|  Deadly, Rare Tropical Cyclone Hits Somalia  | A slow-moving tropical storm pounded the Somalia coast this weekend, a rare hit for the war-torn country that killed more than 100 people and devastated coastal communities. The unnamed tropical storm made landfall on Sunday (Nov. 10) north of Eyl in the Puntland state, a semiautonomous region that typically receives less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain every year. Weak storms such as Cyclone 3A can wreak havoc along the arid African coast because they trigger flash floods, said Amato Evan, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. "Even a very weak storm can cause huge damage and loss of life in this area," Evan told LiveScience.
| Read More » Northern Lights Dance Over Sweden in Stunning Time-Lapse (Video)  | From the frigid northern edge of Sweden, videographer Chad Blakley has captured amazing footage this fall of the northern lights, which have been stimulated by a recent uptick in solar activity. Blakley shot his latest time-lapse northern lights video on Nov. 9 from Abisko National Park, which is well inside the Arctic Circle in Lapland, the northernmost province in Sweden. "The auroras started almost immediately after the sun went down and danced overhead all night long," Blakley told SPACE.com in an email. Solar storms can send high-speed charged particles crashing into Earth's magnetic field, which sparks the geomagnetic storms responsible for the northern lights, also called the aurora borealis.
| Read More » Saturn, Earth Shine in Amazing New Photo by NASA Probe  | A NASA spacecraft has revealed an unprecedented view of Saturn from space, showing the entire gas giant backlit by the sun with several of its moons and all but one of its rings, as Earth, Venus and Mars all appear as pinpricks light in the background. The spectacular image, unveiled Tuesday (Nov. 12), is actually a mosaic of 141 wide-angle images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft taken in natural color, which mimics how human eyes might see the ringed planet. The pictures that make up the mosaic were snapped on July 19, 2013 — the same day that Cassini took advantage of a rare opportunity to photograph Earth without interference from the sun, which was totally eclipsed by Saturn at the time. "In this one magnificent view, Cassini has delivered to us a universe of marvels," Carolyn Porco, who leads Cassini's imaging team at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said of the new image in a statement from NASA. "And it did so on a day people all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being alive on a pale blue dot."
| Read More » Mars Rover Curiosity Recovers from Software Glitch  | NASA's Curiosity rover has bounced back from a glitch that put the 1-ton robot into a protective "safe mode" for three days over the weekend. The car-size Curiosity rover went into safe mode Thursday (Nov. 7), a few hours after receiving a software update from its handlers on Earth. But mission engineers have identified and fixed the problem, allowing Curiosity to resume normal operations on Sunday (Nov. 10), NASA officials said. "We returned to normal engineering operations," Rajeev Joshi, a mission software and systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Tuesday (Nov. 12).
| Read More » Too Aware? The Downside of Mindfulness Revealed "Mindfulness" is the watchword of gurus and lifestyle coaches everywhere. Automatic processes lead to the formation of habits — both good and bad, said study researcher Chelsea Stillman, a doctoral student in psychology at the Georgetown University Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. Next, each participant completed one of two implicit learning tasks. If they automatically caught on to this hidden warning, their reaction times would be faster, indicating implicit learning. Read More » Scientists: Oldest big cat fossil found in Tibet  | LOS ANGELES (AP) — Scientists have unearthed the oldest big cat fossil yet, suggesting the predator — similar to a snow leopard — evolved in Asia and spread out.
| Read More » No, Stuxnet Did Not Infect the International Space Station  | Did the Stuxnet cyberweapon infect the International Space Station? "The American-made Stuxnet virus has infected the International Space Station," said ExtremeTech. "Stuxnet, America's Nuclear Plant-Attacking Virus, Has Apparently Infected the International Space Station," trumpeted Vice. "Stuxnet, gone rogue, hit Russian nuke plant, space station," asserted the Times of Israel.
| Read More » Ouch! Hermaphrodite Sea Slug Stabs Mate in Head During Sex  | Cats may bite, and geese may have barbed penises, but one newly described hermaphroditic sea slug has taken violent animal sex to a new level by stabbing its mates in the head. 1, is a small sea slug found off the northeast coast of Australia. A simultaneous hermaphrodite, it has both male and female reproductive organs that it uses simultaneously during sex. This stabbing behavior, known as traumatic secretion transfer, is fairly common amongst hermaphroditic sea slugs, and does not actually traumatize the slug — the term trauma refers to the Greek translation as "wound." The behavior is well documented, but still not very well understood.
| Read More » Oldest Big Cat Fossils Discovered in Tibet  | The fossils, which were discovered on the Tibetan plateau, belong to a sister species of the snow leopard that prowls the Himalayan region today, said study co-author Zhijie Jack Tseng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In addition, the cat skull came from a region where other fossils of mega-creatures have been found, suggesting perhaps this is the region where Pleistocene megafauna, including "big furry guys" such as wooly mammoths and rhinos, evolved, Meachen said.
| Read More » Incoming comet ISON heading for close encounter with sun  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A comet is heading for a close encounter with the sun later this month, and if it is not vaporized or torn apart, it should be visible to the naked eye in December. Comet ISON is expected to pass just about 621,000 miles (1 million km) from the sun's surface on November 28. Scientists are not sure how ISON will hold up. As it blasts around the sun, traveling at 234 miles per second (377 km per second) the comet will be heated to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees C), hot enough to vaporize not just ice in the comet's body, but also rock and metal.
| Read More » Home HPV Test May Help Detect Early Cervical Cancer BOSTON — Home tests for the human papillomavirus (HPV) may help detect cervical cancer in women who would not otherwise be screened by a doctor, a new study suggests. In the study, researchers mailed home HPV test kits to 155 women ages 30 to 64 in North Carolina. (Pap smears are recommended every three years as a way to screen for cervical cancer, which can be caused by HPV.) About 12 percent of women were infected with high-risk HPV types that increase the risk of cervical cancer, said study researcher Andrea Des Marais, of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, who presented the findings this week here at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association. Read More » Area 51 Declassified: Documents Reveal Cold War 'Hide-and-Seek'  | Newly declassified documents reveal more detail about past use of the mysterious Nevada test site known as Area 51 and the concern for maintaining secrecy about the work done at the facility. The area was photographed with American reconnaissance assets to better assess what the Soviet Union's spy satellites might be able to discern. The documents also detail the debate over the possible release of a photograph "inadvertently" taken of the secret facility by NASA astronauts aboard the Skylab space station in 1974. More than 60 declassified documents in an Area 51 file were posted on the Internet by the National Security Archive late last month, compiled and edited by archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson.
| Read More » Estrogen May Shield Memories from Stress After Menopause SAN DIEGO — Menopause comes with its share of unpleasant side effects, which may include memory loss. The hormone estrogen appears to protect against the effects of stress and associated memory loss in aging women. Now, it seems that estrogen replacement therapy in postmenopausal women could prevent memory loss associated with stress, according to findings presented here Sunday (Nov. 10) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. "Women who are going through menopause report feeling their memory is getting worse, though the reports are anecdotal," said study researcher Alexandra Ycaza of the University of Southern California. Read More » Missing Piece of Long-Neck Dinosaur Finally Discovered  | DENVER — A small roadside quarry west of Denver, site of some of the infamous "Bone Wars" of the 19th century, has revealed a new treasure: the snout of the long-necked dinosaur Apatosaurus ajax. The specimen, nicknamed Kevin, is the first Apatosaurus ajax muzzle ever found, and the discovery is likely to help paleontologists understand how A. ajax is related to other Apatosaurus kin, said Matthew Mossbrucker, the director of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Morrison, Colo., and the paleontologist who first identified the bones. "It's the finest Apatosaurus snout on the planet," Mossbrucker told LiveScience at his office, tucked away in a corner next door to the room where he and volunteers have been painstakingly carving Kevin's bones out of sandstone for two years. The dinosaur species was discovered first by naturalist Arthur Lakes in the foothills of Colorado, along a ridgeline now visible from Mossbrucker's office.
| Read More » 5 Ways Our Cavemen Instincts Get the Best of Us "Like it or not, we evolved to be sweaty, fat bipeds that are furless and big brained," Harvard evolutionary biologist Jason Lieberman said during a public lecture on Nov. 6 here at the American Museum of Natural History. We evolved to be physically active, but we also evolved to be lazy," said Lieberman, who discussed the consequences of living with a Stone Age body in a Space Age world. During the talk, Lieberman described some of the ways that instincts humans inherited from the Stone Age — also known as the Paleolithic Period, stretching from between 2.6 million to about 10,000 years ago — now conflict with modern life and contribute to increasingly common lifestyle-induced diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Read More » One World Trade Center: A Look at the World's Tallest Things In a hotly anticipated decision, a blue-ribbon panel of experts Tuesday (Nov. 12) declared that One World Trade Center in New York City is the tallest building in the United States. The Height Committee of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ruled that the new structure is taller than Chicago's Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower). The spat was initiated when some skyscraper fans complained that One World Trade Center does not rise to the expected height of 1,776 feet (541 meters), but cheats by using a rooftop needle to elevate its profile above the Willis Tower, which stands at 1,451 feet (442 m). Read More » Hydrogen phone chargers to keep Africans connected when power runs short By Wendell Roelf CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - African smartphone users will soon have an alternative means to get round the power shortages afflicting much of the world's poorest continent - a portable charger that relies on hydrogen fuel cells. British company Intelligent Energy plans to roll out 1 million of the new chargers in mid-December, mainly in Nigeria and South Africa, after successfully testing them in Nigeria over the last five months, its consumer electronics managing director, Amar Samra, said. "In emerging markets where the grids are not reliable and people are using (mobile phones) as a primary device, it is mission critical; The chargers are designed to back up the spread of smartphones and tablets across countries where cellphones have already helped to transform lives and businesses. Read More » SES suffers launch delay to satellite ASTRA 5B BRUSSELS (Reuters) - SES, one of the world's largest commercial satellite operators, said on Wednesday that the planned launch of one of its satellites had been delayed until January. SES aimed to launch its ASTRA 5B satellite on board the Ariane 5 booster from Kourou in French Guiana on December 6. The satellite is to serve the European market. The delay was due to adjustments required for a different satellite to be launched on the same rocket for Spain's HISPASAT. Previous satellite launch delays have led SES to trim its guidance for 2013. ... Read More » EasyJet, Airbus team create world's first man-made ash cloud The world's first man-made ash cloud has been created by a team led by airline easyJet and planemaker Airbus to test how passenger aircraft cope with volcanic blasts such as the 2010 Icelandic eruption. The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano shut down much of Europe's airspace for six days, affecting more than 10 million people and costing $1.7 billion. An Airbus A400M test plane on Wednesday dispersed one tonne of ash over the Bay of Biscay, off western France, creating conditions similar to that of the 2010 eruption, said the team, which also included Norwegian sensor maker Nicarnica Aviation. The ash used in the test was from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, collected and stored by scientists in Reykjavik. Read More » Rarely Seen 'Asian Unicorn' Caught on Camera  | One of the most secretive creatures on Earth — the saola — has been photographed in Vietnam for the first time in 15 years. Scientists first discovered the saola in 1992 in Vietnam near the country's border with Laos. A lone saola was documented this past September by a camera trap set up in the Central Annamite Mountains by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Vietnamese wildlife officials. "When our team first looked at the photos we couldn't believe our eyes," Van Ngoc Thinh, head of the WWF in Vietnam, said in a statement.
| Read More » Crazy Cretaceous Find: Intersex Crabs  | DENVER — It's a crustacean conundrum: Why did some Cretaceous crabs sport both male and female characteristics? The answer is unknown, but new fossil discoveries reveal that intersex crabs were a small but persistent part of the population in South Dakota during the Cretaceous Period — and a parasitic barnacle may have been to blame. Gale Bishop, an emeritus professor at Georgia Southern University, excavated these specimens throughout the 1970s; the crabby collection now belongs to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
| Read More » Guts of Superfast Black Hole Jets Revealed  | Astronomers have taken an unprecedented look at the superenergetic jets blasted out by black holes, and thus have answered a key question about the composition of these mysterious beams. "We've known for a long time that jets contain electrons but haven't got an overall negative charge, so there must be something positively charged in them, too," study co-author James Miller-Jones, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, said in a statement. "Since our results found nickel and iron in these jets, we now know ordinary matter must be providing the positive charge." The researchers took the measure of 4U1630-47, a black-hole candidate just a few times more massive than the sun.
| Read More » Ancient Atlantic Seawater Twice As Salty As Today's Oceans  | When scientists drilled deep into the center of a huge crater beneath the Chesapeake Bay, they discovered ancient seawater that had been locked up in sediments since the early Cretaceous Period. Researchers examined the saltiness, or salinity, of water retrieved from drilled cores deep under Chesapeake Bay— a sprawling estuary bordered by Maryland and Virginia — and determined that the briny samples dated back to when the North Atlantic was transitioning from being a closed basin to the wide, open ocean we see today. The findings offer a glimpse into the evolution of the North Atlantic Ocean, which formed approximately 130 million years ago, when the ancient supercontinent Pangaea began drifting apart, said study lead author Ward Sanford, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Reston, Va. [The World's Biggest Oceans and Seas] "This is really the first solid look at the North Atlantic at the time it was opening, to see how that salinity was changing over time," Sanford told LiveScience.
| Read More » Philippines Relief: The Emerging Science of Why We Give In a recent study led by scientists at Stanford University, participants were more likely to donate all or part of $15 they were provided in the study when they saw head shots of orphans or refugees rather than silhouettes. Read More » 'Rare' Atom Finding May Advance Quantum Computers Quantum computers could crack codes and run more complex simulations than current machines, but actually building one is hard to do. The bits that store this complex data don't last long, because they are made of single atoms that get knocked around by stray electrons and photons in the environment. They found a way to get the bits to last long enough to do computations with, using the magnetic properties of a rare earth element called holmium and the symmetry of platinum. The experiment, detailed in tomorrow's (Nov. 14) issue of the journal Nature, is an important step in creating quantum computers and making quantum memory useful. Read More » | |
