|  Guggenheim Painting Proven to Be a Fake  | A painting in the Guggenheim collection initially attributed to French modern artist Fernand Léger has languished out of view for decades after it was suspected to be a fake. The influential American art patron Peggy Guggenheim bought the painting, believing it to be part of Léger's "Contraste de Formes" (Contrasts of Forms), an abstract series created between 1913 and 1914 that breaks up figures into schematic units. (Léger was a contemporary of Pablo Picasso.) In the 1970s, Léger scholar Douglas Cooper voiced serious skepticism about its authenticity. Without any consensus from experts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the current steward of the painting, has never exhibited nor catalogued the artwork.
| Read More » Astronaut Hall of Fame to Add Two Record-Setting Space Shuttle Fliers  | A spacewalker who flew a record seven times into orbit and the first American woman to complete a long-duration space station mission will be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut of Hall of Fame, officials announced on Friday (Feb. 7). Former NASA astronauts Jerry Ross and Shannon Lucid were revealed as the Astronaut Hall of Fame's 2014 honorees during a ceremony held Friday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. "[Lucid and Ross] are extraordinary astronauts who made history as important and frequent crewmembers on shuttle missions," Dan Brandenstein, a four-time shuttle flier and 2003 Astronaut Hall of Fame inductee, remarked. Ross and Lucid were chosen through a selection process overseen by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which Brandenstein heads as chair.
| Read More » Mysterious 'Boom' Rattles Maryland  | At around Noon on Thursday (Feb. 6), firefighter Michael Maykrantz was on duty in Ocean City, Md., when the doors of the firehouse started rattling and the floor vibrated and shook. Was it an earthquake, a sonic boom or some other mysterious phenomenon? Despite a number of official investigations, some frazzled Maryland residents still aren't sure what happened. In 2011, a 5.8-magnitude temblor with an epicenter in Virginia shook the surrounding area, including Maryland and Washington, D.C.
| Read More » Hubble Telescope Helps Solve Mystery of Universe's Massive Galactic Burnouts  | Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers are learning why some massive galaxies hit their peak young and quit making stars when the universe was less than a quarter of its current age. These burnouts are sometimes nicknamed "red and dead" galaxies because of their reddish color, compared to the blue hues of star-making galaxies, according to NASA. Strangely, these dead galaxies are just as massive as today's large spiral galaxies, but with stars squeezed into an area three times smaller. "This means that the density of stars was 10 times greater," Sune Toft, an astrophysics and cosmology professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, explained in a statement.
| Read More » NASA Satellite Sees Sochi Winter Olympics Venues from Space (Photos)  | The 2014 Winter Olympics officially began with an extravagant opening ceremony in Sochi, Russia, today (Feb. 7), and even NASA has embraced the spirit of the games with striking new satellite views of Olympic sites from orbit. The newly released photos of Sochi Winter Olympics venues from space were captured by a NASA instrument on the Earth-watching Terra satellite on Jan. 4. NASA unveiled the images on Thursday, with one photo revealing a view of Sochi Olympic Park Coastal Cluster, on the coast of the Black Sea, as it appears from orbit. "The Olympic Park Coastal Cluster for indoor sports appears as a circular area on the shoreline in the bottom center of the image," NASA officials wrote in an image description.
| Read More » Winter Stargazing: Skywatching Tips and Tricks for Cold Northern Nights Such conditions might make even the most committed stargazer think twice before venturing outdoors. The end of winter is in sight though. Read More » Sochi Winter Olympics Launch with Space-Flown Torch, Cosmonaut Flag-Bearers  | The 22nd Winter Olympic Games were launched in Sochi, Russia on Friday (Feb. 7) using a torch that flew to the International Space Station and back. The space-themed Olympic spectacle, which took place as part of an elaborate opening ceremony, also featured cosmonauts helping to raise the Russian and Olympic flags in the Fisht Olympic Stadium and the projection of recorded scenes from the historic spacewalk that carried the Olympic torch into open outer space for the first time. (In the U.S., NBC, which has exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics, will air the opening ceremony on tape delay beginning at 7:30 p.m. EST.) The lighting of the stadium's Olympic Cauldron by Russian star athletes Irina Rodnina and Vladislav Tretiak using the space station flown torch signaled the ceremonial start of the Winter Games and the end of the longest torch relay in Olympic history.
| Read More » University studies if quakes in North Texas linked to fracking By Jana Pruet DALLAS (Reuters) - A team of scientists has launched a study of seismic activity in North Texas to determine if fracking may be the cause of a series of earthquakes that have rattled two towns in the region since November. The seismic activity in Azle and Reno, northwest of Fort Worth, has national implications, with opponents of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, saying what is happening in the towns points to the dangers of the energy source extraction method. "It's important that we don't rush to conclusions," Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics at Southern Methodist University and leader of the research team, told a news conference in Dallas on Friday. DeShon said the start of the earthquake series has coincided with start of injection wells used for fracking in the area. Read More » Job Tenure: Men Leaving Sooner, Women Staying Longer Specifically, men and never-married women have seen declines in job tenure, while job stability has increased sharply for married women. "That decrease may not seem dramatic, but it marks a broad and significant trend," said Matissa Hollister, a sociologist from McGill University and one of the study's authors. Read More » Unsettled Science Behind Proposal to Lift Gray Wolf Protections, Panel Says  | The drawn-out battle over the fate of gray wolves in the United States continues. An independent panel of experts said Friday (Feb. 7) there is wide disagreement about some of the science the Fish and Wildlife Service used to make its case for ousting gray wolves from the Endangered Species list. The review could hinder the FWS proposal to lift federal protections for the animals throughout much of the United States. "It was a very clean process and we got a unanimous result," said Steven Courtney, one of the scientists charged with setting up the independent panel at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
| Read More » Europe's Oldest Human Footprints Found  | Footprints pressed into the mud of modern-day England more than 800,000 years ago might represent the oldest-known human tracks ever found in Europe, archaeologists say. A storm exposed the footprints at the archaeologically rich coastal site of Happisburgh in Norfolk in May 2013. "They're without doubt the oldest human footprints in Europe and some of the oldest in the world," Simon Parfitt, an archaeologist with the Natural History Museum, said in a video explaining the finds. Scientists had already suspected humans lived at Happisburgh more than 800,000 years ago, because of stone tools found at the site.
| Read More » Female Spiders Judge Mates by Their Gift Wrap  | "Females evaluate the physical condition of a male based on his silk wrapping performance, and how the gifts he brings look," study researcher Mariana Trillo, of Uruguay's Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, said in a statement. "Also, silk wrapping is a condition dependent trait and most probably allows a Paratrechalea ornata female to acquire information about her potential mate, including body condition and quality." Because this species is most active during sunset and at night, white silk is easier to see over long distances. What's more, males in better physical shape produced whiter gifts because they used more silk in their wrapping, while the poor wrapping job of less healthy males resulted in a duller package.
| Read More » Ariane 5 Rocket Blasts Off on 250th Launch with 2 Satellites  | Dual payloads to broadcast television and broadband signals for Asia Broadcast Satellite and French and Italian security forces rocketed into orbit on an Ariane 5 rocket Thursday on Arianespace's landmark 250th launch. The fiery evening liftoff from the frontier of the Amazon jungle began a half-hour ascent, with the Ariane 5's twin solid rocket boosters expending more than a million pounds of pre-packed powder propellant, and the launcher's hydrogen-fueled first and second stages thrusting toward an orbit reaching as high as 22,330 miles above Earth. The launch occurred at 2130 GMT (4:30 p.m. EST), one hour later than planned as ground teams waited for stormy weather to pass over the space base in Kourou, French Guiana. Stephàne Israël, Arianespace's chairman and CEO, hailed the launch as a success in remarks to VIPs inside the Guiana Space Center's Jupiter control center.
| Read More » NASA Spacecraft Snaps More than 200,000 Photos of Mercury (Image)  | A probe orbiting Mercury has beamed more than 200,000 images to ground controllers on Earth, and it's still going strong. NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has been in orbit around Mercury since 2011. Originally, scientists only expected the probe to beam 1,000 or 2,000 images of Mercury home during the life of its mission, but the spacecraft surpassed that goal long ago. "Returning over 200,000 images from orbit about Mercury is an impressive accomplishment for the mission, and one I've been personally counting down for the last few months," Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab's Nancy Chabot, instrument scientist for the Mercury Dual Imaging System on MESSENGER, said in a statement.
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