|  Leech Toxins, Snake Venom: How Nature's 'Poisons' Help People "Poisons can be bad for some things and good for others, including humans," said Michael Novacek, senior vice president of the American Museum of Natural History, at an opening of a new poison-themed exhibition Tuesday (Nov. 12). Read More » 3.5-Billion-Year-Old Fossil Microbial Community Found  | Scientists have found fossil evidence of ancient microbial communities that lived 3.5 billion years ago. You've got a 3.5-billion-year-old ecosystem," said study co-author Robert Hazen, an earth scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. The new find reveals that a scant 1 billion years after Earth's origin, complex microbial communities that clung to sediments along the windswept seashore had already begun harvesting energy from sunlight, rather than the rocks. Though chemical evidence of carbon-based life forms, such as isotopes (or different forms) of carbon, reveal that life existed on early Earth, scientists have discovered a few controversial traces of its existence.
| Read More » Carl Sagan Archive Opens at U.S. Library of Congress  | WASHINGTON — The legacy of the famed astrobiologist and science communicator Carl Sagan is now available to people around the world. The new Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive opened to the public Tuesday (Nov. 12) during a celebration of Sagan's life here at the Library of Congress. The archive is composed of 1,705 boxes of material that once belonged to Sagan and his widow, Ann Druyan. MacFarlane — the creator of the animated TV show "Family Guy" and producer of the new "Cosmos" (a series originally hosted by Sagan) — provided money, making it possible for the Library of Congress to complete the archive.
| Read More » Comet ISON Observing Tips: Choosing the Right Binoculars or Telescope  | With excitement about the upcoming solar flyby of Comet ISON now approaching a fever pitch, I recently thought about a similar scenario that took place back in 1985 with the approach of Halley's Comet. One Sunday in the magazine supplement of my local newspaper, an ad caught my eye for a department store telescope, complete with a king-size image of a comet hovering over the instrument. "So," the ad continued, "If you don't want to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, you are going to have to 'trap it.'" And what better way to do so than with the telescope pictured in the ad, offering up to 500 times magnification power and claiming to be a "wonderful scientific learning tool." [Photos of Halley's Comet through History] So if you're among those who are thinking about buying a telescope simply to get a view of Comet ISON — which is visible in binoculars now but could put on an even better show in December if it survives its Nov. 28 solar encounter, which will bring the icy wanderer within just 730,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — take a few deep breaths and read what I have to say:
| Read More » Why the US Will Destroy, Not Sell, Its Ivory Stockpile  | Today the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) called on other governments to follow the United States' lead and crush or burn their ivory stockpiles, too. "Right now, Africa is hemorrhaging elephants," Patrick Bergin, CEO of the African Wildlife Foundation, said in a statement. "The only way to staunch the movement of illegal ivory is to wipe out the demand, and that begins with destroying stockpiles and stopping trade." The AWF is also urging countries to go a step further and halt their domestic ivory trade until all elephant populations are no longer threatened.
| Read More » Massive Antarctic Iceberg Sets Sail  | After lingering in its birthing bay for nearly six months, an Antarctic iceberg the size of Singapore is finally heading out to sea. Strong winds blowing off the continent are pushing the giant floe away from its parent, the giant Pine Island Glacier, and the warming Southern Hemisphere's has melted the thick winter sea ice that held the block in place since July, said Grant Bigg, an ocean modeler at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The latest satellite images show several kilometers (a couple of miles) of open water between the iceberg and the glacier, Bigg told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. The enormous ice block took more than two years to calve (break off) from Pine Island Glacier.
| Read More » What America's Forests Looked Like Before Europeans Arrived  | The fossil site is a muddy layer packed with leaves from hardwood trees that lived more than 300 years ago along Conestoga Creek in Lancaster County, Pa. The muck was laid down before one of Pennsylvania's 10,000 mill dams, called Denlinger's Mill, was built nearby, damming the stream and burying the mud and leaves in sediment. The same spot is now home to mostly box elder and sugar maple trees, said Sara Elliott, the study's lead author and a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology. "This is a very unusual opportunity to compare modern and fossil forest assemblages," Elliott told LiveScience. Other kinds of trees found in the fossil layer that have since vanished from North America include the American chestnut, which was attacked by an imported fungal disease called the chestnut blight.
| Read More » Who Killed JFK? TV Show Looks at New Evidence  | Nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, debate and conspiracy theories linger over how he was killed, and who exactly was behind it. In a new television special on PBS' science documentary show "NOVA," a team of experts look at the assassination in a new light, in some cases casting doubt on the "official story" of the president's murder by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. One of these, the so-called "magic bullet," also allegedly caused serious injuries to Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting in the front seat of the president's convertible.
| Read More » New 'H6N1' Bird Flu Reported in Taiwan A 20-year-old woman in Taiwan is the first person known to be infected with a strain of bird flu called H6N1, according to a new report of the case. Of the 125 cases of flu reported in Taiwan since the woman became ill, none were caused by H6N1. H6N1 is the latest bird flu virus to hop over to humans. The new finding "shows the unpredictability of influenza viruses in human populations," the researchers, from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, wrote in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Read More » Asthma May Lengthen Time to Get Pregnant Getting pregnant may take longer for women with asthma, a new study from Denmark suggests. Researchers analyzed information from more than 15,000 women in Denmark, including 950 who had asthma. When asked whether they had ever spent more than a year trying to become pregnant, 27 percent of women with asthma said yes, compared to 21 percent of women without asthma. Women were particularly likely to experience a delay in pregnancy if they had untreated asthma, or if they had asthma and were over age 30. Read More » See Two Comets and Planet Mercury in Pre-Dawn Sky This Week  | This week in the hour before sunrise early morning stargazers will get a double treat: the planet Mercury and two special comets. The best time to spot Mercury is about half an hour before sunrise. ISON is not currently visible to the naked eye, but some observers report that it is brightening well. This week, skywatching experts reported that Comet ISON is now visible through binoculars, as well as telescopes.
| Read More » Fast Food: Meals Have More Calories Than You Think BOSTON – People eating at fast food restaurants aren't very good at estimating how many calories are in their meals, particularly if they're eating at Subway, a new study suggests. For the study, researchers queried more than 3,000 customers, including adults, teenagers and parents with young children, at such fast food chains in New England, such as McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Wendy's, KFC and Dunkin' Donuts. Customers were asked how many calories they thought were in their meal (or, if they were parents, in their children's meals), and researchers viewed receipts to verify what was purchased. About two-thirds of customers thought there were fewer calories in their meal than there actually were, according to the study presented here at the American Public Health Association. Read More » Music Could Track Human Migrations Music could be used to track human migration patterns over history, new research suggests. That conclusion, described Tuesday (Nov. 12) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, came from examining a genetic analysis of indigenous populations in Taiwan along with the people's folk music. Populations with more similar folk music also tended to be more closely related, the researchers found. Scientists propose that the Austronesian-speaking people who populate the Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to the Philippines to Hawaii, originally set sail from Taiwan between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. Read More » Bone and Bracelets Found in Roman Child's Coffin  | Last month, treasure hunters equipped with metal detectors led archaeologists to the rare lead coffin buried in a field in Warwickshire. The funerary box was child-sized, and researchers think it is likely more than 1,600 years old, dating back to the Roman occupation of Britain. A crew with a group called Archaeology Warwickshire opened the coffin on Monday (Nov. 11) and found fragmentary skeletal remains and two bracelets made of jet, a dark black gemstone. "Finding the two jet bangles was a surprise," Stuart Palmer, the business manager for Archaeology Warwickshire said in a statement.
| Read More » How NASA Will Use 3D Printers in Space (Video)  | Instead, they can use a newly arrived 3D printer to fabricate the tools and materials they need. "The 3D printer that we're going to fly on space station will actually be the first-ever 3D printer in space," Niki Werkheiser, 3D Print project manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said in a video about the space station 3D printer that posted online Oct. 30. "It is the first step toward [the 'Star Trek' replicator]," Werkheiser added, referring to the machine in the science-fiction franchise capable of creating meals and spare parts. The 3D printer headed to the space station in August 2014 — a joint project between NASA Marshall and the California-based company Made in Space — would be limited to parts only, rather than edible objects.
| Read More » Typhoon Haiyan Aftermath: How Technology Can Help In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, aid workers are stymied by overwhelming obstacles: lack of fuel for relief vehicles, near-total absence of food, water and shelter, and social chaos on an apocalyptic scale. While technology can't prevent storms like Haiyan, there are some clever devices that could alleviate the suffering of survivors and provide lifesaving access to clean drinking water and hot food. The German Solar Energy Foundation (Stiftung Solarenergie) has launched a program to provide solar lamps to Tacloban, Ormoc and other hard-hit areas of the Philippines. Watts of Love, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization, is committed to sending 10,000 solar lamps to the Philippines by Christmas. Read More » How Many Friends Can Your Brain Handle? SAN DIEGO — Being a social butterfly just might change your brain: In people with a large network of friends and excellent social skills, certain brain regions are bigger and better connected than in people with fewer friends, a new study finds. The research, presented here Tuesday (Nov. 12) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggests a connection between social interactions and brain structure. "We're interested in how your brain is able to allow you to navigate in complex social environments," study researcher MaryAnn Noonan, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, in England, said at a news conference. Read More » 1st-Century Roots of 'Little Red Riding Hood' Found  | One researcher in the United Kingdom tested this analogy quite literally, using analytical models that are typically used to study the relationships between species to create an evolutionary tree for "Little Red Riding Hood" and its cousins. "This is rather like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into distinct species," Durham University anthropologist Jamie Tehrani explained in a statement. Tehrani found that "Little Red Riding Hood" likely branched off 1,000 years ago from an ancestral story that has its roots in the first century A.D. [5 Real-Life Examples of Fairy Tales Coming True] "Little Red Riding Hood" is well known to Westerners thanks to the Brothers Grimm.
| Read More » E-cigarettes and Hookahs Rise in Teen Popularity  | Unconventional tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes and hookahs are becoming more popular among U.S. teens, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2012, 1.1 percent of middle school students reported using e-cigarettes, up from 0.6 percent in 2011. Among high school students, e-cigarette use rose from 1.5 percent to 2.8 percent, and hookah use increased from 4.1 percent to 5.4 percent over the same period. The reason for the rise is not known, but it could be due to an increase in marketing and availability of electronic cigarettes and hookahs, as well as the perception that the products are "safer" than cigarettes, the CDC said.
| 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 » Ocean Glow Stick: Sea Worm Emits Strange Blue Glow  | One common sea worm has a rather uncommon trick: Chaeteopterus variopedatus – also known as the parchment tube worm for the paperlike tubes it builds for itself and lives within throughout its life — secretes a bioluminescent mucus that makes it glow blue. Its glow sets it apart from other tube worms, most of whichdon't glow, and other shallow water organisms, which typically emit green light, not blue. "Shallow water is much more complex than deep water from a physical standpoint, and green is what organisms see best," Dimitri Deheyn, a biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography involved in the research, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
| Read More » NASA Maps to Aid Super Typhoon Haiyan Disaster Relief  | NASA scientists have used satellite images to create detailed maps of the devastation in the Philippines from Super Typhoon Haiyan in order to help disaster relief efforts by recovery crews. Super Typhoon Haiyan — which struck the island nation on Nov. 8 — was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. produced the damage maps in order to depict the hardest hit regions of the country, NASA officials wrote in a news release. JPL's ARIA (Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis) team created the 24.9 by 31 mile (40 by 50 kilometers) map using data from the Italian Space Agency's COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation. NASA scientists created the damage map by using "a prototype algorithm to rapidly detect surface changes caused by natural or human-produced damage," space agency officials wrote in a release.
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