|  Just 2 Genes from Y Chromosome Needed for Male Reproduction  | The Y chromosome is often thought of as defining the male sex. Now scientists find that only two genes on the Y chromosome are needed in mice for them to father offspring. In the study, researchers injected two Y-chromosome genes into mouse embryos that lacked a Y chromosome, and found the embryos grew into adult mice that could produce offspring — not through the typical get-together with a female mouse, but through assisted reproduction techniques. "Only two Y-chromosome genes are needed to have children with the help of assisted reproduction," study author Monika Ward, a reproductive biologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, told LiveScience.
| Read More » Neutrino Detector Finds Elusive Extraterrestrial Particles in 'Major Breakthrough'  | Using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, researchers found the first evidence of neutrinos from outside the solar system since 1987. "It is a major breakthrough," said Uli Katz, a particle physicist at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, who was not involved with the research. For the past century, scientists have pondered the source of cosmic rays, which contain the energy of a rifle bullet in a single atomic nucleus. It's thought that objects such as supernovas, black holes or gamma ray bursts mayproduce cosmic rays, but their origin is difficult to detect.
| Read More » Strange Discovery: Giant Dust Ring Found Near Venus Orbit  | Scientists have found a huge, diffuse ring of dust near the orbit of Venus, marking the second time such a structure has been discovered in our solar system. "If we could see it unaided from Earth (which of course we can't because it is far too faint), it would stretch 45 degrees either side of the sun," study lead author Mark Jones, of The Open University in the United Kingdom, told SPACE.com via email. Several different space missions — including the Soviet Union's Venera 9 and 10 probes in the 1970s — have spotted hints of a dust ring near Venus, but the evidence had not been conclusive. They modeled the way a ring near Venus should scatter light, then looked for the feature in images captured by NASA's twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) probes, which have been studying the sun since launching in late 2006.
| Read More » Research shows closer ties between Native Americans, Europeans By Jim Forsyth SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Native Americans have closer genetic ties to people in Eurasia, the Middle East and Europe than previously believed, according to new research on a 24,000-year-old human bone. Genome sequencing on the arm bone of a 3-year-old Siberian boy known as the "Mal'ta Boy," the world's oldest known human genome, shows that Native Americans share up to one-third of their DNA with people from those regions, said Kelly Graf, a research assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University and a member of the international research team. The results add a new dimension to earlier beliefs that Native Americans were mostly descended from East Asians who crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America some 14,000 years ago, Graf said on Thursday. Read More » International Space Station: 15 Facts for 15 Years in Orbit  | Fifteen years ago Wednesday (Nov. 20), the Russian-built Zarya, or "Sunrise," module, also known as the functional cargo block (FGB), lifted off atop a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin the most complex scientific and engineering project in history. It would take 13 years for the space station's assembly to be declared "complete," although it is still being expanded. To mark the 15th anniversary, SPACE.com partner collectSPACE.com compiled a countdown of 15 facts about the International Space Station. Circling Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) every 92 minutes, the crew members aboard the International Space Station "experience 15 or 16 sunrises and sunsets every day," NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Project Office describes.
| Read More » 5 Enduring Kennedy Assassination Theories  | On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy died in Dallas, Texas, the victim of a shot through the head that rung out as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza. The spot, marked with a white X, became the birthplace of dozens of conspiracy theories. The Warren Commission's investigation of the JFK assassination, commissioned by Lyndon B. Johnson in the months following Kennedy's death, determined that the killer was a former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, who fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository along the motorcade route. According to Gallup, 52 percent of Americans believed the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy in the week after the president's death.
| Read More » Mars Rover Curiosity Sidelined by Electrical Glitch  | NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has stopped gathering data for a few days while engineers investigate an electrical problem that cropped up over the weekend. On Sunday (Nov. 17), the mission team noticed a change in the voltage difference between the body of the Curiosity rover and its electricity-distributing power bus. "The vehicle is safe and stable, fully capable of operating in its present condition, but we are taking the precaution of investigating what may be a soft short," Curiosity project manager Jim Erickson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Wednesday (Nov. 20). The voltage difference between Curiosity's chassis and its power bus had been about 11 volts since the rover touched down inside Mars' Gale Crater in August 2012.
| Read More » Evolution debate again engulfs Texas Board of Ed AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas Board of Education has refused to approve a biology book by one of the nation's largest publishers, pending an expert review of supposed "errors" on evolution. Read More » Evolution debate again engulfs Texas board  | AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The long-simmering battle over teaching evolution in Texas boiled over at a late-night meeting, as the Board of Education extended preliminary approval of new science books for use in classrooms across the state but held up one biology text because of alleged factual errors.
| Read More » The Secret to Career Success: Branding Yourself While businesses work hard to build up their brand, too many of their employees aren't doing the same for themselves, one researcher suggests. Nathan Hiller, an associate professor of management at Florida International University, argued during this year's Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology annual conference that it is increasingly important for employees to ensure their own marketability by creating a brand within their organization. The strategy, termed "personal branding," allows employees to clearly define their potential and separate themselves from others in the workplace while demonstrating unique contributions to their organization. "Personal branding is simply making others both within and outside the workplace aware of one's capabilities." Read More » Does God Make People Work Harder? A study revealed that employees working in environments that support their right to be open about their religious beliefs feel safer, have better working relationships with colleagues, and are more likely to be engaged in their work. Patrick Hyland, of Sirota Survey Intelligence and one of the study's authors, said it is important to note the differences between having a spirituality-accepting workplace and religious proselytizing. He says spirituality at work is not about getting employees to buy into a specific set of religious beliefs. "It's about helping employees tap into their personal core values and work towards goals that are both personally and professionally meaningful," Hyland said. Read More » Bringing Back the Unconscious: The Latest Science on Awakenings But the latest research hints that some of them may still retain reserves of conscious awareness and that there may be ways to reach them — with sleeping pills, antiviral medications, or electric stimulation — and help them to reawaken. George Melendez was all but dead in January of 1998, when he was pulled from the wreckage of a car that had landed in a small pond on a golf course near Houston, TX. Medics revived him but the combined brain trauma of the accident and near drowning left the then 23-year-old college student in what doctors call a minimally conscious state—awake and occasionally aware of his surroundings but incapable of producing any reliable responses—verbal or otherwise. It's these patients, such as Melendez, that scientists are hoping to reach. Read More » After Months In Space, NASA Astronaut Karen Nyberg Readapts to Life On Earth (Video)  | NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg is readjusting to life with two feet on the ground. Nyberg just returned to the Earth's surface after spending more than five months living and working in space on the International Space Station. She landed in Kazakhstan on Nov. 10 in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin. She also flew a two-week mission on the space shuttle Discovery in 2008, and although it was a shorter mission than her space station stint, Nyberg is having an easier time readjusting to Earth-bound life this time around.
| Read More » Tails of Comet ISON and Comet Lovejoy Caught in Stunning Time-Lapse Video  | Singapore-based sky photographer Justin Ng pieced together a stunning time-lapse video of two comets streaking across the pre-dawn sky. The video of two incoming comets, captured on Nov. 11, shows the incoming Comet ISON with its long wispy tail as well as the newfound Comet Lovejoy, which is gradually brightening. "The video covers 50 minutes of imaging time for ISON and 90 minutes of imaging time for Lovejoy," Ng wrote. Comets ISON and Lovejoy are both headed for a dangerous dive toward the sun much to the delight of skywatchers and astronomers.
| Read More » 8 Most Famous Assassinations in History  | Friday (Nov. 22) marks the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. That death stunned the world and caused an outpouring of public grief unprecedented in modern United States history. Some even say that the killing of the 35th president altered the course of history, and that the United States would not have become embroiled in the Vietnam War had he lived. From the stabbing of Julius Caesar to the shooting of Mahatma Gandhi, here are eight of the most famous assassinations in history.
| Read More » If JFK Lived: 5 Ways History Would Change  | John F. Kennedy surviving his assassination has always been an irresistible twist for authors of alternate histories. Some are fanciful, such as the 1992 short story collection "Alternate Kennedys," which sent the clan to Hollywood. Others take a serious turn, reversing the 1960s' amazing progress in civil rights. Here are five intriguing ways history may have changed if Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt, or if gunman Lee Harvey Oswald had never taken the shot.
| Read More » Meet the Gigantic Carnivore That Kept T. Rex Down  | An enormous carnivorous dinosaur that once roamed North America kept Tyrannosaurus rex from achieving its potential for millions of years, a new discovery suggests. The new dinosaur, dubbed Siats meekerorum, is part of a group of giant predators known as carcharodontosaurs, and it's only the second of this group to be discovered in North America. North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno discovered the Siats bones eroding out of a hillside in Utah in 2008. "It's easily the most exciting thing that I've found so far," Zanno, who heads the paleontology lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, told LiveScience.
| Read More » Oldest Royal Wine Cellar Uncorked in Israel  | Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest known palatial wine cellar in the Middle East at a site in Israel. The storage room stocked at least 3,000 bottles' worth of the intoxicating beverage in massive pottery jars, researchers report today (Nov. 22) at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Baltimore. The closest modern analogue is a Greek wine flavored with pine resin called retsina, study researcher Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa, told reporters. The find is important less for the wine's palate and more for what it reveals about the culture of the ancient Canaanites, a group that dominated what is now Israel and Lebanon.
| Read More » E-Cigarettes Just More Smoke and Mirrors, Doctors Say At first, electronic cigarettes were a novelty — something a braggart in a bar might puff to challenge the established no-smoking policy, marveling bystanders with the fact that the smoke released from the device was merely harmless vapor. Now, e-cigarettes are poised to be a billion-dollar industry, claimed as the solution to bring in smokers from out of the cold, both figuratively and literally, as e-cigarettes promise to lift the stigma of smoking and are increasingly permitted at indoor facilities where smoking is banned. What's being debated is the degree to which they are less dangerous than traditional cigarettes. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices, often shaped like traditional cigarettes, with a heating element that vaporizes a liquid nicotine solution, which must be replaced every few hundred puffs. Read More » Young Woman Dies of Rare Heart Condition After Falling on Beach According to the case report, the impact of the woman's body on the sand when she fell was enough to prompt a rare heart condition called commotio cordis, in which the heart is jolted into an arrhythmic pattern, after which it stops altogether. Commotio cordis is caused by an abrupt blow to the heart, usually by something small like a baseball, that strikes at a very specific time, said Dr. Emile Daoud, professor of internal medicine at the Ohio State University Medical Center, who was not involved in the woman's case. "This throws everything into chaos," Daoud told LiveScience. Commotio cordis is quite rare, killing between two to four people yearly in the United States, according to the study. Read More » 5 Places Already Feeling the Effects of Climate Change  | But while most climate predictions look ahead to the potential risks 50 or 100 years from now, there are places around the globe that are already being impacted by global warming. Satellite measurements have demonstrated that the waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef have warmed by 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) on average over the past 25 years. A 2012 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that half of the Great Barrier Reef was lost in the past 27 years. Higher-than-normal ocean temperatures cause corals to expel the tiny animals and algae that live inside them.
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