|  Strange Star Chemistry May Reveal Secrets of Planetary Disks  | A dusty gas cloud around a young sun-like star is surprising astronomers with its strange chemistry, suggesting that such planet-forming disks may be more complicated than previously thought. An international team of scientists used the giant ALMA radio telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert to detect significant chemical changes in the star's dust cloud along a region known as the centrifugal barrier, where the pull of gravity no longer overcomes the centrifugal force rotating the gas. "Spectral lines of these minor [chemical] species are faint, because of their low abundances," lead scientist Nami Sakai of the University of Tokyo told Space.com in an email. Sakai led the team of scientists that studied the young star and its gas cloud about 450 light-years from Earth.
| Read More » Prehistoric Boy May Be Native American 'Missing Link'  | A prehistoric boy's DNA now suggests that ancient toolmakers long thought of as the first Americans may serve as a kind of "missing link" between Native Americans and the rest of the world, researchers say. The findings reveal these prehistoric toolmakers are the direct ancestors of many contemporary Native Americans, and are closely related to all Native Americans. Scientists investigated a prehistoric culture known as the Clovis, named after sites discovered near Clovis, N.M. Centuries of cold, nicknamed the "Big Freeze," helped wipe out the Clovis, as well as most of the large mammals in North America. The artifacts of the Clovis are found south of the giant ice sheets that once covered Canada, in most of North America, though not in South America.
| Read More » Construction crews uncover tusk of Ice Age mammoth in Seattle  | By Eric M. Johnson SEATTLE (Reuters) - Construction workers digging in a Seattle neighborhood have found the curved tusk of a mammoth, an ancient elephant relative that inhabited North America at least 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age. Seattle's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture said its paleontologists were confident that the fossil, uncovered on Tuesday, came from an Ice Age mammoth. "The discovery of a mammoth tusk in South Lake Union is a rare opportunity to directly study Seattle's ancient natural history," said curator Dr Christian Sidor. Crews were excavating for plumbing trenches in the city's bustling South Lake Union neighborhood when they found the tusk about 40 feet beneath ground level, said Jeff Estep, president of Transit Plumbing Inc, the subcontracting company involved in the dig.
| Read More » Ancient native boy's genome reignites debate over first Americans By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - For more than 20 years anthropologists have debated whether the first Americans arrived in the New World by walking over a land bridge across the Bering Strait, as millions of schoolchildren have been taught, or by sea from southwest Europe, perhaps in animal-skin kayaks. A new analysis challenges the out-of-Europe hypothesis, which has figured in a political debate over the rights of present-day Native American tribes. His DNA, they report, links today's Native Americans to ancient migrants from easternmost Asia. The study, published in the journal Nature, "is the final shovelful of dirt" on the European hypothesis, said anthropological geneticist Jennifer Raff of the University of Texas, co-author of a commentary on it in Nature. Read More » Jaw-inspiring: Ancient fish was pivotal in evolution of face, researchers find It's easy to take for granted that mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish - vertebrates just like people - have a face. The first creatures with a backbone - jawless fish from hundreds of millions of years ago - did not. With Romundina at the center of their work, Swedish and French researchers described in a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday the step-by-step development of the face as jawless vertebrates evolved into creatures with jaws. The evolution of the jaw led to development of the face. Read More » European GPS Satellites Pass Key Test in Orbit  | The four satellites that currently comprise the Galileo satellite constellation — Europe's version of the United States' GPS system— have passed a key test called In-Orbit Validation (IOV), European Space Agency officials announced Monday (Feb. 10). "IOV was required to demonstrate that the future performance that we want to meet when the system is deployed is effectively reachable," Sylvain Loddo, ESA's Galileo ground segment manager, said in a statement. The test campaign was a lengthy affair carried out across Europe, officials said. "ESA and our industrial partners had teams deployed in the field continuously for test operations," said Marco Falcone, ESA's Galileo system manager.
| Read More » NASA Sun-Watching Spacecraft Celebrates 4th Birthday with Amazing Video  | A NASA sun-studying probe celebrates four years in space this week, and the agency has released a stunning new video to mark the occasion. The amazing new video of the sun, which NASA released Tuesday, is a greatest-hits set from the space agency's powerful Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which is celebrating its fourth year in space. The video showcases some of SDO's most dramatic and beautiful images from the last 12 months. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory blasted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Feb. 11, 2010, on a mission to study solar activity and help scientists understand how variations in that activity affect life here on Earth.
| Read More » Fly Larva Crawls Inside Woman's Ear  | A woman in Taiwan had an unusual cause of her ear pain: a fruit fly larva was wriggling around inside her ear canal. An exam revealed a fruit fly larva moving around in her ear canal, and the skin close to her eardrum was eroded, according to the doctors at Tri-Service General Hospital, in Taipei. Her ear pain went away immediately, and two weeks later, her ear canal had healed, the report said. Dr. Richard Nelson, an emergency medicine physician at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who was not involved in the woman's case, said he has seen several types of insects in human ears, but not fruit fly larva.
| Read More » High-Res Satellites Help Track Whale Populations  | New high-resolution satellite imagery now allows researchers to spot and count whales from space, greatly expediting population analyses used in conservation efforts, according to a new report. "If you are very skilled, you can judge how far away it is and work out the species from the size and shape of the blow," said Peter Fretwell, a researcher for the British Antarctic Survey. To make whale counts more accurate and efficient, Fretwell's team used what is known as very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery to count a group of southern right whales breeding halfway up the coast of Argentina. The team chose to analyze southern right whales — a large species that grows to be roughly 45 to 55 feet (14 to 17 meters) long and travels around southern regions of the Pacific and Antarctic oceans — during this proof-of-concept study because the species tends to bask at the surface and breed in calm waters, making these whales relatively easy to spot from above.
| Read More » Oldest Fossil of Reptile Live Birth Found  | A new fossil that captures both birth and death reveals the earliest ancestors of the giant prehistoric sea predators called ichthyosaurs birthed their babies headfirst, according to a new study. Until now, researchers thought live birth first appeared in marine reptiles after they took to the seas, Motani said.
| Read More » Why Is It So Hard To Forecast Winter Storms?  | The frosty system is expected to make its way north over the next 24 hours, and forecasters say it could dump a mix of sleet and snow in a broad swath of the East Coast up to Maine. But, narrowing down what type of wintry precipitation will fall and exactly where can be challenging, experts say. "It's easier to forecast if precipitation is going to fall, in general, but the hard part is figuring out what form it's going to be," said Eli Jacks, chief of fire and public weather services at the National Weather Service (NWS) in Silver Spring, Md. "A lot of the challenge in forecasting this storm is whether it will stay all snow, or if it will be freezing rain and sleet mixed in." In the South, the NWS has cautioned that the ice storm could have "potentially catastrophic" and "crippling" effects, and the agency said more than an inch of ice could accumulate from central Georgia into South Carolina through Thursday morning (Feb. 13).
| Read More » Eastern US Winter Storm Captured in Satellite Photo  | The latest images from an Earth-watching satellite show frigid clouds veiling the eastern United States in a frightening sign of the snowstorm unfurling the region. The GOES-East spacecraft, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, captured this shot of the continental United States Wednesday (Feb. 12), as freezing rain, sleet, snow and strong winds, paralyzed travel across the Southeast. Forecasters have warned that an inch of ice could coat parts of Georgia and South Carolina. Perched in a geostationary orbit, the GOES-East satellite keeps a constant watch over the same part of the globe.
| Read More » China's Jade Rabbit moon rover awake but still malfunctioning  | China's Jade Rabbit moon rover has endured a long lunar night but is still malfunctioning, state media said on Thursday, after technical problems last month cast uncertainty over the country's first moon landing. Jade Rabbit, named after a lunar goddess in traditional Chinese mythology, landed to domestic fanfare in mid-December, on a mission to do geological surveys and hunt natural resources. But after awakening this week, Jade Rabbit is still not functioning properly, China National Radio said, citing Pei Zhaoyu, a spokesman for the lunar probe program. China has been increasingly ambitious in developing its space programs for military, commercial and scientific purposes.
| Read More » Winter Olympic Gold Medalists to Get Bonus Meteorite Medal Saturday  | Winning gold at the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia on Saturday (Feb. 15) — because on that day, and that day alone, earning a gold medal also means being awarded a piece of a rock that fell from space. Saturday marks exactly one year since a small near-Earth asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere over Russia and exploded over the Chelyabinsk Oblast (region). Over the past year, many fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite have been recovered, with some of the pieces heading to labs for study, many landing on the collectors' market, others going to museums and a small set being placed aside for a special set of medallions. Ten of those medals will be presented to those who place gold at the Sochi 2014 Olympics on the anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor fall.
| Read More » One Year Later, Russian Meteor Strike Sparks Asteroid Deflection Talks  | A year after the Chelyabinsk meteor slammed into the atmosphere above Russia, the world's space agencies have a new plan to address asteroid threats — including a possible mission to move an asteroid. The newly formed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG, pronounced "same page") bills itself as Earth's first line of technological defense if an asteroid threatens. Before that ever happens, however, the coalition aims to create space missions to explore the possibility of moving asteroids around to prove potential technologies that could one day protect Earth. "SMPAG will also develop and refine a set of reference missions that could be individually or cooperatively flown to intercept an asteroid," Detlef Koschny, an official in the European Space Agency's Space Situational Awareness Program office, said in a statement.
| Read More » Science, not muscle, driving many Olympic wins  | KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia (AP) — Nineteen-year-old Slovakian luger Josef Petrulak competed in the Sochi Olympics in a 22-year-old sled. That's right: His sled is three years older than he is. His German rivals get a new sled every year, designed by BMW and calibrated to whoosh faster, smoother and smarter every season.
| Read More » Curiosity Rover Conquers Martian Sand Dune (Video)  | A new video shows NASA's Mars rover Curiosity playing dune buggy, clambering over a drift of sand on its way toward a big Red Planet mountain. "At the start of the drive, the rover's right-front wheel was already at the crest of the 3-foot-tall (1-meter-tall) dune, with the rover still pointed uphill," NASA officials wrote in a description of the video, which was released Tuesday (Feb. 11). Curiosity crossed the dune to find a relatively smooth route to the foothills of Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the Red Planet sky. The 1-ton Curiosity rover landed in August 2012 to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.
| Read More » New US Military Space Plane Aims for 2017 Liftoff  | The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to award the first design contracts for the vehicle project — known as Experimental Spaceplane, or XS-1— in May or thereabouts, officials said. DARPA has high expectations for the XS-1 program, which it hopes can eventually launch 3,000- to 5,000-lb (1,361 to 2,268 kilograms) payloads to orbit for less than $5 million per flight — and to do it at least 10 times per year. "The vision here is to break the cycle of escalating space system costs, enable routine space access and hypersonic vehicles," XS-1 program manager Jess Sponable said Feb. 5 during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group.
| Read More » 'Corneal Melt': Arthritis Complication Lets Woman's Iris Slip Out  | A 61-year-old woman with rheumatoid arthritis suffered a serious repercussion of her condition: The irises of her eyes began to protrude, and she needed immediate surgery, according to a new report of her case. In people with rheumatoid arthritis, which causes high levels of inflammation throughout the body, a condition called "corneal melt" can occur, the report said. It is very rare for corneal melt to affect both eyes, said Dr. Mark Fromer, director of Fromer Eye Centers in New York City and an ophthalmologist at Lenox Hill Hospital.
| Read More » 3D Video of Swimming Sperm May Aid IVF  | A method for taking 3D movies of live sperm could help fertility clinics select the most viable cells for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Using the new technique, "we can observe how the sperm move and determine if that movement is affected by any abnormalities in their shape and structure," Giuseppe Di Caprio of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems of the National Research Council in Italy and Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. Di Caprio led the team that developed the new technique, detailed Tuesday (Feb. 11) in the journal Biomedical Optics Express. Doctors most commonly measure sperm concentration and mobility by visual inspection or by a process called computer-assisted sperm analysis (CASA).
| Read More » Hungry for Humans: What's Behind Deadly Animal Attacks? Dark reports began circulating in December, after the mutilated body of a 65-year-old man was found in northern India. The exact identity of the tiger hasn't yet been established — wildlife officials aren't even sure if it's one tiger or two — but that hasn't stopped villagers in India's Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand states from taking extra precautions when venturing outside their homes. The latest tiger-attack victim in India was Ram Charan, a 45-year-old irrigation contractor working near Jim Corbett National Park, a reserve established in 1936 to protect the region's iconic Bengal tigers and other wildlife. Read More » Chronic Infections Linked with Memory Problems Later in Life Chronic infections from common viruses and bacteria may lead to memory problems and cognitive decline later in life, according to a new study. In the new study, the researchers speculated that the same mechanism — inflammation from chronic infections damaging arteries — might gradually cause cognitive problems, too. The greater the number of chronic infections a patient in the study had, the worse he or she performed during various cognitive tests, according to the researchers, who presented their findings today (Feb. 13) at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference in San Diego. The researchers looked at data from 588 participants in the Northern Manhattan Study (NOMAS), a project started in 1990 at Columbia University to determine stroke risk factors in the local Manhattan community. Read More » Wow! Sochi Winter Olympics Park Seen from Space at Night (Photo)  | From their exclusive lookout more than 200 miles above Earth, the six astronauts and cosmonauts currently living aboard the International Space Station have a stunning view of the 2014 Winter Olympics park in Sochi, Russia. NASA released an image this week showing the brightly lit Sochi sporting complex, captured by one of the Expedition 38 crewmembers aboard the orbiting outpost. Like millions of other people around the globe, the astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station are keeping tabs on the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, which kicked off on Friday (Feb. 7). With two crewmembers from the United States, one from Japan and three from Russia, NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio told Space.com last month that there might be some friendly competition during the games — and that they could even wager their space food to raise the stakes.
| Read More » 17 Developing Countries That Love Social Media More than the US The U.S. may be the birthplace of Facebook, but Americans are far from the most social-network obsessed people on the planet. Egypt, Russia, the Philippines and 14 other developing countries outpace the U.S. in the proportion of internet users who log on to social sites. The data comes from a new Pew Research Center report that examines technology adoption in developing nations. The report finds that a majority of Internet users in the 24 countries surveyed use social media, but smartphone users are still a minority. Read More » High Risk of Blood Clots Even 12 Weeks After Pregnancy Pregnant women have an increased risk of developing blood clots, and now a new study shows this risk remains elevated for at least 12 weeks after delivering a baby — twice as long as previously thought. Of these women, about 1,000 women had a blood clot, including some who suffered a stroke, heart attack or deep vein thrombosis from their clot. The researchers found that women's risk of blood clot peaked around the time of delivery. "Even though these complications are very rare, they can be catastrophic," said study researcher Dr. Hooman Kamel, an assistant professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Read More » China Moon Rover Survives Lunar Night, 'Stands a Chance' of Recovery  | Reports of the death of China's first moon rover, Yutu, have been greatly exaggerated, according to the country's state-run media. The Yutu moon rover, which suffered a potentially serious mechanical malfunction last month, is now awake and has apparently survived its second lunar night, China's Xinhua news agency reported today (Feb. 13). Scientists on the ground are still trying to pinpoint the problems that caused the rover's mechanical malfunctions, but Yutu (which translates to "Jade Rabbit") can now receive signals normally. Yutu's mechanical problems arose as the rover entered its second lunar night in late January.
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