can see how the solar system might have evolved, how the giant planets may have migrated, and how the migration could have affected the distribution of various types of asteroids.

Dynamical models over the last decade have suggested the main asteroid belt has been sculpted by giant planet resonance, a position where an asteroid feels a regular gravitational pull from Jupiter or Saturn, Lauretta said.

Astronomers have figured out that this happens in connection with a mathematical relationship between the asteroid's orbital period and the planet's orbital period. When the orbital period -- how long it takes go to around the sun -- of the asteroid is an integer multiple of the planet's orbital period, you see this effect -- and there tend not to be any large asteroids in these locations.

For example, there is a location where an asteroid would go around the sun twice for every time that Jupiter circles once. The asteroid feels regular tugging from the planet, and its orbit become unstable. That explains the emptiness of that part of the asteroid belt.

There are several sky surveys that look out for asteroids on a regular basis as part of NASA's Near Earth Object Program. The program found that a very small asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere over the mid-Atlantic Ocean at the beginning of January and probably broke up.

Today we know of about 500,000 asteroids in the main belt, but astronomers believe there are at least 1 million asteroids there that are larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, and even more that are small. The next one we spot will also come from this shaken solar system.

Follow Elizabeth Landau on Twitter at @lizlandau

Super Bowl spots to watch

Budweiser's 2014 Super Bowl ad focuses on the friendship between a puppy and its signature Clydesdale.

• Part of the fun of the Super Bowl is watching the ads


• A number of them have been released before the big game


• These seven are ones we can't wait to watch again

(CNN) -- Our favorite Sunday of the year will arrive on February 2, and we're already armed with snacks and snark to dissect the best part of Super Bowl XLVIII: its commercials.

There will be the usual deluge of movie trailers -- expect to see clips for Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" movie as well as Kevin Costner's "Draft Day" -- plus the ad spots shilling beer, M&Ms and everything else.

Here are seven clips that we're looking forward to watching all over again:

Budweiser's puppy love

C'mon people. This has small furry creatures, adoption and interspecies bonding. We've long awaited the moment when the Super Bowl gives up on football and just makes the Puppy Bowl the main event, and we consider this Budweiser commercial to be the first step toward that glorious day.

The Muppets steal a car

The Muppets are mostly around for fun, but they often sneak in a lesson or two while they're at it. With their Super Bowl commercial, they impart a very useful one: do not, under any circumstances, pull over for a Muppets bus -- unless you want them to hijack your car. (On the other hand, if your car is hijacked by Muppets, at least you'll get a groovy song out of it.)

Anna Kendrick's 'non-Super Bowl' Super Bowl commercial

We love this Newcastle Brown Ale ad for so many reasons, but we're only going to give you our top three: 1) It stars Anna Kendrick. 2) It stars Anna Kendrick basically giving the "am I beer commercial hot?" monologue we give ourselves every morning. 3) It stars Anna Kendrick giving the only appropriate response to that: "I mean I'm hot ... But like ... beer commercial hot? No. But I love a challenge."

The 'Full House' reunion

We haven't seen Bob Saget, Dave Coulier and John Stamos -- aka "Full House's" Danny Tanner, Uncle Joey and Uncle Jesse -- together like this since "Full House" went off the air almost 19 years ago, so excuse us while we're going to soak up as much of this minireunion as possible. If we're lucky, maybe Saget and Coulier will join Stamos in his Dannon Oikos spokesman duties full-time.

'Draft day' trailer

If the marketing team behind Kevin Costner's upcoming dramedy "Draft Day" didn't find a way to advertise during the Super Bowl, we'd question their devotion to the job. The film, directed by Ivan Reitman and also starring Jennifer Garner and Ellen Burstyn, features Costner as the general manager of the Cleveland Browns as he grapples with the responsibility of having the No. 1 draft pick. We're getting shades of "Jerry Maguire" from this movie, and we like it.

'Noah' trailer

Admittedly, the promotion for "Noah" is a bit of a downer (#TheFloodIsComing? That's a great thought to have during the Super Bowl), but we can't help but be excited to see what Darren Aronofsky's going to do with this classic Biblical story. Stars include Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Emma Watson. The film will arrive in theaters on March 28.

Ellen's Beats Music commercial, with bears

Ellen DeGeneres is a self-described fan of the new Beats Music app, and she shot a Super Bowl ad to show just how much she loves it. Playing what appears to be a modern-day Goldilocks who likes to hang out at a place called The Woods (we think we've been there ...), DeGeneres grooves to pop music with some hipster bears.

Which commercials are you looking forward to watching on Sunday?

Are you a Super Bowl ad expert?

A city's total lack of preparedness

A rare snowstorm left thousands of motorists trapped on Atlanta interstates overnight. "Thank God I walk to work everyday," said Doug Simonton, who snapped this photo Tuesday afternoon.

Monica Cantwell spent Tuesday night in her office at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her 13-year-old daughter stayed overnight at her middle school in nearby Hoover, Alabama. " Everyone I spoke with is very angry about the lack of foresight, including myself as a parent," she said.

The severe weather forced 4,500 students to spend the night in various school buildings in Hoover, Alabama. High school student Christopher Brady shot this photo Tuesday evening. "At first we were excited, but then we panicked a bit," he said.

Officials said that 1,254 accidents were reported in Georgia's snowstorm. Jay Hayes shot this photo of I-285 around 5 p.m. Tuesday. "I've lived in Atlanta since 2001, and I have never come across a situation where the city was so unprepared," he said.

As of Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of cars were still stranded on Atlanta's interstates, as seen in this photo taken on a GA 400 exit by iReporter Dylan Wintersteen. "It's bizarre to see all the cars people abandoned and just left last night," he said.

CNN Video Producer Jo Parker slept alongside other female staffers in the basement of the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, where all rooms were booked. Male CNN staffers had less luxurious accommodations in the employee gym.

While walking to the grocery store in Roswell, Georgia, Smith Culberson came across an entire highway of abandoned vehicles. "Most cars couldn't drive up the exit ramp because of the ice," he said.

Marcy Heinz left work in Johns Creek, Georgia, at 1:15 p.m. and spent 8 hours on streets and back roads trying to get home. "The gridlock was absolutely unbelievable," she said. "I have 14 and a half years experience driving in Atlanta and this is the worst I've ever seen it." She eventually gave up and wound up spending the night at Milton High School, where students were safely sheltered in one part of the school, separated from stranded motorists also seeking shelter.

Ian Walters says it took about an hour to make the five-mile drive to his Roswell, Georgia, home on Tuesday afternoon. He says the car he was riding in hit a patch of ice on the way up this hill and got stuck for about 10 minutes. Walters was one of the lucky ones, though -- many Atlanta residents reported commutes that took several hours longer than usual.

Keshia Owen camped out at HYATT house Atlanta/Cobb Galleria after she could not make it home Tuesday. "I left work at 12:45 yesterday and haven't seen home yet," said Owen.

• David Levinson: Atlanta area should have been prepared for the weather


• He says Atlanta gets little snow, but gets weather forecasts. Storm was not a surprise


• Officials should have kept people off the roads, Levinson says


• Levinson: Real leaders aren't insecure about risking such decisions

Editor's note: David Levinson is a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota and director of the Networks, Economics and Urban Systems Research Group, or NEXUS. He has authored or edited several books, including "Planning for Place and Plexus: Metropolitan Land Use and Transport." He is the editor of the Journal of Transport and Land Use. He blogs at Transportationist.

(CNN) -- It's just water.

Of course it is frozen in the form of ice. Driving on ice is a fool's errand. On ice it is hard to stop (or start) moving. On ice, vehicle control is difficult at best. You don't need to be a transportation engineer to know that crashes increase with snow and especially ice, with its reduced friction. The problem is not that Atlanta got snow, but that the snow turned into ice.

Should Atlanta have been better prepared? In retrospect, the answer is obvious. In prospect it should have been as well.

While it's hot in the summer, Atlanta is in the foothills of the Appalachians, not the beaches of the Caribbean. In the past eight decades, it has snowed 4 inches or more 11 times in Atlanta. There are periodic ice storms. According to Weatherspark, the average low temperature in January is 34 degrees F, just above freezing. In other words, half the time in January the daytime low is below 34.

I lived in Atlanta for five years. As a freshman, I remember a cold spell in January 1985, when Ronald Reagan's second inauguration was canceled in Washington because of cold, and Georgia Tech, where I was a student, had a delayed opening because it was 8 degrees. So winter is something that leaders should be aware of in Georgia.

Atlanta does not get as much snow as Minneapolis, my current home, and where we have stared down a polar vortex, and are now blanketed with about 2 feet of snow. Atlanta is certainly not as cold as Minneapolis, where unusually, school was canceled two days this week, and five days this school year, and we now look at ice planet Hoth (where Luke Skywalker and friends were based at the opening of "The Empire Strikes Back") as an improvement. But Atlanta still experiences winter. Atlanta still has access to forecasts from the National Weather Service. This storm was not a surprise.

Blizzard of blame

There are several strategies for dealing with ice storms.

Ice storm chaos in Atlanta

Dude, where's my car?

Officials could have tried to prevent the ice. Unfortunately weather control is not yet very practical.

The city and state could have tried to mitigate the ice. There are many techniques for salting and sanding roads that either prevent ice from forming, melt the ice or make it easier to travel on ice. This requires a fleet of vehicles and drivers that are prepared well before the weather event and that continue to be deployed until the roads are cleared.

The risk is the city and state spend money on preparations for bad weather that does not come. Such spending is standard operating procedure in northern cities such as Minneapolis, where snow and ice are almost guaranteed, but it may not be worthwhile if the ice is infrequent.

Opinion: When 2.6 inches of snow made hell freeze over

Atlanta could have tried to avoid the ice. If officials knew ice was coming (and they should have, the weather forecasts were not highly guarded state secrets), they should have canceled schools and encouraged people to stay home. The risk is you cancel school and it only rains, or the storm changes course. Officials who cancel school, only to see the weather improve, look bad, are considered "fraidy-cats," will be mocked by talking heads and Monday morning quarterbacks, and more importantly will have a harder time making the right decision the next time.

A real leader is not so insecure. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned his city about Sandy despite perhaps being (in retrospect) too conservative in his warnings about Irene.

Is missing a day of school, or working from home instead of the office really the end of the world?

David Levinson

In the end, we should ask: Is missing a day of school, or working from home instead of the office really the end of the world?

Instead what officials in Georgia did was accept the damage (in the form of traffic congestion, crashes, people sleeping in place in their cars and schools instead of at home) caused by the ice. This outcome required no advance preparation or forethought. In fact a debacle of this magnitude required a careful absence of preparation.

Worse, everything shut down at once. Dismissals were not coordinated, exacerbating congestion. In the end though, the main problem was not that everyone left work and school at the same time. The problem was they were all there in the first place.

In the long term, the Atlanta area could do much more to avoid its routine congestion. But in the short term, if you cannot prevent the special congestion caused by the weather, avoid it.

Is weather getting weirder? I don't know.

Is weather getting more predictable? Most definitely. The science is improving, and the measurements are getting more precise, and there are many more of them, all of which make short-range forecasts very accurate. Our politicians should listen to the scientists sometimes.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Levinson.