|  Venus and Moon Share Last Night Sky Encounter Tonight for Nearly a Year  | Venus and the moon, the two brightest objects in the night sky, will pair up in the sky tonight (Jan. 2), marking the last time for nearly a year that the two brilliant objects shine near each other for stargazers to enjoy. Venus will only be around for about 30 minutes tonight before it sinks down below the horizon. Venus is in the final days of its reign as the dazzling "evening star," with a transition into the morning sky coming very soon.
| Read More » La Niña Influences Melt of Major Antarctic Glacier  | Though typically thought of as a tropical climate pattern, the influence of La Niña (the cold counterpart to El Niño) spreads as far as Antarctica, significantly slowing the melting rate of one of the continent's largest glaciers, according to a new study. Pine Island Glacier, which makes up about 10 percent of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, empties into the Amundsen Sea.
| Read More » New Heart Rate Trackers: Is Knowing Your Pulse Useful?  | Several new fitness trackers, along with heart rate monitors, allow users to constantly measure their heart rate throughout the day. Heart rate monitors geared toward athletes have been available for years, but recently, fitness trackers aimed at the general public have started to include heart rate as a measure to track along with steps taken, calories burned, distanced walked and sleep. For example, the Withings Pulse includes a sensor that lets you check your heart rate using your finger, and the Basis B1 has heart rate monitor built into the wristband itself, allowing you to know your rate at any time. (The Basis also graphs this information, so users can see how their heart rate changed during the day or night.)
| Read More » US Drivers Distracted 10 Percent of Time on Road A team of researchers based at the National Institutes of Health and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University used video recorders and in-vehicle sensors to measure the activity of about 150 individuals while they drove in regions of Washington, D.C., and southwestern Virginia. "But our study shows these distracting practices are especially risky for novice drivers, who haven't developed sound safety judgment behind the wheel." Read More » Scientists, tourists rescued from Antarctic ship begin long journey home By Maggie Lu Yueyang SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian icebreaker with 52 passengers rescued from a Russian ship trapped in Antarctic ice since Christmas Eve began the long journey home on Friday. "The passengers seem very glad to now be with us and they are settling in to their new accommodation," Jason Mundy, Australian Antarctic Division Acting Director who is on board the ice breaker Aurora Australis, said on Friday morning. A helicopter from the Chinese icebreaker Snow Dragon ferried the 52 scientists and tourists in small groups from the ice-bound Akademik Shokalskiy and transferred them to the Antarctic supply ship Aurora Australis late on Thursday. The Aurora Australis is now sailing towards open water and will then head towards an Antarctic base to complete a resupply before returning to Australia. Read More » First Meteor Shower of 2014 Peaks Friday, but Sun Interferes  | Early each January, the Quadrantid meteor shower provides one of the most intense annual celestial fireworks displays, with a brief, sharp peak lasting only a few hours. That peak occurs Friday (Jan. 3), but this year the sun will spoil the show for stargazers in North America. The 2014 Quadrantid meteor shower will peak Friday at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT), in the middle of the day for most of North America, so the best meteor views will be in other parts of the world, where night has already fallen. At its best, the Quadrantids can dazzle observers with between 60 and 120 meteors an hour.
| Read More » Quirky Quarks: 'Charming' Particle Mixes with Bizarre Cousin An experiment that offers a peek inside the behavior of subatomic particles called quarks could help answer questions about why the universe is made of matter, and might even be evidence of new, previously unseen particles. At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois, an international team of scientists published the first observation of a charm quark (quarks come in several "flavors") decaying into its antiparticle, a phenomenon called "mixing," first predicted in 1974. "There was some evidence back in 2007 that this was happening," said Paul Karchin, professor of physics at Wayne State University, and a co-author of the study detailed Dec. 18 in the journal Physical Review Letters. Atoms are made of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of even smaller pieces called quarks. Read More » Magnificent Orion Nebula Captured by Amateur Astronomer (Photo)  | The famed Orion Nebula is the star attraction of this gorgeous night sky photo sent in to SPACE.com recently by an amateur astronomer. Astrophotographer Chuck Manges of Hooversville, Pa., captured this photo of the Orion Nebula, which is also known as Messier 42 or NGC 1976. An Orion ED102T CF telescope mounted on an Orion Sirius was used to view the nebula from October to November 2012. To see more amazing night sky photos submitted by SPACE.com readers, visit our astrophotography archive.
| Read More » Mock Mars Mission: Utah Habitat Simulates Life on Red Planet  | The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), which is run by the nonprofit Mars Society, aims to help humanity prepare for the rigors and challenges of life on the Red Planet. It was designed in line with Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" settlement approach, which sees crews living off the land as much as possible, MDRS director Shannon Rupert told SPACE.com. "The idea was a small crew on these kind of preplanned set of missions that would allow astronauts to get there and have a functioning habitat in place," Rupert said. Reading through an unofficial "geology guide" to MDRS (published by past visitors) reveals a dry landscape shaped by wind — a similar environment to many areas of the modern-day Red Planet.
| Read More » Jars of Prego Traditional Italian Sauce Recalled Some jars of the popular Italian sauce Prego are being recalled because of their potential to spoil. Read More » Life After Brain Death: Is the Body Still 'Alive'? A 13-year-old girl in California continues to be on a ventilator after being declared brain-dead by doctors. A person is considered brain-dead when he or she no longer has any neurological activity in the brain or brain stem — meaning no electrical impulses are being sent between brain cells. Doctors perform a number of tests to determine whether someone is brain-dead, one of which checks whether the individual can initiate his or her own breath, a very primitive reflex carried out by the brain stem, said Dr. Diana Greene-Chandos, an assistant professor of neurological surgery and neurology at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. "It's the last thing to go," Greene-Chandos said. Read More » King Tut's Mummified Erect Penis May Point to Ancient Religious Struggle  | Egypt's King Tutankhamun was embalmed in an unusual way, including having his penis mummified at a 90-degree angle, in an effort to combat a religious revolution unleashed by his father, a new study suggests. The pharaoh was buried in Egypt's Valley of the Kings without a heart (or a replacement artifact known as a heart scarab); These anomalies have received both scholarly and media attention in recent years, and a new paper in the journal Études et Travaux by Egyptologist Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo, proposes a reason why they, and other Tutankhamun burial anomalies, exist. The mummified erect penis and other burial anomalies were not accidents during embalming, Ikram suggests, but rather deliberate attempts to make the king appear as Osiris, the god of the underworld, in as literal a way as possible.
| Read More » Man-Made Flood Could Help Revive Colorado River Wetlands  | An artificial flood could surge down a dry riverbed from the United States into Mexico either this spring or an upcoming one — a technique researchers hope will help them find out if renewing water in this landscape might rejuvenate life in the area. "This could mark a new era of collaboration among users of the river's water — one that benefits the environment," said Karl Flessa, a conservation biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and one of many people involved in the effort. After decades of dams and diversions, only a tenth of that amount of water crosses the border into Mexico each year, and all of it is diverted for use in Mexican agriculture and cities. Only about 10 percent of the Colorado River Delta's original wetland and riverbank areas now remain, with less than 3 percent of the native cottonwood and willow forests surviving.
| Read More » Major Blizzard Visible from Space  | The winter storm that lashed the Midwest and Northeast over the last couple of days and has left a blanket of snow in its wake also brought with it sub-zero, bone-chilling winds that are keeping the snow fresh and frozen. The storm's huge expanse across nearly two-thirds of the country was clearly visible in NASA satellite imagery. "One storm was moving from the west to east with some limited moisture and atmospheric energy and as that storm was moving across the country, it was basically transferring energy to a brand new storm that has taken over and has been strengthening overnight," Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, told LiveScience. The National Weather Service commonly uses satellite imagery to track the path and extent of storms and to collect atmospheric data that they use to produce storm forecasts.
| Read More » Photos Show Beauty of California's King Tides  | The tide hit a high point — a very high point — today along the California coast, as seen in gorgeous photographs taken at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey. The extreme tide is known as a "king tide," a seasonal phenomenon caused by the interaction of the gravity of the sun and moon with weather. Tides are caused by the gravitational interaction of the sun, moon and Earth. The Earth orbits the sun in an elliptical path, just as the moon's journey around the Earth is not perfectly circular.
| Read More » Bald Eagles in Utah Died of West Nile  | Wildlife experts in Utah have found the culprit behind an unusual string of bald eagle deaths: West Nile virus. Laboratory tests confirmed that the virus was responsible for the deaths of 27 bald eagles in the state in recent weeks, according to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR). The rash of deaths was at first mysterious: The bald eagles appeared to be dying of some type of disease, instead of blunt injuries, which are the usual cause of death of bald eagles in the state, according to the Washington Post. And West Nile virus typically affects birds only in the summer months, when the mosquitoes that spread the disease are active.
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