|  Chill Out, Dudes! Female Flies Have Anti-Aggression Powers Female fruit flies have a secret superpower: Just by their presence, they keep male flies from butting heads. A new study revealing this strange insect phenomenon could eventually lead to new understandings of how human aggression functions. "This is really an entry point to study how aggression can be modulated," said Yuh Nung Jan, a professor of physiology and biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. Hanging around ladies may or may not tamp down aggressive urges in men, but for fruit flies, females have a calming effect, Jan and his colleagues report today (Nov. 17) in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Read More » Are Educational iPad Games Really Educational? As iPads have become ubiquitous, companies have rushed to develop educational games that teach math, physics and even urban planning. "It turns out to be pretty hard to make games or content that are better than school," said Jeremy Roschelle, director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif. Read More » Active Volcano Discovered Under Antarctic Ice Sheet  | Earthquakes deep below West Antarctica reveal an active volcano hidden beneath the massive ice sheet, researchers said today (Nov. 17) in a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The discovery finally confirms long-held suspicions of volcanic activity concealed by the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Several volcanoes poke up along the Antarctic coast and its offshore islands, such as Mount Erebus, but this is the first time anyone has caught magma in action far from the coast. "This is really the golden age of discovery of the Antarctic continent," said Richard Aster, a co-author of the study and a seismologist at Colorado State University.
| Read More » NASA Launching New Mission to Mars Today: How to Watch Live  | CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A NASA probe is scheduled to launch to Mars today (Nov. 18), and you can watch it live online. The space agency's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft (MAVEN) is scheduled to launch atop its Atlas 5 rocket at 1:28 p.m. EST (1828 GMT) from here at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. You can watch the launch live on SPACE.com via NASA TV, beginning at 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT). The $671 million MAVEN will investigate the atmosphere of Mars in order to understand what could have happened to the planet in the past.
| Read More » Nighttime Rocket Launch Tuesday Visible from US East Coast  | NASA and the U.S. military will launch a record payload of 29 satellites from a Virginia spaceport Tuesday night (Nov. 19) on a mission that could create a spectacular sight for skywatchers along the U.S. East Coast, weather permitting. The U.S. Air Force launch will send an Orbital Sciences Minotaur 1 rocket into orbit from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility and Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Va., sometime during a two-hour launch window that opens Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. EST (0030 Nov. 20 GMT). The nighttime launch could light up the sky for millions of observers along a wide swath of the Eastern Seaboard, and could be visible from just northeastern Canada and Maine to Florida, and from as far inland as Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky, depending on local weather conditions, according to NASA and Orbital Sciences visibility maps. The U.S. military's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office is sponsoring Tuesday's launch. You can watch the nighttime launch live online here, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT).
| Read More » Ancient City Discovered Beneath Biblical-Era Ruins in Israel  | Archaeologists have unearthed traces of a previously unknown, 14th-century Canaanite city buried underneath the ruins of another city in Israel. The traces include an Egyptian amulet of Amenhotep III and several pottery vessels from the Late Bronze Age unearthed at the site of Gezer, an ancient Canaanite city. Gezer was once a major center that sat at the crossroads of trade routes between Asia and Africa, said Steven Ortiz, a co-director of the site's excavations and a biblical scholar at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
| Read More » Brain Stimulation May Treat Bulimia  | SAN DIEGO — A mild electrical stimulation to a specific brain area could be an effective treatment for some patients with eating disorders such as bulimia, who suffer from episodes of severe binge eating and purging behaviors, researchers say. After one 42-year-old woman received the electrical stimulation, called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), as a treatment for her depression, and showed an unexpected recovery from her 20-year battle against bulimia nervosa, her doctors conducted a pilot study to see whether the treatment would also work for other patients with eating disorders, said Dr. Jonathan Downar, of the University of Toronto. Downar described the study Tuesday (Nov. 12) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. In the study, Downar and his colleagues recruited 20 patients with bulimia and stimulated a part of their frontal lobes called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is next to the brain region usually stimulated for treating depression.
| Read More » Recluse Spider Bite Eats Hole in Young Woman's Ear  | She had no way of knowing then that she'd just been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse spider, and that a chunk of her ear would soon be liquefied by the spider's venom. The dead tissue made it clear to doctors that the woman had been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse, a spider whose bite is known to destroy skin and underlying fat, causing "sunken-in" scars or "a disfigured ear, if you are very unlucky," said Dr. Marieke van Wijk, a plastic surgeon in the Netherlands involved in the woman's treatment. The case is the first evidence that recluse-spider venom can also destroy ear cartilage, said van Wijk, a co-author of the case report, published last month in the Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery. Venom from recluse spiders, including the American brown recluse and its Mediterranean cousin, kills skin and fat with a mixture of chemicals, including substances that break down proteins.
| Read More » Incredible Technology: How Robotic Spacecraft Spy On Mars from Orbit  | NASA plans to launch its next Mars orbiter today (Nov. 18), kicking off a mission that differs markedly from the space agency's many previous Red Planet efforts. Unlike the nine other orbiters that NASA has blasted toward Mars over the last 40 years, the MAVEN spacecraft — short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution — will set its sights on the thin shell of air swirling above the Red Planet's dry and frigid surface. The spacecraft will lift off at 1:28 p.m. EST (1828 GMT) and you can watch the launch live on SPACE.com via NASA TV, beginning at 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT). NASA has been sending probes toward Mars since November 1964, when the agency launched the Mariner 3 spacecraft on an attempted Red Planet flyby.
| Read More » That Lovin' Feeling: Guys' Brains Respond to Gentle Touch In a new study, researchers from Aalto University in Finland imaged the brains of scantily clad men who were being gently touched by their partners. The social contact activated chemicals in the brain's opioid system that may be critical for maintaining social bonds with others. Read More » What Caused the Deadly Midwestern Tornado Outbreak?  | Eighty-one tornado reports were submitted to the National Weather Service (NWS) yesterday, most of them in the Land of Lincoln, though more than one report could be for the same tornado. One of the tornadoes in this area was preliminarily declared an EF-4, the second strongest type of tornado, said Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel. Sunday started out feeling "like a spring day" (a time of year more associated with tornadoes) throughout much of Illinois, with high humidity and sunny skies, Angel told LiveScience. But then it took a turn for the worse as a low-pressure system over the Great Lakes pulled in a cold front from the north and west and into central and northern Illinois.
| Read More » NASA Launches Robotic Mars Probe to Investigate Martian Atmosphere Mystery  | CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA launched its newest Mars probe toward the Red Planet Monday (Nov. 18) on a mission to determine how the Martian atmosphere transformed the world into the desolate wasteland it is today. The robotic spacecraft, called the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe (MAVEN), launched atop an Atlas 5 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here at 1:28 p.m. EST (1828 GMT), beginning a 10-month journey to Mars. "Liftoff of the Atlas 5 with MAVEN, looking for clues about the evolution of Mars through its atmosphere," NASA launch commentator George Diller said as the rocket climbed into a cloudy Florida sky. If all goes well, MAVEN should arrive at Mars on Sept. 22, 2014, mission scientists have said.
| Read More » Woman's Pulse Surges Through Her Neck, Reveals Heart Condition  | A 33-year-old woman in Canada who had large, abnormal pulses that were clearly visible in her neck ultimately needed surgery to combat a bacterial infection in her heart, according to a new report of her case. The pulses were observed while the woman was being evaluated to see if she needed a replacement heart valve. Such abnormal pulses are actually common, and are caused by a heart problem known as tricuspid regurgitation, said Dr. Juan Crestanello, a cardiac surgeon and assistant professor of surgery at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who was not involved with the woman's care. Normally, as blood flows from the right atrium (an upper chamber of the heart) down into the right ventricle (a lower chamber of the heart), a valve between the two chambers, called the tricuspid valve, prevents blood from flowing backward.
| Read More » | |
