|  Super Bowl Safety: TV Tip-Overs Can Be Deadly, Group Warns Ahead of the Super Bowl — often the most-watched television event of the year — the group Safe Kids Worldwide has declared Saturday (Feb. 1) National TV Safety Day to educate families about properly securing their big screens, with mounts and anchors to prevent accidents. Top-heavy flat panel TVs, too, can be pulled down by a climbing child if the set is not mounted to a wall. In a 2012 survey, Safe Kids Worldwide found that just one in four parents had mounted their flat panel TVs to the wall. As part of the campaign, Safe Kids Worldwide and Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) are urging parents and caregivers to recycle their old TVs, and the make sure the ones they keep are appropriately secured to keep kids safe. Read More » Supplements May Have Negative Impact on Endurance Training Certain vitamin supplements may blunt the muscle's natural response to endurance training, a new study from Norway suggests. In the study, 54 healthy participants were randomly assigned to take vitamin C and E supplements, or a placebo, during an endurance training program that consisted of running three to four times a week. After 11 weeks, the muscles of the people in the placebo group had produced more mitochondria — "powerhouses" of the cells — a natural response to training. The findings suggest "vitamin C and E supplements blunted the endurance training-induced increase of mitochondrial proteins, which are needed to improve muscular endurance," study researcher Dr. Gøran Paulsen, of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, said in a statement. Read More » Do Older People Have More Body Odor? Question: Do older people have more body odor? The body odor of people between the ages of 26 and 75 was analyzed. So, what causes body odor (aka B.O.)? Sweating helps maintain your body temperature, hydrates your skin and balances your body fluids. Read More » 3 Tips for Keeping Teens Healthy I surely hope so, and that's why I took comfort in the results of a European Heart Journal study published this month. The study was done on adolescent boys, but I can only imagine that regular exercise in these years is good for the girls too. Read More » Did Alien Life Evolve Just After the Big Bang?  | Earthlings may be extreme latecomers to a universe full of life, with alien microbes possibly teeming on exoplanets beginning just 15 million years after the Big Bang, new research suggests. Also known as Goldilocks zones, these regions are considered to be just the right distance away from stars for liquid water, a pre-requisite for life as we know it, to exist. But even exoplanets that orbit far beyond the habitable zone may have been able to support life in the distant past, warmed by the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, says Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb. Just after the Big Bang, the cosmos was a much hotter place.
| Read More » NASA Moon Probe Broadcasts Space Weather Symphony Live Online  | A NASA probe orbiting the moon is broadcasting live cosmic tunes from a computer near you. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has a new internet radio station for people who want to check out space weather through music. The craft carries with it a Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation, or CRaTER. The main instrument at the lowest level of activity is a piano.
| Read More » Help Hubble Telescope Scientists Study Amazing New Galaxy Photos (Video)  | A newly released Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image shows the nearby spiral galaxy M83 in rich detail and scientists want your help to understand exactly what they are seeing in the cosmic view. Bold magentas and blues indicate the galaxy blazes with star formation, and the galactic panorama depicts stellar birth and death on a vast scale of 50,000 light-years, encompassing thousands of star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of stars, as well as supernova remnants, the last vestiges of dead stars. A new project called "STAR DATE: M83" asks amateur astronomers to use the new M83 image to estimate ages for approximately 3,000 star clusters. Later, stellar winds from the youngest, most massive stars blow the gas away, revealing bright blue star clusters, and giving a perforated appearance to the spiral arms.
| Read More » Your Heart Health: 5 Numbers to Know Researchers at The Ohio State University surveyed more than 2,000 adults from across the United States and asked them questions about BMI, for example, whether a person with a BMI of 24 is underweight or obese, or is normal weight. BMI is a number calculated from a person's weight and height, and provides a reliable indicator of body fatness and the risk for heart problems for most people. So, in addition to BMI, people should know four other numbers to get a good picture of their health: their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels and the circumference of their waist, the researchers said. "There really are five numbers everyone should know when it comes to heart health," said Dr. Martha Gulati, director of preventive cardiology and women's cardiovascular health at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Read More » Teen Boy Is Youngest to Have Rare Fatal Brain Disorder For three years, a teen boy in North Carolina developed progressively worsening movement, speech and memory problems, but doctors remained unable to determine the cause of his deteriorating condition. It was only after his death at age 16 that they found the answer: The boy had an extremely rare brain disorder called sporadic fatal insomnia, which is caused by prions, or abnormally folded proteins. Although prion diseases are rare in teenagers, the researchers wanted to publish the case to raise awareness about the condition among doctors who treat children, said Dr. Ermias Belay, of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, who investigated the boy's case. Read More » Home Births Linked to Higher Rate of Newborn Deaths The rate of death for newborns born in home births is more than four times that of newborns born in hospitals, according to new research. The research, which will be presented on Friday (Feb. 7) at the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans, also found especially high rates of neonatal death among first-time mothers who gave birth at home. "If you deliver in the hospital with a mid-wife, you can prevent 75 percent of all neonatal death," said study co-author Dr. Amos Grunebaum, an obstetrician at Weill Cornell Physicians in New York City. Home births have been on the rise in recent years, and the safety of the practice has been fiercely debated, with studies coming to different conclusions. Read More » Great Lakes Water Levels Are in Unusual Decline  | The Great Lakes share a surprising connection with Wisconsin's small lakes and aquifers — their water levels all rise and fall on a 13-year cycle, according to a new study. "The last two decades have been kind of exceptional," said Carl Watras, a climate scientist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Water levels have been declining since 1998, Watras told Live Science. The research was published Jan. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
| Read More » Shrinking Greenland Glacier Smashes Speed Record  | In summer 2012, Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae Glacier raced more than 150 feet (46 meters) per day, faster than any glacier on Earth. In 2000, Jakobshavn flowed at roughly 6 miles (9.4 km) per year. "We've been watching it for over a decade now, so it was quite a surprise when it popped up in 2012 with these unusually high speeds," said Ian Joughin, lead study author and a glaciologist at the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle. Jakobshavn Isbrae slows a bit in winter but is still flowing roughly three times faster overall than in the 1990s, Joughin said.
| Read More » New Cholesterol Guidelines: How to Make Sense of Them The new guidelines about who should take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs have spurred ongoing debate and confusion among both physicians and patients since their release in November. More than 70 million American adults have high blood cholesterol, which doubles their risk for heart disease, and less than half of people in this group take statins. But the changes to the guidelines would add more people to the group of those who are recommended to get a statin prescription. "Some people who were otherwise considered not at-risk might be considered at-risk now," said Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a cardiologist and the director of Women's Heart Health at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Read More » Arctic's 'Layer Cake' Atmosphere Blamed for Rapid Warming  | The Arctic is leading a race with few winners, warming twice as fast as the rest of the Earth. Loss of snow and ice, which reflect the sun's energy, is usually blamed for the Arctic temperature spike. "In the Arctic, as the climate warms, most of the additional heat remains trapped in a shallow layer of the atmosphere close to the ground, not deeper than 1 or 2 kilometers [0.6 to 1.2 miles]," said Felix Pithan, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and lead author of the new study. The Arctic atmosphere looks like a layer cake compared with the tropics.
| Read More » Five Tips to Ward Off Cholesterol Confusion (Op-Ed)  | Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum is an attending cardiologist and the director of Women's Heart Health of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and has been featured on The Early Show, The Doctors, Good Morning America, 20/20 and other programs. She recently released her book "Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum's Heart Book: Every Woman's Guide to a Heart Healthy Life," (Avery, 2014) and is the host of Focus on Health, a weekly magazine news show spotlighting health topics, seen on WLNY-TV. Steinbaum contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The controversy surrounding November 2013's release of cholesterol guidelines from the American Heart Association (AHA)-American College of Cardiology (ACC) continues, and the confusion amongst physicians and patients is widespread.
| Read More » Off-Road Wheelchair Helps People with Disabilities Get Off-Road and On With Their Lives (Op-Ed)  | Amos Winter is the an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and a participant in ASME's Engineering for Global Development Committee. The reality is much different for the 20 million to 40 million people in the developing world who require the use of a wheelchair. In such conditions, a conventional wheelchair provides only limited mobility and for people with disabilities, their ability to support themselves is restricted. The idea behind the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC) that my colleagues and I developed was conceived — and the technology evolved — through field trials in East Africa, Vietnam, Guatemala and India.
| Read More » 4,600-Year-Old Step Pyramid Uncovered in Egypt  | TORONTO — Archaeologists working near the ancient settlement of Edfu, in southern Egypt, have uncovered a step pyramid that dates back about 4,600 years, predating the Great Pyramid of Giza by at least a few decades. Over time, the step pyramid's stone blocks were pillaged, and the monument was exposed to weathering, so today, it's only about 16 feet (5 m) tall. Scattered throughout central and southern Egypt, the provincial pyramids are located near major settlements, have no internal chambers and were not intended for burial. Six of the seven pyramids have almost identical dimensions, including the newly uncovered one at Edfu, which is about 60 x 61 feet (18.4 x 18.6 m).
| Read More » Light Pollution Threatens Skywatching Around the World  | But I always looked forward to the times when my family visited my Uncle Ron's house in Mahopac, N.Y. The night sky in Mahopac — which is 50 miles (80 kilometers) due north of midtown Manhattan — was incredibly dark and starry; I now live just to the west of Mahopac, and while I can still see the Milky Way on most clear nights, the nights now are a far cry from what they were a half century ago. Now, it's closer to a charcoal gray, and when I look south toward New York City, I see a bright, whitish glow reaching nearly halfway up into the sky. On the best nights, I can just about make out Eta Ursae Minoris, the dimmest of the four stars that make up the bowl of the Little Dipper.
| Read More » Flow Battery Breakthrough May Boost Green Energy Storage (Video)  | Joss Fong is a video producer and science journalist living in New York. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. A new battery designed by researchers at Harvard University may open the door to large-scale storage of solar and wind power. Because solar and wind power are intermittent energy sources, storage solutions are needed to improve their reliability.
| Read More » When Wildlife TV Programs Hurt the Wildlife (Op-Ed)  | Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This Op-Ed is adapted from two that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. I like to believe that animal abuse in film and television is a thing of the past, but it isn't.
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