|  Israeli prize honors foreign scientists, artist JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's prestigious Wolf Prize this year will honor American, Canadian, Swedish and Taiwanese scientists. Read More » Mock Mars Mission: How to Drive on the Red Planet  | Editor's Note: In the Utah desert, scientists are attempting to recreate what a real-life mission to Mars might be like, and SPACE.com contributor Elizabeth Howell is along for the ride. After rolling forward a few feet, I checked a small mirror on my left arm to watch Paula Crock's progress behind me. As we ventured several miles away from Utah's Mars Desert Research Station, we were figuring out how to safely maneuver vehicles while wearing mock spacesuits.
| Read More » Smoking Report: Why 'Lighting Up' Causes So Many Diseases Fifty years after the first U.S. Surgeon General's report in 1964 warned about the link between smoking and lung cancer, research continues to identify more diseases that are directly caused by smoking. Cigarette smoke contains thousands of compounds, including 69 known to be carcinogens, chemicals that are directly involved in causing cancer. They are carried through the blood to many organs," said Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San Francisco, who was not involved in compiling the report. In colorectal cancer, tumors often originate in the glands and the cells that cover the inside of the bowel. Read More » Pelvic Bone in Museum Storage May Be King Alfred the Great's  | A piece of an ancient pelvis bone that had been tucked away in museum storage might belong to the English King Alfred the Great or his son Edward, scholars announced Friday (Jan. 17). Archaeologists had mounted a search to find the lost remains of Alfred the Great, who was king of Wessex and dominated England from 871 until his death in 899. Last year, researchers exhumed an unmarked grave at Saint Bartholomew's Church in Winchester, England, but none of the bodies buried there were a match with Alfred. After that initial disappointment, the group then turned to bones in storage boxes at the Winchester City Museum that had been excavated from a nearby monastery, Hyde Abbey, in the 1990s.
| Read More » Supreme Court Confusion: Why Judging Distance Is Tough The justices of the Supreme Court may be among the best legal minds in the country, but they have no eye for distances — and new research may help explain why. After the tests, the researchers "trained" the volunteers to conduct virtual experiments: They placed motion-capture tags on the participants' forearms, and asked them to reach for a virtual cylinder on a computer screen. Read More » T. Rex Set for April Road Trip to Washington, D.C.  | Stopped dead in its tracks when the government shut down, a famous T. rex skeleton will finally make its road trip from Montana to Washington, D.C., this spring. Officials at the dinosaur's new home, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, announced Friday (Jan. 17) that the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton is set to arrive on April 15, two weeks before the museum's fossil hall closes for a major five-year renovation. Randall Kremer, a spokesperson for the museum, said the dinosaur's arrival will mark the most significant addition to the museum since the Hope Diamond was donated to the collection in 1958. Rancher Kathy Wankel is credited with the dinosaur's discovery after spotting the creature's arm bones poking out of Montana's Fort Peck reservoir in 1988.
| Read More » 'Sixth Sense' Can Be Explained by Science  | At least one type of "sixth sense" isn't real, new research suggests. The new study, detailed Monday (Jan. 13) in the journal PLOS ONE, found that what people perceive as a sixth sense may simply be their vision systems detecting changes they can't articulate. "People can sense things that they believe they cannot see," such as changes in a person's appearance, said study co-author Piers Howe, a vision scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Howe's interest was piqued when a student came to him claiming she had a quasi-magical sixth sense.
| Read More » Mock Mars Mission: Stunning Night Sky Shines Over Utah Outpost  | Editor's Note: In the Utah desert, scientists are attempting to recreate what a real-life mission to Mars might be like, and SPACE.com contributor Elizabeth Howell is along for the ride. HANKSVILLE, Utah — In the desert here, the nearly full moon was so bright that we didn't even need a flashlight to walk to the Mars Desert Research Station Musk Observatory. About 100 feet away from our Habitat, two crew members had captured (the Andromeda Galaxy M31) in the telescope at the Mars Society observatory, which is a tiny room just barely big enough to fit a crew of five or six.
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