|  Real-Life Hit Men Nothing Like 'Sherlock' Shadowy Snipers In the second season of the BBC's hit show "Sherlock," shadowy snipers threaten the eponymous detective's friends by skulking around stairwells with high-powered rifles or infiltrating their homes and workplaces. The study of contract killings spanning from 1974 to 2013, published in The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, finds that assassinations are often rather mundane. "Hit men are familiar figures in films and video games, carrying out 'hits' in underworld bars or from the rooftops with expensive sniper rifles," David Wilson, a criminologist Birmingham City University's Center for Applied Criminology, said in a statement. Wilson and his colleagues were interested in studying contract killing, in which someone pays another person to carry out a murder. Read More » Year-Round Arctic Ice Cooled Earth Earlier Than Thought  | The Arctic Ocean had an icy head start on Antarctica as the Earth cooled down after an extreme warm spell about 55 million years ago, a new study finds. Until now, evidence for perennial sea ice in the Arctic was just 18 million years old. The Arctic Ocean was frozen through summer by 36.7 million years ago, according to a study published yesterday (Jan. 26) in the journal Nature Geoscience. "This tells us the Arctic Ocean may have played a major role in causing climate to change," said Dennis Darby, a geological oceanographer at Old Dominion University in Virginia and lead study author.
| Read More » Earth's Conveyor Belts Trap Oceans of Water  | At subduction zones, where one plate bends deep beneath another, the sinking plate acts like a conveyor belt, carrying more than an ocean's worth of water into the mantle — the layer beneath Earth's outer crust — over billions of years, researchers report in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Geology. Though the lifetime of a single subduction zone is much shorter than a billion years, the cumulative effect of all of Earth's subduction zones trundling water downward into the mantle means more water could be stored in the planet's deep layers than previously thought, the study researchers said in a statement. "This supports the theory that there are large amounts of water stored deep in the Earth," Tom Garth, lead study author and an earthquake seismologist at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., said in the statement. Knowing how much water gets into the mantle is important for modeling how plate tectonics works and how magma (molten rock) rises from the mantle to Earth's surface, the researchers said in a statement.
| Read More » Famous Amnesia Patient's Brain Cut into 2,401 Slices At age 27, H.M., whose real name was Henry Molaison, underwent an experimental surgical treatment for his debilitating epilepsy. His surgeon removed the medial temporal lobe, including a structure called the hippocampus. His case brought about the idea that the hippocampus may have a crucial role in retaining learned facts, replacing the notion that memories are scattered throughout the brain. "Much of what we know about human memory, it has one way or another to do with H.M.," said study researcher Jacopo Annese, director of The Brain Observatory in San Diego. Read More » Newly Discovered Brain Region Helps Make Humans Unique The brain region, called the lateral frontal pole prefrontal cortex, was described today (Jan. 28) in the journal Neuron, and is linked to higher thinking processes. "We tend to think that being able to plan into the future, be flexible in our approach and learn from others are things that are particularly impressive about humans," Matthew Rushworth, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University, said in a statement. The new brain region is located within a larger region called the ventrolateral frontal cortex, which in past studies has been tied to higher thinking. The research team next mapped connections among different regions of the ventrolateral frontal cortex, then divided the brain region into 12 areas that seemed to be constant across all participants. Read More » Scratching Away at the Mystery of Itch But many people suffer from chronic itch, which has no direct cause and can be a debilitating condition with few options for relief. "When people hear about itch, they think about a mosquito bite or chicken pox, which is irritating but very temporary," said Diana Bautista, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote an article summarizing our current understanding of itch, published today (Jan. 28) in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Bautista said people often laugh when she tells them she studies itch. But "from a clinical perspective, chronic itch is a really widespread problem, and incredibly difficult to treat," she told LiveScience. Read More » 28 Years Ago, Challenger Shuttle Disaster Gave NASA Painful Lesson (Op-Ed)  | Hugh Harris was the Voice of NASA. He spent 35 years with the agency, many as director of the Public Affairs Office at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC), the home port of the U.S. space shuttle fleet. He is also author of the new e-book "Challenger: An American Tragedy, The Inside Story from Launch Control." Harris contributed this article to SPACE.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
| Read More » Could HD Cameras On Space Station Help Save Planet Earth?  | "Our goal is to take a little bit of the view that people have from space and get it out over the Web in as near real-time as possible, and at the same time wrap a business around it that works," Urthecast CEO Scott Larson told SPACE.com. "Now we need to calibrate and commission and continue to focus both cameras, including the medium-resolution camera.
| Read More » Preterm Birth Linked with Asthma  | Babies who are born prematurely may be at increased risk for developing asthma or another type of wheezing disorder later in childhood, a new study finds. About 14 percent of children born preterm (before 37 weeks of pregnancy) were diagnosed with a wheezing disorder, such as asthma, later in childhood, compared with about 8 percent of children who were born at full term (37 weeks or more).
| Read More » Former Space Shuttle Commander Flies Virgin Galactic's Private Spaceship for 1st Time  | Any test pilots hoping to match Rick "CJ" Sturckow's resume must now be feeling seriously discouraged.
| Read More » New Baby Boom? How Global Birthrates Could Bounce Back Almost the world over, women are having fewer children than ever before. Predicting the future of fertility is tough, said lead researcher Martin Kolk, a doctoral student in demography at Stockholm University. "What we do know," Kolk told LiveScience, "is that ignoring this role of fertility correlations across the generations, that is probably wrong." [Crowded Planet: 7 (Billion) Population Milestones] Approximately 11 billion people will walk the planet by 2100, a population likely to tax Earth's water supply, waste-management and food resources. Read More » Why Generous Donors Give Anonymously The most generous donors may give anonymously to avoid violating social norms, new research suggests. "People don't really like deviating from established norms in groups," said study author Nichola Raihani, an evolutionary biologist at the University College London. Read More » Cosmonauts make repeat spacewalk for Canadian video venture By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A pair of Russian cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station on Monday in a second attempt to set up cameras for a Canadian space video venture. Station commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy initially installed a telescope video camera and a medium-resolution still imager for Vancouver-based UrtheCast Corp during a December 27 spacewalk. However, cabling issues prevented ground control teams from verifying if the imagers were receiving power, so Kotov and Ryazanskiy brought both back inside the station so ground control teams could try to resolve the problem. Read More » 27 Dimensions! Physicists See Photons in New Light  | But to make them work, it's necessary to measure the quantum state of particles such as photons or atoms. Quantum states are numbers that describe particle characteristics such as momentum or energy. In a study detailed in the Jan. 20 issue of the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Rochester and the University of Glasgow took a direct measurement of a photon's 27-dimensional quantum state. To understand a 27-dimensional quantum state, think about a line described in two dimensions.
| Read More » Ruins of Bustling Port Unearthed at Egypt's Giza Pyramids  | TORONTO — The remains of a bustling port and barracks for sailors or military troops have been discovered near the Giza Pyramids. The archaeologists have been excavating a city near the Giza Pyramids that dates mainly to the reign of the pharaoh Menkaure, who built the last pyramid at Giza. Also near the pyramids they have been excavating a town, located close to a monument dedicated to Queen Khentkawes, possibly a daughter of Menkaure. Several discoveries at the city and Khentkawes town suggest Giza was a thriving port, said archaeologist Mark Lehner, the director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates.
| Read More » Scientists create embryonic-type stem cells without embryos By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a cheap and easy way to reprogramme mature cells from mice back into an embryonic-like state that allowed them to generate many types of tissue. Chris Mason, chair of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London, who was not involved in the work, said its approach was "the most simple, lowest-cost and quickest method" to generate so-called pluripotent cells - able to develop into many different cell types - from mature cells. Read More » Inside Stephen Hawking: PBS Documentary Explores Famed Scientist's Life Tonight  | On the heels of his bombshell claim that black holes — as scientists have traditionally thought of them — may not exist, Stephen Hawking will tell the story of his life in a new PBS documentary that premieres tonight (Jan. 29). Simply titled "Hawking," the TV portrait will follow the famed astrophysicist "from boyhood under-achiever to PhD genius, and from a healthy cox on the Oxford rowing team to diagnosis of motor neuron disease, given just two years to live — yet surviving several close brushes with death," according to PBS. Stephen Hawking, who turned 72 this month, has lived for decades with motor neurone disease (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), which has rendered his immobile and without the ability to speak. In it, he quite controversially claimed that there might not be such a thing as an event horizon — the point at which not even light can escape a black hole — which, in turn, could mean "that there are no black holes."
| Read More » Scientists create embryonic-type stem cells without embryos  | By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a cheap and easy way to reprogramme mature cells from mice back into an embryonic-like state that allowed them to generate many types of tissue. Chris Mason, chair of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London, who was not involved in the work, said its approach was "the most simple, lowest-cost and quickest method" to generate so-called pluripotent cells - able to develop into many different cell types - from mature cells.
| Read More » Hong Kong to Destroy More Than 30 Tons of Ivory  | Following in the footsteps of China and the United States, conservation officials in Hong Kong announced that they will destroy their stockpile of confiscated ivory. Hong Kong will start burning more than 30 tons (28 tonnes) of elephant tusks and other ivory products in the first half of 2014, but the disposal of the massive hoard might not be complete for another two years, officials said last week in a video of the announcement released by the non-profit group WildAid. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has estimated that some 96 elephants are killed each day on average, mostly for their ivory. As Hong Kong is a major transit point for ivory headed to China, conservation groups lauded the decision.
| Read More » A New Method for Making Stem Cells  | Scientists have found a new way of creating stem cells, which are cells that have the ability to turn into any type of tissue, using mouse cells. If the method works for human cells, it could ultimately be used to create tissue for people who need organ transplants, and to study diseases such as cancer. The researchers called the stem cells they made "STAP cells" (an abbreviation for stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency). Researchers in Japan first demonstrated the ability to make stem cells from adult cells in 2006.
| Read More » Scientists create embryonic-type stem cells without embryos  | By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a cheap and easy way to reprogramme mature cells from mice back into an embryonic-like state that allowed them to generate many types of tissue. Chris Mason, chair of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London, who was not involved in the work, said its approach was "the most simple, lowest-cost and quickest method" to generate so-called pluripotent cells - able to develop into many different cell types - from mature cells.
| Read More » Asteroid Belt Reveals Drama of Early Solar System Evolution  | A better understanding of the asteroid belt has revealed just how dynamic the solar system was in its early days, a new study reports. "In modern dynamical models, the giant planets are thought to have migrated over substantial distances, shaking up the asteroids — which formed throughout the solar system — like flakes in a snow globe, and transporting some of them to their current locations in the asteroid belt," Francesca DeMeo and Benoit Carry, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Paris Observatory, respectively, write in a study published online today (Jan. 29) in the journal Nature.
| Read More » Bizarre Magnetic Particle Revealed in Ultra-Cold Lab Experiment  | And the monopole and electron system behaves just as English physicist Paul Dirac predicted it would in 1931. Though the new experiment, described today (Jan. 29) in the journal Nature, doesn't prove that such monopoles exist outside the lab in other magnetic systems, it could help physicists know what to look for in nature, said study co-author David Hall, a physicist at Amherst College in Massachusetts. All known magnets have a north and south pole: Break a magnetic compass needle in two, for instance, and there will always be two smaller magnets with both poles. "You can slice up your needle as much as you like and you can even get down to the atomic level, and you'll still have a north pole and a south pole," Hall told LiveScience. Even electrons and protons have two poles.
| Read More » Obama Declares Climate Change a 'Fact': Now What?  | An emphatic five words spoken by President Obama last night during the State of the Union (SOTU) address were bittersweet for some climate scientists. "Climate change is a fact," Obama said. Scientists have known human-caused climate change is real, and while Obama has never said anything to the contrary, his declarative acknowledgement of the phenomenon is important. "I applauded," after the remark, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the independent National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
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