GoogleTrends: January 2014

Friday, January 31, 2014

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Scientists Map What Your Brain Looks Like on English

Researchers may now be closer to understanding how the brain processes sounds, or at least those made in English. Taking advantage of a group of hospitalized epilepsy patients who had electrodes hooked directly to their brains to monitor for seizures, Dr. Edward Chang and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, and University of California, Berkeley, were able to listen in on the brain as it listened to 500 English sentences spoken by 400 different people.

Methane Rising As Funding Cuts Threaten Monitoring Network

Levels of methane, a climate-changing greenhouse gas, have been rising since 2007. But U.S. federal budget woes are shrinking the monitoring network that tracks greenhouse gases such as methane, which comes from sources as varied as fracking and cow farts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitors many potent greenhouse gases, such as methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, at observatories around the world. In the past six years, funding for part of the network — the collection of air samples in flasks — has not kept pace with cost increases, said Ed Dlugokencky, an atmospheric chemist with NOAA's Earth Sciences Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

Spy Device? One-Way Sound Machine Created

The device, called an acoustic circulator, breaks the fundamental principle that sound, and other types of waves, are a two-way street. The result is one-directional sound.

Ophidiophobics beware: flying snakes have great aerodynamics

Scientists studying the amazing gliding proficiency of an Asian species known as the paradise tree snake say it does two things as it goes airborne. Researchers led by Jake Socha, an expert in biomechanics at Virginia Tech, replicated in a plastic model the shape the snake assumes while airborne, and tested it to evaluate its aerodynamic qualities. The paradise tree snake is one of the world's five species of flying snakes, all from the genus Chrysopelea.

New big-headed fish species discovered in Idaho and Montana rivers

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - A tiny fish characterized by a disproportionately large head and previously unknown to scientists has been found in mountain rivers of Idaho and Montana in what biologists said on Thursday marked a rare discovery. The new aquatic species is a type of freshwater sculpin, a class of fish that dwell at the bottom of cold, swiftly flowing streams throughout North America and are known for their oversized head and shoulder structure. "The discovery of a new fish is something I never thought would happen in my career because it's very rare in the United States," said Michael Young, co-author of a scientific description of the find published in the latest edition of the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa. Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Montana first encountered the new species while conducting a genetic inventory of fish found in the upper Columbia River basin, said Young, also an agency fisheries biologist.

Video Game Can Teach Kids Signs of Stroke

A short video game may help children identify the signs of a stroke, and call 911 if they witness someone having one, a new study suggests. The study involved about 200 children ages 9 to 12 living a community with many people at high risk for stroke(the Bronx, N.Y.). The children were tested on their knowledge of stroke symptoms before and immediately after they played a 15-minute stroke education video game. Children were 33 percent more likely to recognize stroke symptoms, and say they would call 911 in a hypothetical scenario immediately after they played the video game, compared with before.

NASA Honors Fallen Astronauts with 'Day of Remembrance' Friday

NASA will pay homage to its fallen astronauts Friday (Jan. 31) with an agency-wide "Day of Remembrance," a ceremony that comes amid a somber week of spaceflight disasters for the space agency.

Where's My Roof? Why Northern Football Stadiums Go Topless

On Sunday, the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks will square off at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey under the open sky. It's the first time in football history the Super Bowl has been played in an open stadium in a cold-weather city. But why is MetLife Stadium open anyway? There are 31 official NFL stadiums.

Evidence for Universe Inflation Theory May Lurk in New Data

This theory, known as inflation, is currently the dominant explanation for what happened after the Big Bang and for how the universe came to be the way it is today. Since 2009, this radio telescope, run by the European Space Agency (ESA), has been mapping the oldest light in the universe. Known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), this fossil light is often called the Big Bang's afterglow. It is thought to have appeared after the inflationary period, some 380,000 years after the universe was born, when neutral atoms started forming and space became transparent to light.

Winter Constellations: Orion the Hunter Reigns in Cold Night Sky

Every summer in mid-August, when I'm stretched out on a long lawn chair in the predawn hours scanning the skies for Perseid meteors, I'll always pause before the break of dawn to watch for Orion the Hunter's rise in the sky. The Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of extremely tenuous glowing gas and dust, approximately 1,300 light-years away.

Aliens Didn't Do It! Mysterious Underwater 'Fairy Rings' Explained

Instead, mysterious underwater rings spotted off the coast of Denmark are the result of poison, biologists say. Striking rings of green eelgrass — some of them up to 49 feet (15 meters) wide — can occasionally be spotted in the clear Baltic water off the coast of Denmark's island of Møn. But biologists Marianne Holmer from University of Southern Denmark and Jens Borum from University of Copenhagen assure that the circles have "nothing to do with either bomb craters or landing marks for aliens." [In Photos: Mysterious Crop Circles]

What's the Universe Made Of? Math, Says Scientist

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Scientists have long used mathematics to describe the physical properties of the universe. But what if the universe itself is math? That's what cosmologist Max Tegmark believes. In Tegmark's view, everything in the universe — humans included — is part of a mathematical structure.

Virgin Galactic Fires New Engines for Satellite-Launching Rocket

Virgin Galactic has tested its new fleet of liquid-fueled rocket engines and unveiled additional details about the company's plans to use these hybrid motors to launch commercial satellites into orbit. "We are proud of the great progress our propulsion team has made in reaching these milestones," Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said in a statement.

Super Bowl Space Tech: NASA Makes the Big Game Possible

NASA and the Super Bowl may not be two things you'd normally put in the same sentence together, but Sunday's big game wouldn't be the same without innovative spinoff technologies from space exploration. From helmets to headsets to the communications satellites that allows fans to watch around the world, NASA's legacy can be found throughout the Super Bowl Sunday experience. So when the Seattle Seahawks face off against Denver's Broncos, the teams will have NASA to thank for some of their basic tech needs. Here's a look at some of the NASA's space technology spinoffs (and some pop culture, too) that have found their way into Super Bowl:

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FeedaMail: TRENDS IN NEUROSCIENCES

TRENDS IN NEUROSCIENCES

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Contents page + Editorial Board + Cover figure legend

Stuck in traffic: an emerging theme in diseases of the nervous system

Jacques Neefjes, Rik van der Kant.

• The DNA sequencing revolution has revealed many new mutations in neurological diseases.
• Many of these mutations affect proteins controlling endosomal/lysosomal tr....

Dopaminergic basis of salience dysregulation in psychosis

Toby T. Winton-Brown, Paolo Fusar-Poli, Mark A. Ungless, Oliver D. Howes.

• Psychosis is typified by reality distortion and subcortical dopamine dysfunction.
• The two may be linked through aberrant salience processing.
• We review evid....

Molecular neuroanatomy: a generation of progress

Jonathan D. Pollock, Da-Yu Wu, John S. Satterlee.

• Compelling technologies and resources for neuroscience are highlighted.
• Atlases, the connectome, and genetically encoded sensors and activators are reviewed.
....

A de novo convergence of autism genetics and molecular neuroscience

Niklas Krumm, Brian J. O'Roak, Jay Shendure, Evan E. Eichler.

• Exome sequencing has identified rare mutations and novel genes in ASD and ID cases.
• Targeted resequencing has confirmed association for several novel genes.
•....

Aging in the olfactory system

Arie S. Mobley, Diego J. Rodriguez-Gil, Fumiaki Imamura, Charles A. Greer.

• A review of cellular/molecular changes in the olfactory system during normal aging.
• An analysis of changes in neurogenesis that may lead to cell and synapse losse....

Inflammatory pathways of seizure disorders

Nicola Marchi, Tiziana Granata, Damir Janigro.

• Traditional and novel anti-epileptic treatments encompass immunomodulatory effects.
• Acute and chronic immunological triggers contribute to acute and chronic seizu....

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Thursday, January 30, 2014

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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At Least 20% of Human DNA Is Neanderthal

At least one-fifth of the Neanderthal genome may lurk within modern humans, influencing the skin, hair and diseases people have today, researchers say. Although modern humans are the only surviving human lineage, other groups of early humans used to live on Earth. The closest extinct relatives of modern humans were the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until they went extinct about 40,000 years ago. Recent findings revealed that Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of modern humans when modern humans began spreading out of Africa perhaps about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, although some research suggests the migration began earlier.

First-Ever Weather Map of Failed Star Reveals Patchy Alien Clouds

Scientists have created the first weather map of a space oddity known as a brown dwarf, revealing a rare glimpse at alien weather patterns on the failed, wannabe star. The map shows the weather on the surface of WISE J104915.57-531906.1B (called Luhman 16B for short), the nearest brown dwarf to Earth at 6.5 light-years away. Brown dwarfs are called failed stars because they are larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, yet still too small to produce nuclear fusion like a true star. "Previous observations have inferred that brown dwarfs have mottled surfaces, but now we can start to directly map them," the new study's lead author, Ian Crossfield of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a statement.

Modern humans more Neanderthal than once thought, studies suggest

Although Neanderthals became extinct 28,000 years ago in Europe, as much as one-fifth of their DNA has survived in human genomes due to interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago, one of the studies found, although any one individual has only about 2 percent of caveman DNA. "The 2 percent of your Neanderthal DNA might be different than my 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA, and it's found at different places in the genome," said geneticist Joshua Akey, who led one of the studies. Put it all together in a study of hundreds of people, and "you can recover a substantial proportion of the Neanderthal genome." Both studies confirmed earlier findings that the genomes of east Asians harbor more Neanderthal DNA than those of Europeans. According to the paper by geneticists at Harvard Medical School, published in Nature, about 1.4 percent of the genomes of Han Chinese in Beijing and south China, as well as Japanese in Tokyo come from Neanderthals, compared to 1.1 percent of the genomes of Europeans.

Long lunar night wait for China's malfunctioning Jade Rabbit moon rover

Chinese scientists will have to wait until the end of a long lunar night, lasting about 14 earth days, to see if repair efforts on the country's first moon rover, dubbed Jade Rabbit, were successful, state media said. Jade Rabbit began experiencing "mechanical control abnormalities" on Saturday when entering the lunar night, which exposes the surface to extreme cold over about 14 earth days. "The complicated environment on the moon's surface is frequently the main reason leading to abnormalities in the lunar vehicle," Pang Zhihao, an expert from the China Academy of Space Technology, told state media. China landed Jade Rabbit, named after a lunar goddess in traditional Chinese mythology, in mid-December to domestic fanfare on a mission to conduct geological surveys and search for natural resources.

Alaska Heat & Atlanta Snow: What Happened?

A killer winter storm paralyzed the South yesterday, but it was sunny and warm in Alaska, with record high temperatures. The jet stream roars along Alaska's coastline and then sharply twists, diving south into Washington before flowing toward the Midwest, completely cutting off California. Because the jet stream is the dividing line between cold, Arctic air from the north and warm air from the south, these unusual undulations are steering frigid air into the eastern half of the country this winter. (Remember the polar vortex?) Meanwhile, Alaska is basking in relative warmth: The town of Port Alsworth tied the highest temperature ever recorded in January in Alaska on Monday: 62 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius).

At least 20% of Neanderthal DNA Is in Humans

At least one-fifth of the Neanderthal genome may lurk within modern humans, influencing the skin, hair and diseases people have today, researchers say.

Sexual Problems Affect Young Adults Too

Sex problems do not only affect middle age and older people — teens and young adults have difficulties with sex too, a new study from Canada shows. The study included only boys and girls who were sexually active, out of 411 people in that age range who initially responded to the survey. Study participants reported extensive sexual experience and most were heterosexual and in committed relationships. Half of the participants reported having a sexual problem, and half of those young people reported being significantly distressed about their problem.

Testosterone May Help Boost Women's Low Libido

Women who experience a drop in their sex drive after taking antidepressants might be helped by testosterone therapy, a new study from Australia suggests. In the study, women on antidepressants who wore a patch that delivered the hormone testosterone daily reported having more sexual experiences they called "satisfying," compared with women who wore a placebo patch. By the end of the three-month study, those who wore the testosterone patch had about two additional satisfying sexual experiences per month, compared to their typical number. In contrast, those who wore the placebo patch had about the same number of satisfying sexual experiences at the beginning and end of the study.

Soon, the World Will Look to Brazil for Water and Resources (Op-Ed)

Michael Reuter is The Nature Conservancy's director of freshwater for North America and has focused his career on the management of large freshwater systems for both people and nature. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Few places have what Brazil has. Because from now on, billions of people globally — perhaps nine billion by 2050 — will look to Brazil, whether they know it or not, for essential goods and services.

Milky Way Multiplicity (Op-Ed)

Mike Taylor has been a landscape and studio photographer for 20 years combined and counting. Living in Maine offers me some great opportunities to capture the beauty of our night sky with very little light pollution. Acadia National Park is one of my favorite spots for night photography, where the sky is dark, open and full of wonder. On Earth Day morning in April 2013, I spent quite a few hours photographing the night sky at this awe-inspiring locale, using a flashlight to illuminate the foreground sand and rocks.

Predicting Super Bowl Snow is an Epic Forecasting Challenge (Op-Ed)

Henson contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Next month's Super Bowl will be the first ever held in an open stadium in the northern United States. Most people realize that local weather forecasts become increasingly unreliable more than a few days out. However, once you get to about one to two weeks from kickoff, you're in a more interesting time window — a place where weather forecasts, seasonal predictions and climatological guidance intersect.

U.S. Energy Efficiency to Jump — Celebrate It (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. With tighter efficiency standards finally kicking in for 60-watt and 40-watt light bulbs this month, the Heritage Foundation's blog recently encouraged Americans to "stock up on incandescent bulbs" before the federal government "takes them away." According to the Heritage Foundation, those old, outmoded incandescent bulbs have "become a symbol in the fight for consumer freedom and against unnecessary governmental interference into the lives of the American people."

Rains Spurred by Climate Change Killing Penguin Chicks

Penguin-chick mortality rates have increased in recent years off the coast of Argentina — a trend scientists attribute to climate change and expect to worsen throughout the century, a new study finds. From 1983 through 2010, researchers based at the University of Washington in Seattle monitored a colony of roughly 400,000 Magellanic penguins living halfway up the coast of Argentina on a peninsula called Punta Tombo. It revealed that starvation and predation were the most common and consistent chick killers over the years, but that hypothermia was the leading cause of death during years with heavy rainstorms, which became more prevalent throughout the study period — a trend that is consistent with climate models projecting the effects of climate change in the region. "They have to have waterproof feathers to survive," study co-author Dee Boersma told LiveScience.

Groups Sue Feds to Protect Blue Whales and Dolphins Off California (Op-Ed)

Michael Jasny is director of the NRDC Marine Mammal Project. Jasny contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Last month, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency that the U.S. Congress charges with protecting whales and other marine life, gave the U.S. Navy permission to harm marine mammals on an unprecedented scale. Off Southern California and Hawaii alone, the Navy is now allowed to kill 155 marine mammals outright, permanently injure another 2,000, temporarily deafen hundreds of thousands more, and cause widespread disruption of feeding, nursing and other behaviors that are essential to the animals' survival — a total of more than 9 million incidents over the next five years.

Wildlife Across the Globe Rely on Pristine Antarctic Waters: Protect Them (Op-Ed)

Bradnee Chambers, executive secretary of the United Nations Environment Programme Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The nations, members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), were following through on obligations from the international treaty that established the commission in 1982 to conserve the marine animals of Antarctica, and in particular, its krill resources. Krill is especially abundant in the global food web, and as a result, scientists estimate that three-quarters of all marine life is maintained by the nutrient-rich waters from Antarctica's Southern Ocean. At the Hobart conference, the commission's member states discussed establishing two international marine protected areas in Antarctica, which would have been the world's largest.

Simulating Mars Terraforming, on Earth (Video)

Kai Staats, documentary filmmaker and member of the MarsCrew134 team, contributed this article to SPACE.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Her research is in extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme environments such as the glaciers of Greenland; Michaela first came across extremophiles at University College London, where she completed a Masters of Science Planetary Science degree with First Class Honors. Michaela's studies have brought her to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as an exchange student from her home country of Slovakia, and as a research fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Girl's Back Hair Was Sign of Spine Problems

A young girl's thick back hair was actually a sign of spine problems, according to a new report of the case. The girl, a 3-year-old living in Taiwan, was taken to the doctor for removal of a tuft of course hair on her lower back. Just after she was born, the child had undergone magnetic resonance imagining, which showed she had a split spinal cord, a condition known as diastematomyelia, as well as a fluid-filled cyst in the spinal cord, called syringomyelia. Some of her spinal fluid was also leaking out onto the skin surface.

Squatters Rights: Why Do Humans Need Toilet Paper and Animals Don't? (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. Some, motivated by this finding, began watching dogs at dog parks to see if there was any trend in how dogs oriented themselves when they peed or pooped. The results were about 50:50 — supporting or refuting the recent discovery — and I cautioned them that they likely needed more control over the situation to make an accurate assessment because when dogs are together they show a strong tendency to orient themselves to the location of another dog or dogs.

For Men with ADHD, Taking Meds May Mean Fewer Car Accidents

Adults with ADHD are more likely to have traffic accidents than people without this condition, but they may be safer on the road if they take medication, according to a new study from Sweden. Researchers looked at 17,000 people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and counted how many serious traffic accidents they had between 2006 and 2010. For comparison, they also included a group of people who did not have ADHD. By the end of the study period, 6.5 percent of men with ADHD, and about 4 percent of women with ADHD had at least one serious traffic accident, compared with about 2 percent of people without ADHD.

Rare Sight: Crescent Venus, Mercury Spotted in Daytime Sky (Photos)

The brilliant planet Venus and tiny Mercury take center stage these amazing, and rare, daytime sky photos captured this month by an amateur astronomer. Skywatching photographer Chris Shur snapped the striking views of a crescent Venus and bright Mercury on Jan. 18 from Payson, Ariz. At the time, both planets were 10 degrees - about the width of a closed fist held at arm's length - to either side of the noontime sun. He took the photos with an Explore Scientific AR152 refractor telescope (6-inch) mounted on the side of the 12-inch, DMK 51AU03.AS camera, and Baader Continuum + IR/UV blocker filter.

This Wall-Crawling Gecko Robot May Fly in Space One Day (Video)

Meet Abigaille: a six-legged gecko-inspired robot that may one day climb walls in space. Engineers from Canada and the European Space Agency looked to geckos to make adhesive robot feet that wouldn't shed their sticking power in the harsh vacuum of space. "This approach is an example of 'biomimicry,' taking engineering solutions from the natural world," Michael Henrey of Canada's Simon Fraser University said in a statement.

Now for the weather on Luhman: Cloudy with a chance of molten iron rain

You think the weather is bad on Earth lately. The first weather maps from this dim, gaseous object known as a brown dwarf, show a complex structure of patchy clouds, comprised of liquid iron and other minerals stewing in scorching temperatures, a pair of studies show. Computer models indicate that as a brown dwarfs cools, liquid droplets containing iron and other minerals form in their atmospheres. Brown dwarfs are bigger than Jupiter-sized planets, but too small for nuclear fusion, the signature process that gives a star its shine.

Flying Snake Morphs into UFO Shape to Glide

The findings, published today (Jan. 29) in The Journal of Experimental Biology, show that the Southeast Asian snake's flattened, UFO-like cross-section gives it the right aerodynamic properties for gliding. "The shape is unusual," said study co-author Jake Socha, a biomechanics researcher at Virginia Tech.

Less Snow Threatens Antarctica's Fragile Ice Shelves

Antarctica's summer meltwater ponds are beautiful killers. Given an escape route down to the ice, the sapphire-blue water jacks open fractures and crevasses in ice shelves, breaking them apart. Most ice shelves — floating, frozen plateaus permanently attached to the shore — have a thick blanket of snow that protects them from meltwater. But climate change may soon transform these downy snow blankets into threadbare sheets, putting more ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula at risk of collapse, a new study finds.

Scientists hail breakthrough in embryonic-like stem cells

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent LONDON (Reuters) - In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a simple way to reprogram mature animal cells back into an embryonic-like state that allows them to generate many types of tissue. Chris Mason, chair of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London, who was not involved in the work, said its approach in mice was "the most simple, lowest-cost and quickest method" to generate so-called pluripotent cells - able to develop into many different cell types - from mature cells. The researchers took skin and blood cells, let them multiply, then subjected them to stress "almost to the point of death", they explained, by exposing them to various events including trauma, low oxygen levels and acidic environments. Within days, the scientists found that the cells had not only survived but had also recovered by naturally reverting into a state similar to that of an embryonic stem cell.

California weighs giving tax break to space exploration firms

By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - For-profit space explorers who make California their headquarters would not have to pay property taxes on their rockets and space stations under a bill that advanced in the state legislature on Wednesday. The move is aimed at stopping an effort by Los Angeles County to collect levies on equipment owned by the privately held SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. It is part of a broader effort by lawmakers to revitalize California's flagging aerospace sector, once among the nation's largest and key to the state's economy. "This bill will create thousands of new, high-paying jobs right here in California," said state Democratic Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, the bill's author.

Commercial Space Travel Training Company Gets FAA Approval

A new commercial spaceflight training company wants to help you develop the right stuff for flying to space. Waypoint 2 Space — a Houston-based company aimed at helping commercial astronauts train for spaceflight — just received Federal Aviation Administration safety approval for their plan to train would-be astronauts. "This achievement is an important milestone for us and for the commercial spaceflight industry as a whole," Kevin Heath, chief executive officer of Waypoint 2 Space said in a statement. "The FAA is working very hard to assure that space vehicles, launch sites and training programs are the safest they can be and we believe this safety approval for our programs is another step in that direction.

New 'Swamp Monster' Skull Found in Texas

A toothy, long-nosed skull found in Texas belonged to a "swamp monster" that lived more than 200 million years ago. The creature is a previously unknown type of phytosaur, an extinct creature that hunted fish and other prey along the shallow edges of rivers and lakes. "They had basically the same lifestyle as the modern crocodile, by living in and around the water, eating fish, and whatever animals came to the margins of the rivers and lakes," study researcher Bill Mueller, assistant curator of paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University, said in a statement. Phytosaurs are a common find in the Cooper Canyon formation in Garza County, Texas, where the new species was discovered.

Upgraded Deep-Sea Sub Alvin Heading Back to Work

After undergoing a $41-million makeover over the past three years, the United States' deepest-diving manned submersible, Alvin, has been cleared to get back to work bringing scientists to the darkest parts of the ocean once again. The newly upgraded Alvin was certified this month to dive up to 12,470 feet (3,800 meters) below the surface, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which operates the Navy-owned sub. After additional tests, Alvin's operators hope the sub will be certified dive to 14,760 feet (4,500 m) later this year. Alvin has been used in more than 4,600 dives in its 50-year history.

Whale of a Tale: Rare Marine Fossil Found at School

A whale fossil that's been sitting on the grounds of a Southern California school for perhaps 80 years may be a previously unknown species. However, museum paleontologist Howell Thomas believes the skull belongs to a new species of extinct sperm whale. "It's a pretty remarkably complete skull," said Martin Byhower, a 7th-grade science teacher who first noticed the skull and alerted Thomas. Chadwick School is a private K-12 school in Palos Verdes, not far from Long Beach, Calif. Almost 80 years ago, when the campus was constructed, builders left boulders of hard sedimentary rock, known locally as Palos Verdes stone, sitting around, sometimes incorporating them into the school buildings.

Testosterone Again Linked to Heart Risks

For some men, taking testosterone may triple the risk of having a heart attack, according to a new study. Researchers looked at medical records of more than 48,500 men ages 65 and younger who were taking testosterone (in forms of gels, patches or injections), and followed them for three months. The results showed that among men with a history of heart disease, 15 men per 1,000 had a heart attack during the three months after they started taking testosterone compared with five men per 1,000 before testosterone was prescribed. For men who didn't have heart problems in the past, the risk of a heart attack didn't change when they started taking testosterone, according to the study published today (Jan. 29) in the journal PLOS ONE.

What Is Norovirus?

Once again, a cruise ship is limping into port carrying hundreds of passengers and crew sickened by norovirus. But what exactly is norovirus, and why does it spread so easily on cruise ships? Today (Jan. 29), the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Explorer of the Seas returned to port in Bayonne, N.J., after a suspected outbreak of norovirus struck almost 600 of the vessel's passengers and crew, according to NBC News. People sometimes refer to a norovirus infection as "stomach flu," even though the virus is not related to influenza.

NASA Moon Probe Spotted by Robotic Lunar Sibling (Photos)

In a moment of lunar synchronicity, a moon-orbiting NASA probe spied another one of the space agency's spacecraft from its spot in orbit. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter caught sight of NASA's LADEE moon dust probe as both spacecraft sped around the moon at nearly 3,600 mph (1,600 meters per second) on Jan. 14. LRO and LADEE were a mere 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) apart as the photo was taken. LADEE (the name is short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) can barely be seen as a somewhat blurry smudge above the moon's pockmarked surface, however this photo was no accident.

Best Time to See Mercury in Night Sky Is Now

Stargazers have the best chance of the year to spot Mercury in the evening sky over the next week, but only if you know how to find the elusive planet. The problem with Mercury is that it never strays very far from the sun. In fact, it is said that famed Johannes Kepler, who figured out the laws of planetary motion, never saw Mercury in his entire life in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The best time to spot Mercury is about half an hour after sunset (or half an hour before sunrise).

Primeval 'Devil Frog' May Have Sported Anti-Dinosaur Armor

The monster frog, Beelzebufo ampinga, lived during the Cretaceous Period in what is now Africa, and sported spiky flanges protruding from the back of its skull and platelike armor down its back, almost like a turtle shell. The researchers first discovered a few bone fragments from a mystery frog in Madagascar in 1998, but it wasn't until 2008 that they had enough pieces to identify the species, which they dubbed the devil frog, or Beelzebufo ampinga. When the team analyzed the frog's morphology, they found that physically, it fit in with a family of horned frogs called the Ceratophryidae, which are now found only in South America. But to reach Madagascar from South America, the frogs would have needed to hop along a passageway, possibly through Antarctica, that linked the two landmasses.

See the New Supernova in Galaxy M82 Today in Live Webcast

A new supernova discovered by students in London is starring in a new webcast, and you can watch it live online today (Jan. 30). Supernova 2014J was spotted by four undergraduate students observing galaxy M82 while astronomer Steve Fossey taught them how to use a telescope at the University College London Observatory on Jan. 21. Fossey and his students will take part in the online Slooh Space Camera webcast about the exploding star discovery beginning at 4 p.m. EST (2100 GMT). Ben Cooke, Tom Wright, Matthew Wilde and Guy Pollack — the astronomy students speaking with Slooh today — caught sight of the star explosion after Fossey saw something odd when adjusting the telescope.

Some Doctors Mistakenly Inject Oral Vaccine

Some health care providers make a mistake when giving the rotavirus vaccine to babies, injecting the vaccine as a shot instead of placing drops in the infant's mouth as is required, a new report finds. Before the vaccine, 20 to 60 children younger than age 5 died yearly from the infection, and 55,000 to 70,000 were hospitalized every year, according to the CDC.

Some Babies Mistakenly Injected with Oral Vaccine

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