|  China Cat? Ancient Chinese May Have Domesticated Felines  | Ancient Chinese villagers may have palled around with felines, according to a new study that finds possible evidence of domesticated cats 5,300 years ago in a Yangshao village. The earliest evidence of cat domestication comes from ancient Egypt, where paintings show kitties getting special treatment. Most of what happened between that burial and the domestication of cats in ancient Egypt remains a mystery. "Despite cats being so beloved as pets, it is surprising how little has been known about their domestication," said study researcher Fiona Marshall, a zooarchaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
| Read More » Neanderthals May Have Intentionally Buried Their Dead  | New research suggests the answer is no: Neanderthals also may have intentionally buried their dead. The first potential discovery of a Neanderthal tomb occurred in 1908 at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southwestern France. The well-preserved state of these 50,000-year-old bones led researchers to suggest that Neanderthals buried their dead well before modern humans arrived in western Europe. Neanderthals were known to bury their dead in the Middle East.
| Read More » Scientists still waiting for clear signs of ozone hole healing Full recovery of the ozone layer, which shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation, should occur around 2070, atmospheric scientist Natalya Kramarova, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told reporters at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco last week. "Currently, we do not see that the ozone hole is recovering," she said. "It should become apparent in 2025." Researchers report puzzlingly large variations in the size of the annual ozone hole over Antarctica. In 2012 for example, the ozone hole was the second smallest on record, an apparently positive sign that the 1989 Montreal Protocol agreement - which called for the phasing out of Freon and other damaging chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs - was working. Read More » Human Hand Fossil Turns Back Clock 500,000 Years on Complex Tool Use  | The discovery of a 1.4-million-year-old hand-bone fossil reveals that the modern human ability to make and use complex tools may have originated far earlier than scientists previously thought, researchers say. A critical trait that distinguishes modern humans from all other species alive today is the ability to make complex tools. In contrast, apes — humans' closest living relatives — lack a powerful and precise enough grip to create and use complex tools effectively. "There's a little projection of bone in the third metacarpal known as a "styloid process" that we need for tools," said study lead author Carol Ward, an anatomist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Missouri."This tiny bit of bone in the palm of the hand helps the metacarpal lock into the wrist, helping the thumb and fingers apply greater amounts of pressure to the wrist and palm.
| Read More » Megafloods May Have Carved Canyons on Earth & Mars  | Nearly 50,000 years ago, a megaflood may have washed across the area that is now Idaho, carving a gorge — a discovery that could explain similar canyons on Mars, a new study finds. "Landforms on Earth and Mars record information about past environments and events that predate the historical record," said study lead author Michael Lamb, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology. The heads of canyons — the parts of gorges created by the downstream waters of a river — can have a variety of shapes. At times, canyon heads can resemble amphitheaters — the heads are curved when seen from above (think Niagara Falls), and the walls of the canyon heads rise straight up vertically.
| Read More » China eyes collection of lunar samples in 2017  | China aims to launch its next unmanned lunar probe in 2017, with the key aim of collecting and bringing back lunar samples, an official said on Monday, after the country's first probe landed successfully on the moon over the weekend. China's leaders have set a priority on advancing its space program, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power. The development of the Chang'e 5 probe, tasked with the moon sampling mission, is well underway and it is expected to be launched around 2017, a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense said. "After the success of the Chang'e 3's mission, the lunar exploration program will enter the third phase, with the main goal being to achieve unmanned automatic collection of samples and returning them (to the earth)," spokesman Wu Zhijian told a news conference.
| Read More » Stunning Geminid Meteor Shower Views Wow Skywatchers (Photos)  | One of the best meteor showers of the year wowed skywatchers during its peak last weekend, and some stargazers took the opportunity to snap incredible photos of the cosmic display. The Geminids didn't seem to let skywatchers down, putting on a great display for observers and photographers despite a bright waxing moon.
| Read More » NASA Eyes Spacewalk Fix for Space Station, Private Rocket Launch Delayed  | A cooling system malfunction on the International Space Station has delayed the planned launch of a private cargo ship to the orbiting laboratory this week as engineers discuss whether astronauts will have to perform a spacewalk repair on the outpost. The problem does not threaten the safety of the six astronauts currently living aboard the space station, NASA officials said, but fixing it is a high priority. NASA engineers spent the weekend analyzing the glitch. Meanwhile, the private spaceflight company Orbital Sciences Corp. pushed back the planned Dec. 18 launch of its commercial Cygnus spacecraft by at least 24 hours.
| Read More » Ancient 'Snowball Earth' Possibly Triggered by Rock Weathering A global ice age that lasted more than 50 million years may have been triggered by volcanic rocks trapping carbon dioxide that would otherwise warm the planet, researchers say in a new study detailed today (Dec. 16) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although ice is now found mostly in Earth's polar regions, analysis of ancient rocks suggests it could at times cover the entire globe. For the new study, scientists focused on a snowball Earth period that began about 717 million years ago known as the Sturtian glaciation. This global ice age was preceded by more than 1 billion years without glaciers, making the Sturtian a transition from a longtime ice-free world to a snowball Earth, the most dramatic episode of climate change in the geological record. Read More » Snowy-Owl Migration to US One of Biggest on Record  | Snowy owls — large, fluffy, white birds typically found in the Arctic and rarely seen south of the Great Lakes — have swooped down upon the eastern United States in greater numbers than at any time in at least 50 years, one bird expert says. This migration of snowy owls southward is called an irruption, and this is the "largest of its kind in recent memory," said Kevin McGowan, a bird expert at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Snowy owls — the same species as Hedwig, Harry Potter's fictional letter-carrying bird — are magnificent to behold, standing 3 feet (1 meter) tall and sporting a 5-foot (1.5 m) wingspan. "Snowy owls are an Arctic bird adapted to live at the top of the world, and they usually spend the winter up there," as well as the summer, McGowan told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
| Read More » Diabetes Drug Won't Help Obese Kids Keep Off Weight Few children who become obese are able to lose and keep off weight with diet and exercise alone, leading some doctors to prescribe drugs, such as the diabetes drug metformin, to treat childhood obesity. The study, which reviewed information from previous research, found no evidence that children and teens who took the drug lost more weight after one year than those who did not take the drug. While some adolescents who took the drug did experience short-term weight loss (six months or less), the effect was modest, and it's not clear whether such limited weight loss would actually improve their health, the researchers said. Given the current evidence, metformin has not been shown to be superior to other weight-loss treatments for kids, such as diet and exercise, the researchers said. Read More » Amazing Video Shows North Pole of Mars Like Never Before  | A 3D animation of views from a European spacecraft orbiting Mars is giving Earthlings a front-row seat to a stunning tour of the Red Planet's frozen north pole. The video of the Martian north pole draws on data from The European Space Agnecy's Mars Express probe. The spacecraft that has been orbiting the Red Planet for a decade. The northern ice cap on Mars has a diameter of about 621 miles (1,000 kilometers), roughly the width of Greenland's ice sheet at its widest point, going east west.
| Read More » Math Surprise: Remote Islanders Invented Binary Number System The natives of a remote Polynesian Island invented a binary number system, similar to the one used by computers to calculate, centuries before Western mathematicians did, new research suggests. The counting scheme, described today (Dec. 16) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses both decimal and binary numbers, so it isn't a complete binary system from zero to infinity. "Those were probably the numbers that were most frequent in their trading and redistribution systems," said study co-author Andrea Bender, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bergen in Norway. One of the most famous, and avant-garde, mathematicians of the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, invented a binary numeral system and showed that it could be used in a primitive calculating machine. Read More » Ignorance About Cats' Sex Lives Fuels Unplanned Pregnancies  | Cat owners could use a refresher on the "birds and the bees," at least when it comes to their feline companions. New research shows that British and American cat owners harbor some pretty serious misconceptions about the reproductive habits of Fluffy. Half of the respondents also said they thought female cats "should" (or "possibly should") have a litter before being spayed, said study co-author Jane Murray, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol school of veterinary sciences in England. Due to these misconceptions, a total of 850,000 unplanned kittens are born each year in the United Kingdom, according to the study, published today (Dec. 16) in the journal Veterinary Record.
| Read More » Scientists query study saying ear acupuncture aids weight loss By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists derided research published on Tuesday that suggested ear acupuncture may help people lose weight, saying the study's design was flawed and its conclusions highly implausible. "It is hard to think of a treatment that is less plausible than ear acupuncture," said Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at Britain's University of Exeter. A summary statement about the study, conducted by Korean researchers, said it compared three approaches in a total of 91 people - acupuncture on five points on the outer ear, acupuncture on one point, and a sham treatment as a control. It said participants were asked to follow a restrictive diet, but not one designed to lead to weight loss, and not to take any extra exercise during eight weeks of treatment. Read More » Huddle Up: the Surprising Physics of Penguin Movements  | When male emperor penguins face the minus-58-degrees-Fahrenheit (minus 50 degrees Celsius), 120-mph (200 km/h) winds of Antarctic winters, the birds rely on their neighbors' bodies to keep themselves — and the eggs that they protect in a pouch near their feet — alive and warm. While the model that the researchers created has the penguins moving in a straight line, the natural formation of the huddles often moves more in a spiral rotation, Gerum said.
| Read More » Scientists prove deadly human MERS virus also infects camels By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have proved for the first time that the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus that has killed 71 people can also infect camels, strengthening suspicions the animals may be a source of the human outbreak. Researchers from the Netherlands and Qatar used gene-sequencing techniques to show that three dromedary, or one-humped camels, on a farm in Qatar where two people had contracted the MERS coronavirus (CoV) were also infected. But the researchers cautioned it is too early to say whether the camels were definitely the source of the two human cases - in a 61-year-old man and then in a 23-year-old male employee of the farm - and more research is needed. Both the men infected in Qatar recovered. Read More » Biggest Spider Fossil Now Has a Mate — But It's Complicated  | A few years ago, scientists uncovered the largest-ever fossil of spider: a female representative of a never-before-seen species that was buried in volcanic ash during the age of the dinosaurs. "It was so much like the modern golden orb weaver," said Paul Selden, a paleontologist with the University of Kansas. Volcanic ash is famous for preserving more ephemeral pieces of the past, from bodies buried in their death poses at Pompeii to 2.7-billion-year-old raindrop impressions found in South Africa. "It would take something like a volcanic eruption to blow them into the bottom of the lake and bury them," Selden told LiveScience.
| Read More » DARPA Robotics Challenge: 8 Tricky Tasks  | The DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials are being held Friday and Saturday (Dec. 20–21) at the Homestead Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla. The contest, which features teams from five different countries, is designed to foster the development of robots that could one day provide assistance following natural or manmade disasters. DARPA, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for developing new technologies for the military, will evaluate the performance of the robots on eight separate physical tasks. Here are the eight tasks that will be on display at the DARPA Robotics Challenge:
| Read More » Private Rocket Launch Thursday Night Visible from US East Coast  | People along the east coast of the United States should get a great opportunity to see a rocket launch from their own backyards this week. Weather permitting, observers from Massachusetts to the Carolinas could see an International Space Station-bound Cygnus spacecraft launch atop a two-stage Antares rocket Thursday (Dec. 19) night. The Orbital Sciences Corp. developed spacecraft and rocket are scheduled to lift off from pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Va., at 9:19 p.m. EST (0219 Dec. 20 GMT). This flight — called Cygnus CRS Orb-1 — is the first official resupply mission to the space station launched by Orbital Sciences under a $1.9 billion contract for eight cargo runs to the orbiting outpost with NASA.
| Read More » Spectacular Tarantula Nebula View Captured by Amateur Astronomer (Photo)  | The bright core of the Tarantula Nebula is shrouded in shades of purple in this stunning image recently sent in to SPACE.com.
| Read More » Case Is Closed: Multivitamins Are a Waste of Money, Doctors Say People should stop wasting their money on dietary supplements, some physicians said today, in response to three large new studies that showed most multivitamin supplements are ineffective at reducing the risk of disease, and may even cause harm. The new studies, published today (Dec. 16) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine —including two new clinical trials and one large review of 27 past clinical trials conducted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — found no evidence that taking daily multivitamin and mineral supplements prevents or slows down the progress of cognitive decline or chronic diseases such as heart diseases or cancer. "Study after study comes back negative — yet people continue to take supplements, now at record rates," said Dr. Edgar Miller, one of the five authors of the editorial and a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The new findings are in line with those of previously published studies that have found no benefits from dietary supplements, including B vitamins and antioxidants, and even suggested possible harms. Read More » 'Dog Dust' May Combat Allergies and Asthma Exposure to "dog dust," or the dried flakes of skin that fall from Fido, may protect against developing allergies and asthma in later life by altering intestinal bacteria, a new study in mice suggests. "Perhaps early life dog exposure introduces microbes into the home that somehow influence the gut microbiome, and change the immune response in the airways," said study researcher Susan Lynch, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Past research has shown that exposure to pets, particularly dogs, during infancy may prevent people from developing allergies, and other work has found that bacteria in the gut can affect allergies and asthma. The new study adds to the research because it links these ideas — showing that the reason exposure to dog dust may prevent allergies is that the dust affects the population of gut microbes. Read More » Science Scorecard: Did 2013 Live Up to Expectations?  | Last year, LiveScience reached out to scientists in different fields and asked them for their science wishes for 2013. All Tara Shears wanted for 2013 was to see the Standard Model of particle physics take a few hits. The Standard Model is the dominant theory of how fundamental particles interact. Researchers had hoped the Higgs boson, which was predicted by the Standard Model but not confirmed until this year, would buck expectations and give physicists some fresh mysteries to uncover.
| Read More » Astronaut May Spacewalk in Weightless Wonderland to Fix Space Station  | Astronaut Rick Mastracchio just might find himself spacewalking in a weightless wonderland this winter to make repairs on the International Space Station, and he says he's ready for the job. A veteran NASA astronaut making his fourth spaceflight, Mastracchio is one of six crewmembers currently living and working on the space station.
| Read More » Antarctica may have a new type of ice - diamonds By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - A type of rock that often bears diamonds has been found in Antarctica for the first time in a hint of mineral riches in the vast, icy continent that is off limits to mining, scientists said on Tuesday. A 1991 environmental accord banned mining for at least 50 years under the Antarctic Treaty that preserves the continent for scientific research and wildlife, from penguins to seals. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, an Australian-led team reported East Antarctic deposits of kimberlite, a rare type of rock named after the South African town of Kimberley famed for a late 19th century diamond rush. "These rocks represent the first reported occurrence of genuine kimberlite in Antarctica," they wrote of the finds around Mount Meredith in the Prince Charles Mountains. Read More » Sharks Like to Approach Humans from Behind, Study Suggests  | Although divers and shark scientists have noticed this tendency before, it hadn't been carefully documented, said Erich Ritter, a scientist at the Shark Research Institute in Florida. In a new study, published in December in the journal Animal Cognition, research volunteers kneeled on the seafloor for hours staring straight ahead, while interactions with Caribbean reef sharks were videotaped from above. "They truly do swim up from behind, be it that they want to sneak up or they don't want to be seen," Ritter told LiveScience. Ralph Collier, a researcher with the Shark Research Committee in Los Angeles, said the study finding helps explain stories from commercial and sport divers, who have told him tales of turning around to find great white sharks staring them down.
| Read More » Antarctica's Soggy Bottom: New Lakes & Streams Found  | Dimples in Antarctica's vast ice sheet frequently pop up and down like creatures in the arcade game "Whac-A-Mole" — a sign that water is forcing its way through a vast network of channels and lakes under the ice, researchers said last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "We have identified thousands of locations where we infer hydrologic change in Antarctica," Greg Babonis, a graduate student in glaciology at SUNY Buffalo, said Dec. 11. Water is a critical player in how quickly Antarctica's ice sheets slip toward the sea. Babonis found about 120,000 locations on Antarctica's icy surface that changed rapidly between 2003 and 2008, from NASA's ICESat satellite data.
| Read More » November Was the Hottest on Earth Since 1880  | It's confirmed: November 2013 was the hottest November on Earth since at least 1880.
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