|  HIV's Killer Tactics Revealed, New Therapy Approach Found  | The reason people who are infected with HIV die is because their white blood cells die, leaving them unable to fight infections. Now, researchers show for the first time that this cell death is caused by cellular self-destruction, and is linked with inflammation. "We found that depletion of [these cells] is more about cellular suicide, rather than murder by the virus itself," said Dr. Warner Greene, the senior author of two studies published today (Dec. 19) in the journals Nature and Science. The researchers also showed that a drug that has already been tested in humans, but not HIV patients, can prevent the depletion of these white blood cells in human cells, said Greene, who is a researcher at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, a biomedical research organization affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco.
| Read More » Cancer Immunotherapy Named Science 'Breakthrough of the Year'  | A type of cancer treatment that directs the body's own immune system to fight cancer cells has been named as the "breakthrough of the year" by one of the world's top science journals.
| Read More » Live from Mars: Private Red Planet Mission to Beam Video to Earth in 2018  | WASHINGTON — The Mars One colonization project plans to bring live video of the surface of Mars to Earth via a privately built communications satellite and lander to launch as part of an unmanned mission to the Red Planet in 2018. "When we land on Mars, we will have the most unique video footage in the solar system," Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a news conference on Dec. 10. Lansdorp said public engagement is a driving force for Mars One, which aims to land humans on the Red Planet by 2025. For its unmanned mission in 2018, Mars One has partnered with Surrey Satellite Technology, Ltd. (SSTL) to develop a concept for the communications satellite, which will be in Mars-synchronous orbit and provide a high-bandwidth link to relay data and live video from the planet's surface.
| Read More » Hippie Chimps: New Clue May Explain Bonobo Peacefulness  | Bonobos have a reputation among the great apes as "hippie chimps," and new research hints that high levels of a key thyroid hormone may play a role in keeping the animals' aggression in check. Found in the lowland forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bonobos (Pan troglodytes) are closely related to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) but the two diverge in behavior. Males in particular show low levels of aggression — they even maintain platonic friendships with females and stick by their mothers into adulthood. The life of male chimpanzees, meanwhile, revolves around climbing the social ladder (or at least hanging onto their current rung), and navigating cooperative and aggressive relationships with other males. Scientists recently found another big difference between the two Pan species: A key thyroid hormone decreases at a much later age in bonobos compared with chimps.
| Read More » Japan's Newborn Volcanic Island Seen from Space (Photo)  | A NASA satellite snapped a photograph of a tiny new island that rose out of the Pacific Ocean a few weeks ago after a volcanic eruption. Japanese officials have named the new island Niijima. It is located about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of Tokyo in the Bonin Islands, an archipelago that includes the island of Iwo Jima and sits on the western edge of the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a hotbed of seismic and volcanic activity. The baby island was born on Nov. 20, 2013, when ash and tephra (solid fragments ejected by a volcano) shot into the sky from an underwater volcano, as stunning pictures from the blast show.
| Read More » Massive Tsunami Could Wipe Out Hawaii's Waikiki Beach SAN FRANCISCO — Huge tsunamis with waves as high as a four-story building could inundate the island of Oahu, washing out Waikiki Beach and flooding the island's main power plant, a new study finds. "Any of us who watched the Tohoku tsunami footage on television had to have been affected by the scale of what they saw in real time," said study co-author Rhett Butler, the interim director of the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. Ancient traces of historical tsunamison both Hawaii Island and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska suggest that monster earthquakes at the juncture of the Pacific and the North American plates can trigger giant tsunamis bigger than Tohoku size every 325 years. Archaeobotanist David Birney was excavating in Makauwahi Sinkhole on Kauai, Hawaii, when he found huge deposits of coral, shells, beach gravel and other marine sediments inside a cave in the area. Read More » Weight of the World: New Technique Could Weigh Alien Planets  | Knowing the mass of a planet can help scientists understand more about the exoplanet's atmospheric makeup and whether its insides are rocky or gassy. Knowing the mass of a planet can also lend some insight into how it cools, its plate tectonics, how it generates magnetic fields and whether gas escapes from its atmosphere, researchers said. The main technique scientists use now is radial velocity strategy. a planet's gravitational pull is linked to its mass.
| Read More » Total Volume of Saturn Moon Titan's Otherworldly Seas Calculated  | The lakes and seas on Saturn's largest moon Titan hold massive amounts of liquid hydrocarbons — 40 times more than are found in Earth's proven oil reserves, new observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggest. Titan, which is about 1.5 times bigger than Earth's moon, harbors about 2,000 cubic miles (9,000 cubic kilometers) of liquid methane and ethane on its frigid surface, researchers announced last week. The hydrocarbons are almost all contained in an area near Titan's north pole that's just 660,000 square miles (1.62 million kilometers) in size, a region slightly larger than Alaska. The find indicates there is something favorable in the geology that restricts most liquid to Titan's northern hemisphere, researchers said.
| Read More » Snorkels in Space: NASA Outfitting Spacesuits with Diver-like Device for Upcoming Spacewalks  | HOUSTON — Astronauts preparing to spacewalk outside the International Space Station are outfitting their spacesuits with an unusual device: a makeshift snorkel. The astronauts, whose task it is to repair a critical cooling system necessary for keeping the outpost fully powered, have an additional concern to the "normal" challenges of a quickly-planned extra-vehicular activity (EVA, or spacewalk). During the last spacewalk to use U.S. spacesuits in July, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano had to quickly retreat to the station's airlock when a leak inside his suit's plumbing enveloped his head in water. Since then, NASA engineers and the astronauts on board the space station have been working to identify and fix the problem.
| Read More » The Top 10 Science Stories of 2013  | The Top 10 Science Stories of 2013
| Read More » Reactivated NASA Asteroid-Hunting Probe Takes First Photos in 2.5 Years  | A NASA asteroid-hunting spacecraft has opened its eyes in preparation for a renewed mission, beaming home its first images in more than 2.5 years. The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft, or NEOWISE, has taken its first set of test images since being reactivated in September after a 31-month-long hibernation, NASA officials announced today (Dec. 19). The space agency wants NEOWISE to resume its hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids, some of which could be promising targets for future human exploration. "The spacecraft is in excellent health, and the new images look just as good as they were before hibernation," Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.
| Read More » Allow NASA to Do Great Things Again (Op-Ed)  | NASA has pushed back its first crewed flights to the International Space Station (ISS) from 2015 to 2017 — after Congress allocated less money to the Commercial Crew program than President Barack Obama's administration says the space agency needs. That's two extra years the United States must pay Russia to taxi American astronauts to the ISS, two years when that same money could instead support American jobs back home. In the Commercial Crew Development program (or Commercial Crew), NASA is helping companies develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to transport astronauts to the ISS with partial financing while the companies pay the remainder of the development costs themselves.
| Read More » Fuel Economy Reaches Record High in 2013 (Op-Ed)  | Luke Tonachel is a vehicles analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Tonachel contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. In its new Fuel Economy Trends report the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finds that new automobiles sold in model year 2012 averaged a record-high 23.6 miles per gallon (mpg) — sticker value — and that model year 2013 is expected to continue the upward trend to reach a new record of 24 mpg. In recent years, automakers have been boosting fuel economy across classes of conventional gasoline cars and trucks, enhancing choices for consumers.
| Read More » Carnivores in Our Midst: Should We Fear Them? (Op-Ed)  | Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
| Read More » The Microbes in Your Gut May be Making You Fat Cimons contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. In 2008, Rob Knight fell ill while vacationing in Peru. He is convinced the antibiotics changed the composition of the microbes in his gut in a way that finally caused him to lose weight — at least 70 pounds. "Exercise and diet, which had not worked before, began to work," says Knight, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the microorganisms that live in our bodies, known as the human microbiome. Read More » Anti-Science Riders Lurk in Pending Farm Bill (Op-Ed) Celia Wexler is a senior Washington representative for the Scientific Integrity Initiative at UCS. Right now, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate are seeking to close an agreement on a comprehensive farm bill , crucial to the future of food stamps, farm subsidies and programs that the Union of Concerned Scientists long has supported — among them the Farmers Market Promotion Program, which would help American families eat more healthily through targeted grants to local and regional food projects. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has a huge challenge in trying to come to terms with her House counterparts who'd like to cut the food stamp program alone by $40 billon. But the farm bill is not just about the big-ticket items. Read More » Got Science? Champions Who Stood Up for Science in 2013 (Op-Ed) Seth Shulman is a senior staff writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a veteran science journalist and author of six books. Shulman contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Read More » Scientific American 's Top 10 Science Stories of 2013 | Scientific American 's Top 10 Science Stories of 2013
| Read More » Why Ex-Military Drones Spy on Wildlife  | The leading causes of death for wildlife biologists on the job are not grizzly bear maulings or poisonous snakebites. That's one reason the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is turning toward a technology more associated with military reconnaissance than conservation for its field studies. Former military drones are being repurposed as eyes in the sky to monitor volcanoes, study flood zones and track endangered wildlife — sparing biologists from risky plane rides. This program got a splash of bad publicity on Tuesday (Dec. 17) when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) included the USGS drones as an example of government waste in his 2013 "Wastebook," dismissing the research as "counting sheep" instead of focusing on more-crucial flood gauges.
| Read More » The Story of the World's First Christmas Card  | The U.S. Greeting Card Association predicts Americans will send about 1.6 billion Christmas cards this year. Homemade and handwritten Christmas cards were already popular in Victorian England by the time innovator Sir Henry Cole had a clever idea to speed up his own seasonal card-writing process. Taking advantage of new printing technologies, Cole commissioned artist John Callcott Horsley to create a festive design, and he produced about 1,000 copies of his own Christmas card in 1843. After Cole used the cards he needed, he sold the rest for one shilling each, according to the Winterthur Library in Delaware, which has a copy of one of those cards donated by the ephemera collector John Grossman.
| Read More » 8 Ways Magic Mushrooms Explain Santa Story  | The story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or "magic" mushrooms, according to one theory. "Santa is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and fungi to commune with the spirit world," said John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif. Here are eight ways that hallucinogenic mushrooms explain the story of Santa and his reindeer. According to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions who dropped into locals' teepeelike homes with a bag full of hallucinogenic mushrooms as presents in late December, Rush said.
| Read More » Will 'Green Bullets' Ruin Hunting? But lead ammunition may be going the way of leaded gasoline, as an increasing number of wildlife conservationists and public health experts support the use of non-lead ammo, sometimes referred to as "green bullets." In October, Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed into law AB 711, a bill banning the use of lead bullets by hunters. The meat from game killed with lead bullets poses dangers to people eating it, and the lead in animal carcasses left in the field can harm other wildlife, such as the endangered California condors that live on carrion. "We are thrilled that Governor Brown has made AB 711 the law of the land," State Assemblyman Anthony Rendon said in a statement. Read More » Humanoids to 4-Legged Machines: 'Robot Olympics' Shows Off Diverse Designs  | HOMESTEAD, Fla. — This week, teams of engineers from around the world are competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials, a prestigious robotics competition that will showcase some of the most advanced machines in development. DARPA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense tasked with developing new technologies for the military, hopes the Challenge will foster the development of robots that could one day work in emergency settings deemed too dangerous for humans, said Gill Pratt, program manager of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). At this week's Challenge, the majority of competing robots will stand upright on two legs, and were built to resemble human beings. This is largely because DARPA envisions these robots eventually working alongside, and in the same environment, as humans, Pratt said.
| Read More » Ursid Meteor Shower Peaks This Weekend: How to Watch Live  | When skywatchers think of meteor showers during the month of December, they immediately think of the Geminids, the most prolific and reliable of the dozen or so annual meteor displays. And yet, there is also another notable December meteor shower that, by comparison, hardly gets much notice at all — the Ursids. This year, the peak of this meteor display is due in the wee hours of Sunday morning (Dec. 22). The Ursids got their name because they appear to fan out from the vicinity of the bright orange star Kochab, in the constellation Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. Kochab is the brighter of the two outer stars in the bowl of the Little Dipper (the other being Pherkad), which seem to march in a circle like sentries around Polaris, the North Star. If you can't catch the Ursids in person, you can watch the meteor shower in a live webcast hosted by the online Slooh Space Camera.
| Read More » Surprise: Louisiana Sinkhole Slid Sideways Before Collapsing  | The Earth's surface slid sideways by as much as 10 inches (26 centimeters) before collapsing into a still-growing toxic sinkhole in Bayou Corne, La., a new study reports. "This was unusual for us," said Cathleen Jones, a radar scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Usually at a sinkhole, we expect to see vertical movement at the surface, some sort of subsidence," Jones said. The subtle surface changes revealed in the new study, published in the Dec. 13 issue of the journal Geology, could improve models of how the sinkhole formed, Jones said. The sideways flow was like water slipping into a bathtub drain, Jones said.
| Read More » Kids' Belief in Santa Myth Is Healthy, Psychologists Say Spoiler alert: This article contains information suggesting Santa Claus may not be real. But for many children, believing in Santa is a normal and healthy part of development, psychologists say. "I don't think it's a bad thing for kids to believe in the myth of someone trying to make people happy if they're behaving," said Dr. Matthew Lorber, a child psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He became famous for giving gifts and money to the poor, and it's those values that are important, Lorber told LiveScience. Read More » NASA Recreates Iconic Apollo 8 'Earthrise' 45 Years Later (Video)  | Four days shy of the photo's 45th anniversary, NASA on Friday (Dec. 20) released a new simulation of the events that led to the creation of the image known as "Earthrise." The new video was created using topographic data from the space agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been circling the moon since 2009. "This new simulation allows anyone to virtually ride with the astronauts and experience the awe they felt at the vista in front of them," NASA said in a release teasing the video. It was Christmas Eve 1968, and the first lunar voyagers in all of history — Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders— were emerging from behind the moon for the fourth time. What followed was an impromptu photo opportunity, first in black and white (building on the first "Earthrise" captured by NASA's Lunar Orbiterprobe two years earlier) and then after quickly locating the proper film cartridge, in stunning full color.
| Read More » Mediterranean Sea Was Once a Mile-High Salt Field  | SAN FRANCISCO — About 6 million years ago, a mile-high field of salt formed across the entire Mediterranean seafloor, sucking up 6 percent of the oceans' salt. Now, new research has pinpointed when key events during the formation of that "salt giant" occurred. The new research, presented here Dec. 11 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, could help unravel the mystery behind the great salt crisis. About 6 million years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar linking the Mediterranean with the Atlantic Ocean was closed and instead, two channels — one in Northern Morocco and another in Southern Spain — fed the sea with salty water and let it flow out, said study co-author Rachel Flecker, a geologist at the University of Bristol in England.
| Read More » Sex Studies: Blushworthy Headlines of 2013 With that in mind, here are 10 of the sex stories most likely to have caused blushing in 2013. The study researchers found that men who did "feminine" chores such as cooking and washing had less sex than those who did not. However, research does show that people in equal partnerships are happier. Read More » Mercury Crater Named After John Lennon  | Beatles legend John Lennon, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" author Truman Capote and sculptor Alexander Calder are among the 10 artists and writers now immortalized on Mercury with impact craters bearing their names.
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