Barren Deserts Can Host Complex Ecosystems

	Digging for Space History in Surplus Sale of NASA-Flown Gold A government surplus auction is selling a NASA space artifact that may be worth its weight in gold. As of Thursday (Jan. 15), the gold plates had attracted seven bids totaling almost $160,000. They are currently the only lot listed under the website's "Shuttle/Hubble" category and originate from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The GSA auction site offers surplus property from many federal agencies, NASA included. Read More » Barren Deserts Can Host Complex Ecosystems Life forms including bacteria, algae, fungi and lichens, as well as plants such as mosses and liverworts, can band together to create biological soil crusts in dry, nutrient-starved environments. "These are incredibly diverse microbial communities with hundreds of different organisms," said Jason Raymond, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. Raymond is the senior author of three new papers in the scientific journal Genome Association, which shed light on the microbes that commonly set up shop in biological soil crusts in Utah's Moab Desert. Figuring out how life thrives in biological soil crusts, in conditions that would fell most other life on the planet, will help in gauging the habitability of other worlds. Read More » 2014 Was Earth's Hottest Year On Record Global temperatures in 2014 shattered earlier records, making 2014 the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880, U.S. scientists reported today (Jan. 16). Every continent set heat records last year, and the Pacific Ocean was unusually warm despite a no-show El Niño. The warmth on land and in the oceans broke previous temperature records set in 2005 and 2010, the scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced. Five months set new heat records: May, June, August, September and December. Read More » Risky Cocktail: Many Americans May Mix Alcohol with Medications More than 40 percent of Americans who drink alcohol also take medications that may interact with their booze, a new study finds. Medications ranging from sleeping pills to blood pressure drugs can cause problems when taken with alcohol, such as nausea, headaches, loss of coordination, internal bleeding, heart problems and difficulties in breathing, said study co-author Rosalind Breslow, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the study, Breslow and her colleagues looked at the results of surveys from nearly 27,000 men and women ages 20 and over that were conducted between 1999 and 2010. The participants reported how much alcohol they drank during the past year, and which medications they used over the past month. Read More » Last year was Earth's hottest on record, U.S. scientists say By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Last year was Earth's hottest on record in new evidence that people are disrupting the climate by burning fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the air, two U.S. government agencies said on Friday. The White House said the studies, by the U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), showed climate change was happening now and that action was needed to cut rising world greenhouse gas emissions. Last year was the warmest, ahead of 2010, undermining claims by some skeptics that global warming has stopped in recent years. Read More » Treasure Hunters Find Mysterious Shipwreck in Lake Michigan Beneath the cold waves of Lake Michigan rests an aging shipwreck, its wooden planks encrusted with brown-and-gray zebra mussels, that may be the remnants of a 17th-century ship called the Griffin, two Michigan-based treasure hunters say. French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle built the Griffin in 1679, but it was lost in Lake Michigan the same year. In 2011, Michigan-based treasure hunters Kevin Dykstra and Frederick Monroe found a shipwreck as they were searching for the $2 million in gold that, according to local legend, fell from a ferry crossing Lake Michigan in the 1800s, they told WZZM, a western Michigan news station. "I didn't go down there with the expectation of seeing a shipwreck — I can tell you that," Dykstra told Live Science. Read More » 'Smart Shoe' Devices Could Charge Up as You Walk One of the devices, the "shock harvester," generates power when the heel of your shoe hits the ground. The harvesters can be connected to electronics inside your shoe that track things like speed, movement and temperature. "Both [devices] are based on the same principle — electromagnetic induction," said Klevis Ylli, a doctoral student at the Hahn-Schickard-Gesellschaft Institute of Micromachining and Information Technology in Germany, and lead author of the paper outlining the new energy harvesting devices. Read More » A Bit of Walking Takes Strain Out of Running a Marathon Think that slowing down and walking a little during a marathon will ruin your time? Maybe not: A new study finds that among amateur runners, those who walked for part of a marathon had similar times compared with those who ran the whole way. The participants underwent three months of training to prepare for the marathon (which is 26.2 miles, or 42.2 km) in Kassel, Germany, in May 2013. The participants were divided into two groups: a "running-only" group, who ran the full marathon, and a "run/walk" group, who stopped and walked for 1 minute every 1.5 miles. Read More »