|  Richard III DNA Test Sparks Controversy  | King Richard III has been dead for more than 500 years, but his bones continue to ignite fresh controversy. The medieval king, unearthed from a Leicester parking lot in 2012, has been the center of debate over where and how his body should be reburied. "Why is the University of Leicester doing this, and why is it doing it without any consultation?" said John Ashdown-Hill, an independent historian involved with the search for the bones. The DNA testing will add very little to scientific knowledge, and it breaks agreements with Buckingham Palace made before the University got involved in the Richard III search, Ashdown-Hill told Live Science.
| Read More » Secret World of Ocean Garbage Patch Microbes Revealed  | There's a secret world of microbes hidden on the plastic littering the oceans, and scientists are untangling how these mysterious microbial communities, dubbed the "plastisphere," are impacting the ocean ecosystem. Researchers have found that seabirds often ingest this debris, but little was known about how sea debris affected the entire ocean ecosystem. The microbes also look markedly different from ordinary marine microbes, the scientists said. But the researchers didn't understand exactly how those microbes got on the plastic, or whether they were affecting the ocean ecology.
| Read More » Higher BPA Detected in People After Handling Receipts People are exposed to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) mainly through foods and beverages, especially those in cans. But BPA, a potentially harmful chemical, is also found on receipts, and new research shows the substance can indeed be absorbed into people's bodies through the skin when they handle receipt paper. BPA, which is used in some plastics, the lining of cans, and other food packaging, is believed to have hormone-disrupting properties and has been linked to various health problems, ranging from obesity in teenagers to reproductive problems in adults. BPA is also used in thermal receipt paper as a color developer, and is found in other paper products, too. Read More » Virtual Reality Treatment Relieves Amputee's Phantom Pain  | Amputees who suffer from phantom-limb pain could get some relief, thanks to a potential new experimental treatment involving virtual reality. One man who suffered severe phantom pain for 48 years after his arm was amputated reported a dramatic reduction in his pain after the experimental treatment, in which signals from his limb stump controlled a virtual reality arm, according to a case study detailed today (Feb. 25) in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. After people lose an arm or a leg, they often experience painful sensations of their missing limb, known as phantom pain. As much as 70 percent of amputees experience phantom pain, which can be chronic and debilitating.
| Read More » Long-Sought Quark-Formation Process Finally Found  | Scientists have found traces of an ultra-rare process to form top quarks, one of the particles that make up protons and neutrons. And that process seems to operate just as predicted by the Standard Model, the long-standing, yet incomplete, model that describes the subatomic particles that make up the universe. Though the new results don't rule out other physics theories to explain the existence of dark matter and energy, they do suggest scientists have to look elsewhere for any hint of as-yet unknown physics. In 1995, scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., discovered the top quark, the heaviest subatomic particle known.
| Read More » US Makes No Dent in Obesity The obesity rate among children and adults in the United States did not change significantly over the past decade, new research suggests. About 35 percent of American adults and 17 percent of children and teens were obese during the 2011-2012 period, according to a study published today (Feb. 25) in the journal JAMA. "That's the first time we've seen a decrease since we have been tracking obesity levels in the U.S.," said study researcher Cynthia L. Ogden, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The new report follows previous data showing a decline in the obesity rate of 2- to 4-year-olds in low-income families. Read More » Peru Park Sets Record for Reptile, Amphibian Biodiversity  | For reptiles and amphibians, southern Peru's Manu National Park is the most diverse protected area on the planet. Deforestation, gold mining and oil and gas drilling are closing in on the buffer zone around the park.
| Read More » California's Springtime Wonders Struck by Drought  | California springtime usually brings spectacular, fiery displays of flowers and flowing waterfalls, but this year's drought is putting a damper on the state's natural wonders. At Yosemite National Park, the ongoing drought dried up waterfalls earlier this month, including flaming Horsetail Fall. Horsetail Fall only flows in the winter and early spring, fed by sun-warmed snowmelt. The good news for shutterbugs is the atmospheric pattern that has California locked in a terrific drought meant clear skies over Yosemite during the peak firefall conditions.
| Read More » Odd Cause of Humans' Dark Skin Proposed Skin cancer could have directly driven the evolution of dark skin in humans, a study on people with albinism in modern Africa suggests. Albino people in sub-Saharan Africa almost universally die of skin cancer — and at young ages, according to a new paper published today (Feb. 25) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. These modern tragedies point to a potential reason early humans evolved dark skin, said Mel Greaves, a cell biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research in the United Kingdom. "Cancer has been dismissed by effectively all scientists in the past" as the reason for the evolution of black skin, Greaves told Live Science. Read More » Water Found in Atmosphere of Nearby Alien Planet  | Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of one of the first alien planets ever identified by astronomers. Advances in the technique used to scan the atmosphere of this "hot Jupiter" could help scientists determine how many of the billions of planets in the Milky Way contain water like Earth, researchers said. The exoplanet Tau Boötis b was discovered in 1996, when the search for worlds outside our solar system was just kicking off. At about 51 light-years away, Tau Boötis b is one of the nearest known exoplanets to Earth.
| Read More » Sultan of Schwing: How Moroccan Ruler Could Sire 1,000 Kids Revealed  | Sultan Moulay Ismaïl of Morocco, "The Bloodthirsty," reputedly sired hundreds of children and perhaps more than a 1,000. Now computer simulations suggest this could have been possible if the ruler had sex about once a day for 32 years.
| Read More » Watery Graveyard: Fossils Reveal 1st Evidence of Mass Marine Die-Offs  | Dozens of fossilized whales, seals and other marine animals have been discovered piled up in an ancient tidal flat in northern Chile, providing the first fossil evidence of repeated mass die-offs, according to a new report. Four distinct layers of bones appear at the site, suggesting the mass die-offs — also known as mass strandings — occurred repeatedly over the course of thousands of years, some time between about 6 million and 9 million years ago, an international team of scientists report. Whale bones dominate the site, but the researchers have also identified 10 other types of marine animals in each layer, including aquatic sloths and a brand-new seal species. The scientists think the animals were most likely poisoned-to-death from so-called harmful algal blooms, similar to the blooms that cause red tides today.
| Read More » Huge Peanut-Shaped Asteroid Buzzes Earth in NASA Video  | A large asteroid shaped like a cosmic peanut zipped safely by Earth this month, and a new NASA video retells the entire space rock encounter as it happened using impressive radar images.
| Read More » Facebook Tops List of 25 Best Companies for Internships Maybe it's because Mark Zuckerberg knows something about getting started young. Facebook tops the list of the country's best companies for internships. That's acccording to online career site Glassdoor, which combed through thousands of company reviews shared by interns to reveal its annual ranking of the 25 Highest-Rated Companies Hiring Interns. Read More » The Truth About How Mom's Stress Affects Baby's Brain Here at the University of Denver, psychologists are working to understand how the early environment affects a child's life course — but the environment that researchers Elysia Poggi Davis and Pilyoung Kim are interested in isn't just the home or the neighborhood, but also the womb. Poor women are far more at risk. Read More » Heat extremes increase despite global warming hiatus: scientists  | By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Hot weather extremes have increased around the world in the past 15 years despite a slowdown in the overall pace of global warming, a study showed on Wednesday. Heat extremes are among the damaging impacts of climate change as they can raise death rates, especially among the elderly, damage food crops and strain everything from water to energy supplies. "Observational data show a continued increase of hot extremes over land during the so-called global warming hiatus," scientists in Switzerland, Australia and Canada wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change. This hiatus has heartened those who doubt that governments need to make big, urgent investments to shift from fossil fuels towards renewable energies.
| Read More » Quantum Dropleton: Weird New Particle Acts Like Liquid  | Physicists can spend years seeking new particles to illuminate aspects of nature's laws, but an international team decided instead to make their own particles. Called a dropleton or quantum droplet, the newly created "particle" is actually a short-lived cluster of electrons and positive charges called "holes." Like other so-called quasiparticles, dropletons act like single particles. At the Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany, and Joint Institute for Lab Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, researchers made an agglomeration of electrons and holes that was bigger than any created before — 200 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, across. Before now, physicists had created two-pair groups of electrons and holes, but never such an agglomeration that could form this liquid-like quantum droplet or dropleton.
| Read More » The Myths of Charles Krauthammer: The Drinking Game (Op-Ed)  | Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University and was recognized in 2007, with other IPCC authors, for contributing to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a lead author on the "Observed Climate Variability and Change" chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report. In his recent Washington Post Op-Ed "The myth of 'settled science,'" Charles Krauthammer delivers on only one small piece of what his headline promises: Myth. His commentary is a veritable laundry list of shopworn talking points, so predictable now in climate change denialist lore that one can make a drinking game out of it.
| Read More » At Mars, Is the Doctor In? (Video)  | This article was adapted by Kai Staats from one that appeared on the European Space Agency blog Chronicles from Concordia. Recently, the MarsCrew134 Analogue Astronaut Expedition simulated a mission to Mars over the course of two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the Utah desert. Dr. Susan Jewell, MarsCrew134 Medical Officer and founder of the International Space Surgery Consortium, led an experiment to play out the above emergency medical scenario. The scenario began outdoors with a crew member down.
| Read More » Taking a Page from Eliot Ness to Fight Wildlife Trafficking (Op-Ed)  | This piece was originally published on Huffington Post. Poachers are expanding their market opportunities and are now even hacking off elephants' toenails for new "traditional" medicine cures. Raising awareness about the plight of elephants is, without doubt, necessary. It has galvanized Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea, the Vice-Chair of the Clinton Foundation, to mobilize support from presidents of elephant-range states to take concrete action to halt the slaughter of elephants for their ivory.
| Read More » With Simple, Homemade Telescopes, You Can Explore the Stars (Op-Ed)  | One of my greatest joys in amateur astronomy has been in building my own equipment. The great Clyde Tombaugh originally inspired me to do this — a Kansas farmer's son, Tombaugh's plans for attending college were frustrated when a hailstorm ruined his family's crops. With no money for college, Tombaugh was devastated. Tombaugh was not one to quit, however, so in 1926, he built several telescopes with lenses and mirrors he ground himself — on a fence post! From broken farm equipment, he built his own equatorial mount so his telescope could move with the rotation of the Earth.
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