|  Cold Air Could Help You Lose Weight New evidence suggests that regular exposure to mildly cold air may help people lose weight by increasing the amount of energy their bodies have to expend to keep their core temperature up, researchers say. In fact, being able to control the ambient temperature might be partly responsible for the rise in obesity rates in industrial societies, said researchers from the Netherlands in a study published today (Jan. 22) in the journal Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism. "Since most of us are exposed to indoor conditions 90 percent of the time, it is worth exploring health aspects of ambient temperatures," said study researcher Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt of Maastricht University Medical Center. "What would it mean if we let our bodies work again to control body temperature?" Read More » Scotland Surprisingly Had Glaciers 400 Years Ago  | The last glacier in Scotland may have melted only 400 years ago, not 11,500 years as previously believed, new research finds. The Cairngorm Mountains of eastern Scotland are the snowiest part of the Scottish Highlands even today. "Conventional wisdom is that's when Scotland had its last glaciers," said study researcher Martin Kirkbride, a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee. Kirkbride discovered Scotland's last glacier inadvertently while doing fieldwork with undergraduate students in the Cairngorms.
| Read More » Bare Mount Shasta Reveals California Drought Severity  | Images of a nearly bare Mount Shasta taken from space reveal the severity of the California drought. The volcanic peak, normally blanketed in snow this time of year, has almost no snow cover on the south, west and eastern slopes. Snow cover has decreased dramatically since November, when the mountaintop looked mostly white, NASA's Earth Observatory reported. Normally, snow cover peaks around April 1, and by the first of the year, 15 to 30 percent of that snow has already accumulated.
| Read More » Around the World: Atlantic Warming Melts Antarctic Ice  | Though physically about as distant from Antarctica as you can get, water masses in the North and Tropical Atlantic Ocean significantly influence the effects of climate change on the icy southernmost continent, new research suggests. Antarctic climate has changed considerably over the past several decades, with the Antarctic Peninsula — located on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — experiencing more warming than any other region on Earth. Researchers have long recognized that atmospheric and oceanographic conditions, such as wind speed and direction, in the southern Pacific Ocean play an important role in the climate of Antarctica and the distribution of its ice. But Pacific conditions cannot entirely explain all the changes currently occurring in and around Antarctica, particularly during the austral (Southern Hemisphere) winter.
| Read More » Number of Kids with Autism May Drop Under New Criteria The number of U.S. children estimated to have autism could decline as a result of new criteria to diagnose the condition, a new study suggests. The findings show that 81 percent of children in the study diagnosed with autism under the old criteria would still be classified as having the condition under the new criteria, which were released last year in the new edition of the psychiatric handbook called the DSM-5. The new findings should be reassuring to parents, said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York, who was not involved in the study. "The overwhelming majority of children" who met the old criteria will continue to meet the new ones, Adesman told LiveScience. Read More » Electrical Burn Causes Man's Star-Shaped Cataract  | A 42-year old electrician in California developed star-shaped cataracts in his eyes after a serious work-related accident caused electricity to run through his body, according to a new report of the case. The man's left shoulder came into contact with 14,000 volts of electricity, and an electric current passed through his entire body, including the optic nerve — the nerve that connects the back of the eye to the brain. "The optic nerve is similar to any wire that conducts electricity," said Dr. Bobby Korn, an associate professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego, who treated the patient. "In this case, the extreme current and voltage that passed through this important natural wire caused damage to the optic nerve itself," Korn said.
| Read More » Texting Makes You Walk Like a Clumsy Robot Texting makes people walk funny, which could make them more prone to accidents, new research suggests. When texting, walkers change their posture to keep their upper body fairly rigid in order to keep the screen in their field of view, a new study published today (Jan. 22) in the journal PLOS ONE reveals. "Obviously deviating from a straight line is very bad if you're walking close to traffic," said study co-author Siobhan Schabrun, a physical therapy researcher at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. Read More » Water vapor plumes raise question about life on dwarf planet Ceres  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The dwarf planet Ceres, one of the most intriguing objects in the solar system, is gushing water vapor from its unusual ice-covered surface, scientists said on Wednesday in a finding that raises the question of whether it might be hospitable to life. Using the European Space Agency's Herschel infrared space telescope, researchers spotted plumes of water vapor periodically spewing from Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt residing between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The discovery comes just over a year before the scheduled arrival of NASA's Dawn spacecraft for a closer look at Ceres, a round body measuring about 590 miles in diameter - less than a third of the size of the moon. "This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere," Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency in Spain, who led the research published in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
| Read More » Flies with brothers make gentler lovers The study found that unrelated male flies compete more fiercely for female attention than related flies, pestering them more often for sex and leaving them little time to sleep or eat. "Brothers don't need to compete so much with each other for female attention since their genes will get passed on if their sibling mates successfully anyway," said Dr Tommaso Pizzari of Oxford University's zoology department, who led the study. Read More » Sound Waves Make Droplets Dance in Midair  | A team of researchers demonstrated experimentally how to lift and spin liquid droplets, controlling them with high-frequency sound waves. "Even nylon and Teflon have been shown to contaminate biological tests."
| Read More » Exploding Star: New Supernova Discovery Is Closest in Years  | An exploding star has suddenly appeared in the night sky, dazzling astronomers who haven't seen a new supernova so close to our solar system in more than 20 years. In just the last few days, a the supernova emerged as a bright light in Messier 82 - also known as the Cigar Galaxy - about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, or the Great Bear. The supernova, which one astronomer described as a potential "Holy Grail" for scientists, was first discovered by students at the University College London. Positioned between the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, the new supernova should be easy for skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere to spot;
| Read More » Mock Mars Mission: Farewell to a Simulated 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. HANKSVILLE, Utah — Early on in my two-week Mars Desert Research Station mission, I was hiking a hill steeper than I had ever faced. Crew 133 executive officer Gordon Gartrelle coaxed me up, a process that included teaching me the meaning of the word "commit" in hiking.
| Read More » Sci-Fi Spaceship Helps Launch NYC Art Museum Exhibit  | The simulated spaceship forms part of the "Museum as Hub: Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module" exhibit at the New Museum here, and is made up of images of space shuttles taken from Eastern European science fiction movies dating back to the Cold War era. The exhibit as a whole explores the ideological role that outer space played during that time period in socialist Europe, New Museum representatives said in a statement.
| Read More » NASA to Launch Next-Generation Relay Satellite Today: Watch It Live  | CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A fresh satellite for NASA's communications network is set for launch from Florida's Space Coast on Thursday (Jan. 23) to bolster voice and data links between mission control, the International Space Station and a fleet of orbiting research observatories. You can watch the NASA launch live online here beginning at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT), courtesy of NASA. Built by Boeing Co., the satellite will be the 12th craft launched in NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite program, which started linking mission control with space shuttles in the 1980s. Now that the space shuttle is retired, the TDRS network's primary customers are the space station, the Hubble Space Telescope and U.S. government Earth-observation satellites.
| Read More » No More Eye Drops? Contact Lens Protoype Delivers Glaucoma Meds  | Like a miniature donut stuffed inside a tiny pita pocket, a common glaucoma medicine is sandwiched inside this specially designed contact lens. Its construction offers numerous potential clinical advantages over the standard glaucoma treatment and may have additional applications, such as delivering anti-inflammatory drugs or antibiotics to the eye. This vision loss can be reduced if glaucoma is found and treated early, most commonly with eye drops to lower pressure within the eye. People using traditional eye drops for glaucoma "aren't getting any symptomatic relief, and they're not seeing better, so there's not a lot of motivation to be compliant with the medication," said Joseph Ciolino, an ophthalmologist who, along with his mentor Daniel Kohane, developed the new contact lens at Harvard Medical School.
| Read More » Sea Anemones Found Clinging to Underside of Antarctic Ice  | A robot surveying the underside of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf has made a startling discovery: Clinging upside-down from crannies in the ice shelf with their tentacles dangling into the icy water were thousands and thousands of tiny sea anemones. Other anemones have been found in Antarctica, but these are the first reported to live in the ice. "When the robot got down, the engineers noticed the ice looked kind of fuzzy, and when it drifted up to take a look they saw anemones, and knew it was really something special," said Frank Rack, science leader of the Antarctic Geological Drilling Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Other groups have drilled through Antarctic ice shelves before, he said, "but nobody looked up." [Gallery: Unique Life at Antarctic Deep-Sea Vents]
| Read More » Rare Borneo Bay Cat Captured in Stunning Photo  | An extremely elusive creature called a bay cat has been photographed in stunning detail in its native Borneo in Southeast Asia. The bay cat, or Pardofelis badia, is a mysterious little wildcat that lives only on the island of Borneo, which includes the countries of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. Logging has threatened some of these cats' tropical forest habitats, and the creature is now listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In the past, the elusive cats were only documented in poor-resolution camera-trap images first captured in 1998.
| Read More » See the Moon Dance with Planets, Stars This Week  | You should see a bright star, Spica, just below it, and a reddish object above and to its left. Currently Mars is just slightly brighter than Spica, half a magnitude brighter on the astronomer's brightness scale.
| Read More » Rocket Renovations Will End Public Tours of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building  | A hugely popular, hugely historic and just plain huge NASA tour spot is closing to the public as the space agency picks up the pace preparing the facility for the future of U.S. space exploration. Tours taking the public into the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are set to end on Feb. 11, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex announced recently. Public access to the voluminous facility is being halted as work resumes to renovate the VAB for the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's next-generation heavy-lift rocket. The towering launch vehicle will provide NASA with a new capability for human exploration beyond Earth orbit.
| Read More » Ancient Church Mosaic With Symbol of Jesus Uncovered in Israel  | Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered intricate mosaics on the floor of a 1,500-year-old Byzantine church, including one that bears a Christogram surrounded by birds. The ruins were discovered during a salvage excavation ahead of a construction project in Aluma, a village about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of Tel Aviv, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced Wednesday (Jan. 22). Excavator Davida Eisenberg Degen said the team used an industrial digger to probe a mound at the site, and through a 10-foot (3 meters) hole, they could see the white tiles of an ancient mosaic. The basilica was part of a local Byzantine settlement, but the archaeologists suspect it also served as a center of Christian worship for neighboring communities because it was next to the main road running between the ancient seaport city of Ashkelon in the west and Beit Guvrin and Jerusalem in the east.
| Read More » 2013 Was Record Year for Rhino Poaching in South Africa  | The number of rhinos illegally slaughtered in South Africa reached an all-time high in 2013, with an average of three rhinos killed each day, according to new figures released this month by the South African Department of Environmental Affairs. Kruger National Park, which is home to South Africa's largest population of black rhinos and white rhinos, was hardest hit, with poachers killing 606 rhinos within the famous safari destination last year. Black rhinos are considered "critically endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and wildlife experts estimate that only 4,240 black rhinos remain in the wild. White rhinos are classified as "near-threatened," and there are an estimated 20,150 white rhinos in the wild, according to the IUCN.
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