|  Bionic hand allows amputee to feel again By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Dennis Aabo Sorensen lost his left hand when a firework rocket he was holding exploded during New Year's Eve celebrations 10 years ago, and he never expected to feel anything with the stump again. But for a while last year he regained his sense of touch after being attached to a "feeling" bionic hand that allowed him to grasp and identify objects even when blindfolded. There is still work to be done in miniaturizing components and tidying away trailing cables that mean the robotic hand has so far only been used in the lab, but Sorensen said the European research team behind the project had got the basics right. Alastair Ritchie, a bioengineering expert at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the research, said the device was a logical next step but more clinical trials were now needed to confirm the system's viability. Read More » The Real Reason Shy Toddlers Speak Late Toddlers who don't talk much may not necessarily have a language delay, new research finds. Shy kids understand words, but when spoken to, they may clam up instead of speaking up. Delayed speech is linked to social struggles later in life, so researchers wanted to understand whether shy kids can't produce language or simply don't want to. The good news is that shy kids don't show language acquisition delays, said study researcher Soo Rhee, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Read More » DARPA Publishes Huge Online Catalog of Open Source Code  | the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for developing new, cutting-edge technologies for the military — is shedding some of its secrecy by making all of its open-source code freely and easily accessible online. The catalog will function as a way for DARPA to organize and share results from the agency's research efforts, according to DARPA officials. The database will likely be of particular interest to the research and development community, and DARPA is hoping the move will spur innovation and lead to new collaborations in the future. "Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government," Chris White, DARPA program manager, said in a statement.
| Read More » Woolly Mammoths and Rhinos Ate Flowers  | Woolly mammoths, rhinos and other ice age beasts may have munched on high-protein wildflowers called forbs, new research suggests. The new research "paints a different picture of the Arctic," thousands of years ago, said study co-author Joseph Craine, an ecosystem ecologist at Kansas State University.
| Read More » Man Gets First Prosthetic Hand That Can Feel  | Nine years ago, Dennis Aabo Sørensen severely wounded his left arm in a fireworks accident, and had to have it amputated. Researchers embedded electrodes in Sørensen's arm, and touch sensors in a prosthetic hand to stimulate his remaining nerves. With the hand, Sørensen was able to recognize different objects by their feel, and grasp them appropriately, according to the study detailed online today (Feb. 5) in the journal Science Translational Medicine. "I could feel things that I hadn't been able to feel in over nine years," Sørensen, who lives in Denmark, said in a statement.
| Read More » Robotic Russian Cargo Ship Docks with Space Station after Express Flight  | An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station today (Feb. 5) to deliver supplies to the crewmembers manning the space laboratory after a quick trip through space.
| Read More » Wobbly Alien Planet with Wild Seasons Found by NASA Telescope  | Astronomers have discovered an alien planet that wobbles at such a dizzying rate that its seasons must fluctuate wildly. The warm planet is a gassy super-Neptune that orbits too close to its two parent stars to be in its system's "habitable zone," the region where temperatures would allow liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, to exist. The faraway world, which lies 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, was discovered by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Kepler was designed to detect exoplanets by noticing the dips in brightness caused when these worlds transit, or cross in front of, their parent stars.
| Read More » Pow! Fresh Crater on Mars Spotted by NASA Spacecraft (Photo)  | A NASA spacecraft has snapped a stunning photo of a fresh Martian crater that was gouged out of the Red Planet just in the last three years or so. "The crater spans approximately 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone," NASA officials wrote in a description of the new image. "Before-and-after imaging that brackets appearance dates of fresh craters on Mars has indicated that impacts producing craters at least 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) in diameter occur at a rate exceeding 200 per year globally," NASA officials wrote. The spacecraft has been observing the Red Planet with its suite of powerful instruments ever since, giving scientists their best-ever looks at the surface of this alien world.
| Read More » Eating Yogurt May Reduce Risk of Diabetes Eating yogurt four or five times a week may lower the risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, a new study has found. This risk reduction was seen in study participants who consumed an average of four and a half 4-ounce servings of low-fat yogurt per week, according to the study published today (Feb. 5) in the journal Diabetologia. The study found an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship between eating yogurt and lowered risk of diabetes. They found that replacing a serving of chips with a serving of yogurt reduced the risk of diabetes by 47 percent. Read More » Spending a Week in the Dark Could Boost Hearing "Even in adults, when you actually lose vision for a few days, you can improve auditory processing," said study co-author Hey-Kyoung Lee, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The new results suggest that sensory deprivation could be a viable way to train adults with hearing loss to better process sounds coming from cochlear implants, the researchers said. "Once you put the animals in the dark for about a week, the neurons in the auditory part of the brain start processing sound better," Lee told Live Science. Electrodes placed in the mice's auditory cortex, which processes sound, also showed stronger connections between the neurons. Read More » Epidural May Prolong Labor More Than Thought Using epidurals for pain relief during a baby's delivery may prolong labor more than previously thought, a new study finds. In the study, the researchers looked at more than 42,000 women in California who delivered vaginally between 1976 and 2008, and compared the length of the second stage of labor, which is the time it takes for "pushing" the baby out after the cervix has fully opened, among women who had received epidurals and those who hadn't. Although it was thought that epidurals lengthen labor by about one hour, the researchers found that women who had epidurals actually took two to three hours longer to get through the second stage of labor, compared with women who hadn't received this pain medication, according to the study, published today (Feb. 5) in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. "When epidural is used, it may be normal for labor to take two hours longer, and physicians don't necessarily have to intervene, as long as women are progressing and the baby is OK," said Dr. Yvonne Cheng, one of the researchers on the study and an obstetrician at University of California, San Francisco. Read More » Charlemagne's Bones Are Likely Authentic, Scientists Say  | The relics of Charlemagne, long on display at a treasury in Germany, are likely the real bones of the Frankish king, scientists say. Last Tuesday (Jan. 28) marked exactly 1,200 years since Charlemagne died in A.D. 814. To commemorate the occasion, a group of scientists at the Cathedral of Aachen gave a summary of the research that has been conducted on the king's bones, stretching back to 1988. Like many saints whose body parts were scattered in various reliquaries, Charlemagne was not left to rest in one piece.
| Read More » Olympic Figure Skating: Human Body's Limits May Prevent Leap Forward  | For a sport judged partially on style, figure skating has not changed much with the times: The billowing, sequined costumes look the same as they have for decades, the classical music never goes in or out of style, and the jumps (which actually determine the score) have more or less stayed the same. And given those limits, fans shouldn't expect moves to change much in the future either, said Tom Zakrajsek, a world and Olympic figure-skating coach based in Colorado Springs, Colo., who will head to Sochi this Thursday (Feb. 6) to coach Max Aaron, an alternate for U.S. Men's Figure Skating Singles. Skaters typically spend between 0.65 and 0.70 seconds in the air for jumps, and fitting in an extra spin would require them to extend that time to between 0.72 and 0.75 seconds, Zakrajsek said. [Winter Warriors: The Fitness Skills of 9 Olympic Sports] James Richards, a biomechanist at the University of Delaware who studies the mechanics of figure-skating jumps, does not think a quintuple is feasible for the human body.
| Read More » Is the Northeast Running Out of Road Salt? But that changed this week, as the northeastern United States got walloped with another heavy winter snowfall, and stocks of road salt hit dangerously low levels. Wednesday (Feb. 5), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency, citing a regional shortage of road salt. Read More » Fate of a Fertilized Egg: Why Some Embryos Don't Implant In the study, researchers found that human embryos typically produce a chemical called trypsin, which signals the womb to prepare its lining for implantation. But in embryos with significant genetic abnormalities, this chemical signal was altered, and it produced a stress response in the womb that could make implantation unlikely, the researchers said. The researchers likened this process to an "entrance exam" set by the womb — an embryo needs to pass this test in order to implant. But sometimes, the womb may make this exam too difficult or too easy, which could lead to the rejection of healthy embryos, or the implantation of embryos with development problems, the researchers said. Read More » Bumblebees Can Fly Higher Than Mount Everest  | Alpine bumblebees have the ability to fly at elevations greater than Mt. Everest, scientists have found. Bumblebees cannot survive the freezing conditions of Mt. Everest's peak. But researchers based at the University of California, Berkley simulated the low oxygen and low air density conditions of such high elevations to determine the limits of the bumblebee's flight capacity, and found the bees were capable of staying afloat at remarkably inhospitable elevations. The researchers placed the bees in clear, sealed boxes and experimentally adjusted the oxygen levels and air density using a hand pump to simulate increasing elevation, while keeping temperature constant.
| Read More » Drones Enter the Battle Against Elephant, Rhino Poachers  | Google gave the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) a $5 million Global Impact Award about a year ago to look for new ways to detect and deterwildlife crime. Now the conservation group and its partners in Namibia are just about ready to implement bungee-launched drones and a host of other poacher-tracking technologies in some of the country's national parks, WWF officials say. With such high profits at stake, poaching rings have adopted technologies like night vision goggles, silenced weapons and even helicopters to find and kill some of the world's most threatened mammals. This landscape is "not a level playing field" for less-equipped rangers in Namibia, some of whom are charged with managing vast protected areas, like the New Jersey-sized Etosha National Park, said Crawford Allan, who is leading the WWF's Wildlife Crime Technology Project.
| Read More » Greenland's First Coral Reef Found  | A cold-water coral that thrives in deep, dark water has been found growing off the shore of Greenland as a reef for the first time, scientists report. A Canadian research ship sampling water near southwest Greenland's Cape Desolation discovered the Greenland coral reef in 2012, when its equipment came back to the surface with pieces of coral attached. "At first, the researchers were swearing and cursing at the smashed equipment, and were just about to throw the pieces of coral back into the sea, when luckily, they realized what they were holding," Helle Jørgensbye, a doctoral student at the Technical University of Denmark who is studying the reef, said in a statement. Cold-water corals have been found off of Greenland's west coast before, but never the stone coral Lophelia pertusa, and never as a reef, according to a report by the researchers published in the journal ICES Insight.
| Read More » Astronauts to Watch Winter Olympic Games from Space Station  | The 2014 Winter Olympics are about to begin in Sochi, Russia, and astronauts will be watching the games from their vantage point high above Earth on the International Space Station. The space station currently plays host to a crew of six international astronauts and cosmonauts, a unique viewing party for one of the biggest worldwide events of the year. NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio expects that there will be some friendly international competition during the games, especially if the Russians and Americans compete against each other. You can watch the full space sports interview on Space.com, with Mastracchio also touching on the recent Super Bowl XLVIII.
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