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	(Sponsor this newsletter) 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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]  Read More » 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. Read More » 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. Read More » 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: Read More »
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