|  4D Printing May Bolster Arsenal of US Army  | The 3D printing revolution shows no signs of letting up, and now has made its way on to the next dimension. The U.S. Army Research Office has awarded $855,000 to three universities to make advances in 4D printing, which is the ability to 3D-print objects that can change their shape or appearance over time (the fourth dimension), or in response to some condition. "Rather than construct a static material or one that simply changes its shape, we're proposing the development of adaptive, biomimetic composites that re-program their shape, properties or functionality on demand, based upon external stimuli," said Anna Balazs, a researcher at Harvard, in a statement. The U.S. Army awarded additional 4D-printing grants to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois.
| Read More » Russian Fireball Explosion Shows Meteor Risk Greater Than Thought  | DENVER – As researchers recover more leftover pieces from the space rock that detonated earlier this year near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, the event is helping to flag a worrisome finding: Scientists have misjudged the frequency of large airbursts. Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, broached the implications of the Chelyabinsk airburst event on Oct. 7 here at the American Astronomical Society's 2013 Division for Planetary Sciences meeting. According to Boslough, when you add the Chelyabinsk incident to the 1908 Tunguska explosion over Siberia — along with a 1963 bolide blast near the Prince Edward Islands off the coast of South Africa — the data suggest that the incoming rate of small space rocks is actually much higher than asteroid experts have assumed based on astronomical observations. "These three data points together suggest that maybe we have underestimated the population," of smaller sized objects that can create air bursts, Boslough said.
| Read More » Spectacular 3D Mars Video Brings Red Planet to Life  | A newly released video, created by stitching together images taken by a veteran Mars spacecraft, provides a richly detailed, three-dimensional view of the Red Planet. The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has orbited the Red Planet nearly 12,000 times, capturing images of Martian valleys, canyons and lava flows that have provided unprecedented views of planet's terrain. "For the first time, we can see Mars spatially — in three dimensions," Ralf Jaumann, project manager for the Mars Express mission at the German Aerospace Center, said in a statement. Mars Express has covered 37 million square miles (97 million square kilometers) of Mars' surface (out of 56 million square miles or 145 million square kilometers) in high resolution.
| Read More » 'Biohacker' Implants Chip in Arm Tim Cannon is a software developer from Pittsburgh and one of the developers at Grindhouse Wetware, a firm dedicated to "augmenting humanity using safe, affordable, open source technology," according to the group's website. As they explain it, "Computers are hardware. Read More » Female Dogs Are Better Navigators (Op-Ed)  | They contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Dognition is a series of games owners play with their dogs to better understand how their dogs think.
| Read More » Full Belly Fossil! 'Sea Monster' Had 3 Others in Its Gut  | DENVER — The mosasaur, a fearsome marine reptile that stalked the Cretaceous seas, scavenged its own kin, a new fossil find reveals. A fossilized mosasaur found in Angola contains the partial remains of three other mosasaurs in its stomach, researchers reported here Tuesday (Oct. 29) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. "These are three different species of mosasaur inside the belly of a fourth species of mosasaur," said study researcher Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas. The find isn't the first example of mosasaurs digesting mosasaurs, but it illuminates an ancient ecosystem surprisingly similar to ones seen in parts of the ocean today.
| Read More » For Mice, the Smell of Urine Is Sexy  | There might be a link between fatherhood and urine spraying for mice.
| Read More » 5 Weird Effects of Daylight Saving Time  | As daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. this coming Sunday morning (Nov. 3), most Americans will join snoozers across more than 60 other nations in savoring the gift of one extra hour of sleep. The researchers attribute the injuries to lack of sleep, which might explain why the same effect did not pop up in the fall when workers gained an hour of sleep.
| Read More » Sunday Solar Eclipse: Skywatchers to Chase Moon's Shadow by Land, Sea & Air  | The only total solar eclipse of 2013 will occur Sunday, but will be harder to see by eclipse-chasers because of its short duration and the remote path from which it will be visible. Observers in that portion of Earth's surface will see an annular eclipse, or a "ring of fire" solar eclipse, in which a thin or broken ring of sunlight remains visible around the moon's outline.
| Read More » Landslides Scar Colorado After Major Flood  | DENVER — The floods that struck northern Colorado in September left their mark in the form of landslides that scarred spots from the high mountains to the low foothills. Hundreds of landslides occurred during the storm that dropped record rains on the Boulder area, Jonathan Godt, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher with the Landslide Hazards Program, reported here Tuesday (Oct. 29) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. The damage occurred inside a triangle along Colorado's Front Range Mountains, spanning an area some 1,150 square miles (3,000 square kilometers). Several days of heavy, tropical-style rain fell in northern Colorado beginning Sept. 9 and intensifying Sept. 11 and 12, when floodwaters began to rise in Boulder (which saw more than 7 inches, or 18 centimeters, of rain in one day) and other foothill towns.
| Read More » Weird Forests Once Sprouted in Antarctica  | DENVER — Strange forests with some features of today's tropical trees once grew in Antarctica, new research finds. Forests carpeted a non-icy Antarctic. The question, said Patricia Ryberg, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, is how plants coped with photosynthesizing constantly for part of the year and then not at all when the winter sun set. "The trees are the best way to figure this out, because trees record physiological responses" in their rings, Ryberg told LiveScience.
| Read More » Antarctic Hills Haven't Seen Water in 14 Million Years  | Water has not flowed across Antarctica's Friis Hills for 14 million years, researchers reported Tuesday (Oct. 29) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver. The Friis Hills rise 2,000 feet (600 meters) above Antarctica's Taylor Valley, one of the "Dry Valleys" west of McMurdo Sound. Fossils show tundra mosses and a lake once covered the flat-topped hills, when Earth's climate was warmer more than 14 million years ago. To gauge ancient rainfall amounts, Rachel Valletta, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, looked for traces of a radioactive isotope called beryllium-10 in lake sediments on the Friis Hills.
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