|  Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy  | WASHINGTON — An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion. A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement. "There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to 1-percent accuracy," David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the principal investigator of BOSS, said in a statement. Scientists working with BOSS mapped the locations of 1.2 million galaxies and found that their new measurements support the idea of the "cosmological constant" — an idea first proposed by Albert Einstein.
| Read More » International Space Station Gets Life Extension Through 2024  | NASA and White House officials are announcing plans today (Jan. 8) to keep the International Space Station running through at least 2024 — a four-year life extension for the largest spacecraft ever built. The NASA decision will allow scientists to use the International Space Station for at least the next 10 years, maximizing the science return on the $100 billion orbiting laboratory, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's chief of exploration and human spaceflight operations, said in a teleconference. Previous lifetime projections for the space station called for it be shut down in 2020. "There's some pretty significant benefits in announcing us to go beyond 2020," Gerstenmaier said, adding that the agency will maintain its annual $3 billion space station budget through the extension.
| Read More » 'Whiteout' Over Great Lakes Seen from Space (Photo)  | The five Great Lakes, in all their glory, barely peek out from the veil of clouds and whooshing snowfall above them in a new satellite image captured Monday (Jan. 6) as the Arctic's polar vortex barreled southward. NOAA's GOES-East satellite snapped this Midwest "whiteout" of sorts at 3:15 p.m. EST (2015 UTC), before sunset, providing side illumination to the clouds and lake-effect snow, which forms when cold air moves over warmer lake waters. "The posted GOES image is a blend of the satellite-observed visible and thermal-infrared brightness of the scene, overlaid on a NASA-provided true-color historical-satellite image of the USA," Dennis Chesters of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wrote in an email. This resulting image shows an area that extends from the Minnesota-Canadian border in the upper left to the Chesapeake Bay, including the Great Lakes, where temperatures dipped to an average of 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 7 degrees Celsius) with a wind chill near minus 50 F (minus 45 C), according to NASA.
| Read More » Polar Vortex Brought Flurry of Frost Quakes to Canada  | Frost quakes typically strike after a rapid temperature drop, such as the big chill that hit Ontario when the polar vortex swept through on last week. These "frost quakes" were reported throughout Ontario, with the first complaints of cracks and booms starting on Twitter around 5 p.m. ET on Jan. 2 and peaking about 2 a.m. ET Friday, Jan. 3. Natural Resources Canada did not record any shaking on its seismometer network, said Allison Bent, a seismologist with Earthquakes Canada in Ontario. "With frost quakes, almost all the energy is on the surface, so if you're close to it you feel it quite strongly, but not enough energy gets into the ground to pick it up far away," Bent told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
| Read More » Great White Sharks Live As Long As Humans  | Great white sharks can live almost as long as humans — 70 years or more — much longer than scientists previously thought. "White sharks in the northwest Atlantic are considerably older than previous age estimates," some of which pegged the oldest great white sharks at around 23 years old, said study co-author Li Ling Hamady, an oceanography graduate student at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Figuring out a great white shark's age is tricky. Researchers typically look at shark teeth, ear bones, vertebrae and bony rods in the skeleton to make age estimations.
| Read More » Lions Face Extinction in West Africa  | Lions in West Africa are on the brink of extinction, new research suggests. Fewer than 250 adults may be left in West Africa, and those big cats are confined to less than 1 percent of their historic range. The new study, detailed today (Jan. 8) in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that without dramatic conservation efforts, three of the four West African lion populations could become extinct in the next five years, with further declines in the one remaining population, study co-author Philipp Henschel, the lion program survey coordinator for Panthera, a global wildcat conservation organization, wrote in an email. The majestic lion once roamed throughout West Africa, from Nigeria to Senegal.
| Read More » Mysterious Wanderings of Tiger Sharks Tracked  | A new four-year study of tiger sharks off the coast of Australia has revealed patterns in the animals' mysterious migratory wanderings, including curious differences based on the gender and age of the sharks. The study, led by Jonathan Werry, a researcher at Griffith University in Australia, tracked 33 tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) using satellite and acoustic transmitters as they traveled across the Coral Sea, which lies between the Great Barrier Reef, off the east coast of Australia, and the Pacific island of New Caledonia. The researchers found that mature female sharks tend to be the ones making long-distance journeys across the Coral Sea — between the deep ocean and the more shallow, coastal waters — while adult males and younger females were found to linger in oceanic reefs away from the coasts. "In the reef system in the center of the Coral Sea, 500 nautical miles [575 miles, or 930 kilometers] from either coastline, we saw extraordinary year-round residency for mature males and pre-reproductive females," Werry told LiveScience.
| Read More » New Glue Could Mend Broken Hearts The glue bonds to heart tissue, and is as strong as stitches or staples, sealing wounds while avoiding complications, say its inventors, Jeffrey M. Karp, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, andDr. The researchers said the company may get approval to use the glue in Europe by the end of 2015. Read More » 'Nutcracker Man' Ate Tiger Nuts (Not What it Sounds Like)  | A strong-jawed extinct relative of humans called "Nutcracker Man" might have lived up to its name by munching on tiger nuts — that is, grass bulbs known as tiger nuts still eaten in parts of the world today, researchers say. The extinct creature, officially called Paranthropus boisei, roamed across East Africa 1.4 million to 2.4 million years ago, living alongside the direct ancestors of humanity.
| Read More » 7 Crazy Things That Happen Only When It's Really Cold  | So as you stay toasty indoors, free of frostbite, check out these 7 "cool" effects of sub-zero temperatures. Normally, pure water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Pure alcohol freezes at a frigid minus 173 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 114 degrees Celsius), so the stronger the alcohol, the colder it will need to be outside for the trick to work.
| Read More » Fate of Ark of the Covenant Revealed in Hebrew Text  | A newly translated Hebrew text claims to reveal where treasures from King Solomon's temple were hidden and discusses the fate of the Ark of the Covenant itself. King Solomon's Temple, also called the First Temple, was plundered and torched by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C., according to the Hebrew Bible. The Ark of the Covenant is a chest that, when originally built, was said to have held tablets containing the 10 commandments. The newly translated text, called "Treatise of the Vessels" (Massekhet Kelim in Hebrew), says the "treasures were concealed by a number of Levites and prophets," writes James Davila, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, in an article in the book "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha More Noncanonical Scriptures Volume 1" (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013).
| Read More » The Obama Legacy in Planetary Exploration (Op-Ed)  | It is frustrating, at a time when other nations are in ascendancy in space, that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama seems committed to undermining the nation's own solar system exploration program. It has taken the National Research Council's (NRC) recommendations for prioritizing planetary investments in bad economic times and turned those recommendations upside down. The administration continues to favor large, directed projects at the expense of programs and missions that are openly competed. Now, the Obama Administration is preparing to go after the seed corn of the U.S. solar-system exploration program: its planetary research and analysis programs.
| Read More » Hot New Wood Stoves: High-Tech & Eco-Friendly But wood as a fuel source has some inherent drawbacks, especially the gases, particulate matter and other pollutants produced by burning logs. A new generation of high-efficiency wood stoves, however, has become available that are as low in emissions as they are high in energy efficiency. And as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduces new regulations designed to make wood stoves even more efficient, people are rediscovering wood as a smart, renewable source of energy. Last week, the EPA proposed tightening its emission standards for wood stoves: Currently, the EPA certifies wood stoves that produce no more than 7.5 grams of fine particulate matter per hour, but new regulations would reduce that level to 4.5 grams per hour by next year, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports, and lower it again to 1.3 grams per hour by 2019. Read More » 5 Odd Religions Coming to a Statehouse Near You After a Christian religious group received permission in 2012 to erect a monument devoted to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City, another religious group — The Satanic Temple — is formally requesting to erect its own monument. The statue is nothing if not controversial: "In my opinion, this Satanist monument does not meet with the values of Oklahomans," Oklahoma State Rep. Bob Cleveland told CNN. Inspired by the Jedi Knights from the "Star Wars" film franchise, Jedi followers "believe in peace, justice, love, learning and benevolence," according to the Temple of the Jedi Order's website. Though there are several entities claiming to be Jedi organizations, the Temple of the Jedi Order was officially registered as a religion in the state of Texas in 2005. Read More » Placebo Effect May Account for Half of Drug's Efficacy Even when a medication works, half of its impact on a patient may be due to one aspect of the placebo effect: the positive message that a doctor provides when prescribing the treatment, according to a new study. Researchers designed an elaborate study, in which 66 people suffering from migraine headaches were given either a placebo, or a common migraine drug called Maxalt. The pain-relieving benefits of the migraine drug increased when patients were told they were taking an effective drug for the treatment of acute migraine. And when the identities of Maxalt tablets and placebo pills were switched, patients reported similar pain relief from placebo pills labeled as Maxalt as from Maxalt tablets labeled as a placebo, according to the study published today (Jan. 8) in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Read More » Why Depression, OCD May Be More Common than Thought The true burden of mental-health disorders might be underestimated by most studies because they use a certain common survey approach to assess the percentage of people with these conditions, researchers say. Using the information from all of the interviews, they found the rates of six mental disorders to be considerably higher than those ascertained based on just the last interview, which is called the retrospective method and is commonly used in studies. "We found that estimates of the lifetime prevalence of mental disorders were between two to 12 times lower when we looked at people's responses at the last interview, compared with when we looked at reports from preceding interviews," said study researcher Adam Spira, an assistant professor of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The new study suggests that people of all ages don't recall past episodes of mental disorders. Read More » Ancient Greeks Used Portable Grills at Their Picnics  | More than 3,000 years ago, they used portable grill pits to make souvlaki and non-stick pans to make bread, new cooking experiments suggest. The Mycenaean civilization, which was the backdrop for Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad," thrived in Greece during the late Bronze Age from around 1700 B.C. until the society mysteriously collapsed around 1200 B.C. The Mycenaeans left behind amazing palaces and gold-littered tombs at sites like Pylos and Mycenae, but in these places, archaeologists also have found less glamorous artifacts, such as souvlaki trays and griddles made from gritty clays. It wasn't clear how these two types of pans were used, said Julie Hruby of Dartmouth College, presenting her research at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting here on Saturday (Jan. 4). "We don't have any recipes," Hruby told LiveScience.
| Read More » Sangamo to develop blood disorder drugs with Biogen (Reuters) - Sangamo Biosciences Inc said it would collaborate with Biogen Idec Inc to develop treatments for a group of inherited blood disorders in a deal for up to $320 million. Sangamo shares jumped as much as 30 percent to a six-year high of $17.73 on the Nasdaq on Thursday morning. Biogen will use Sangamo's genome-editing technology to develop drugs targeting sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. It will provide Sangamo $20 million upfront and reimburse costs related to research and development. Read More » Massive Utah Landslide Triggered Earthquakes  | One of the largest landslides in U.S. history, caused by a collapse last year at a copper mine in Utah, triggered earthquakes, the first time rock avalanches have been known to do so, researchers say. Investigators analyzed a mammoth landslide at the Bingham Canyon copper mine in the Oquirrh Mountains near Salt Lake City, operated by the Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. At more than 3,180 feet (970 meters) deep, the mine is the largest artificial excavation in the world. In total, Kennecott estimated about 165 million tons (150 million metric tons) slid nearly 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), probably making it the largest non-volcanic landslide to have occurred in North America in modern times. The damage from the Bingham Canyon rockslide is estimated at nearly $1 billion, potentially making it the most expensive landslide in U.S. history.
| Read More » Ancient Nursery of Bizarre Spoon-Billed Sharks Discovered  | Stunningly preserved baby sharks with bizarre, long snouts — as well as egg cases from the same species — may be the oldest convincing evidence of an ancient shark nursery. In unpublished work on egg casings found in Germany, paleontologists have inferred the presence of another ancient shark nursery that is 330 million years old, but "this is the first time we have eggs and fossilized hatchlings in the same place, proving it's a shark nursery," said study co-author Lauren Sallan, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Bandringa fossils were discovered in a coal mine in Mazon Creek, Ill., in 1969. Over time, researchers discovered many other fossils that looked somewhat different from the Mazon Creek specimens, and concluded they were two separate species of Bandringa.
| Read More » Orbital Sciences Launches Landmark Private Cargo Mission to Space Station  | The commercial spaceflight company Orbital Sciences Corp. launched a robotic spacecraft from Virginia's Eastern Shore Thursday (Jan. 9) on a milestone flight: the company's first official cargo delivery to the International Space Station.
| Read More » Hot Tubs, Spas Can Spread Illness in Winter Disease outbreaks tied to swimming happen even in the winter, often after people go in hot tubs or spas, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 2009 and 2010, there were 81 outbreaks and 1,326 cases of illness in the United States linked to recreational water exposure (in pools, lakes, hot tubs, etc.), according to information reported from 28 states and Puerto Rico. Eighteen of these outbreaks (22 percent) were linked with hot tubs or spas, and about 40 percent of the outbreaks occurred in February or March, according to the report. Healthy people can develop Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections, including ear infections or skin rashes, after exposure to hot tubs that have not been properly chlorinated, according to the CDC. Read More » | |
