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 | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Scientists using Europe's comet-orbiting Rosetta spacecraft have discovered that the complicated ancient body is coated with surprisingly simple organic molecules and surrounded by a changing cloud of gases, according to new research released on Thursday. In November it released a piggyback-riding spacecraft, which descended to the comet's surface for a series of independent studies. The Rosetta mission is intended to shed light on the solar system's early days by studying one of its pristine comet remnants.
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Countdown to catastrophe: Doomsday Clock moved closer to midnight
(Reuters) - Rising threats from climate change and nuclear arsenals prompted the scientists who maintain the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic countdown to global catastrophe, to move it two minutes closer to midnight on Thursday, its first shift in three years. The Doomsday Clock, devised by the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, now stands at three minutes to midnight, or doomsday. It has been set as close as two minutes to midnight, in 1953 when the United States tested a hydrogen bomb, and as far as 17 minutes from midnight, in 1991 as the Cold War expired. "Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," Bulletin Executive Director Kennette Benedict told a news conference.
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Gripping Tale: Hominin Hands Hold Clues to Tool Use
This capability depends not only on the extraordinarily powerful human brain, but also the strength and dexterity of the human hand. In new research, the scientists looked at a major factor behind the power and precision of the human grip, which is the structure of the metacarpals, the bones in the palm. "The styloid process is one of the key features of a suite of morphological characteristics of the human hand that is linked to forceful use of the thumb during tool use," said study co-author Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kent in England. Previous research has suggested that this styloid process was found only in members of the human lineage, which all belong to the genus Homo.
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Huge Milky Way Gas Bubbles Clocked at 2 Million Mph
 | Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have clocked the speed of gas bubbles, known as Fermi bubbles, at a whopping 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h). "A few million years ago, there was a very energetic event at the galactic center, and we're seeing a remnant," lead author Andrew Fox, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said at a press conference this month. Fox presented the new Hubble observations at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, revealing the , and agethe Fermi bubbles. Fermi bubbles were first discovered in 2010 by scientists using NASA's Fermi Large Area Telescope, which revealed two lobes of material protruding from the center of the Milky Way.
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China and Europe Will Team Up for Robotic Space Mission
 | China and Europe aim to launch a joint space-science mission by 2021. On Monday (Jan. 19), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) issued a call for proposals for a robotic space mission that the two organizations will develop jointly. "The goal of the present Call is to define a scientific space mission to be implemented by ESA and CAS as a cooperative endeavor between the European and Chinese scientific communities," ESA officials wrote in a statement Monday. All proposals must be signed by two lead investigators, one based in Europe and the other in China, ESA officials said.
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Surprise! Fish Lurk in Antarctica's Dark Underworld
 | In a cold and dark underwater world, where a never-ending rain of rocks keeps the seafloor barren, researchers were startled to find fish, crustaceans and jellyfish investigating a submersible camera after drilling through nearly 2,500 feet (740 meters) of Antarctic ice. "This is the closest we can get to something like Europa," Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a chief scientist on the drilling project, said, referring to Jupiter's icy moon. Researchers with the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project punched through the ice with a custom hot-water drill on Jan. 8 and discovered the marine life on Jan. 16. The WISSARD drillers are crunching through the ice with the same setup used to reach Antarctica's subglacial Lake Whillans in 2013, when scientists grabbed the first evidence of microbial life from a lake under the ice sheet.
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Melting Glaciers Pose a Carbon Menace
 | Melting glaciers dump massive amounts of carbon into the world's oceans, a new study finds. The organic carbon could be a temporary boon for tiny creatures at the bottom of the aquatic food chain that gobble the compound as food, but if this manna disappears because the glaciers have vanished, the overfed ocean ecosystems may collapse, the study authors warned. We do not know how different ecological systems will react to a new influx of carbon," study co-author Robert Spencer, an assistant professor of oceanography at Florida State University, said in a statement. Organic carbon is derived from plants or animals.
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Why Rain Gives Off That Fresh, Earthy Smell
The phenomenon was first characterized (as the familiar smell after a light rain) by two Australian scientists in 1964, but until now, researchers didn't understand the physical mechanism behind it. "They talked about oils emitted by plants, and certain chemicals from bacteria, that lead to this smell you get after a rain following a long dry spell," Cullen Buie, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said in a statement.
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Art embraces science in new British play 'Oppenheimer'
 | LONDON (AP) — Suddenly, scientists are sexy. With Benedict Cumberbatch nominated for multiple trophies as Alan Turing and Eddie Redmayne turning heads as Stephen Hawking, young British actors playing scientists are all the rage this awards season.
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Staying Home & Watching TV May Reduce Flu Spread
Staying at home and watching TV during a flu epidemic may actually reduce the spread of the disease, according to a new study of the 2009 "swine flu" epidemic. Researchers analyzed the television-viewing habits of people in central Mexico during spring 2009, when that year's H1N1 flu epidemic began. At that time, officials in Mexico City implemented measures to reduce people's contact with one another (a public health strategy called "social distancing"). They closed public schools and canceled large public events.
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Human 'Atlas' Reveals Where Proteins Reside in the Body
 | A new, detailed map of the proteins found in human tissues reveals exactly which proteins are special to organs such as the liver or brain, and which ones are common across all tissues in the body. Understanding how protein production varies across different tissues in the body, and which proteins are made in each organ will help scientists better study cancer and other diseases in which proteins don't function properly, the researchers said. The findings could also "help explain some side effects of drugs and thus might have consequences for future drug development," said Mathias Uhlén, who led the work and is a professor of microbiology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Other proteins were found in specific organs.
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Can't Exercise for 30 Minutes Today? Any Activity Is Better than None
Health officials recommend that people get 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, but some researchers argue that this recommendation may set the bar too high for some people, and that guidelines should instead focus on getting people to be just a little bit more active. The World Health Organization says that people are sufficiently active if they get at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity a day, five days a week, or more than 20 minutes of vigorous physical activity a day, three times a week (or an equivalent amount of exercise). However, more than a third of adults worldwide don't meet these physical activity guidelines, and some people may be discouraged by the recommendations, especially if they are typically sedentary, said Philipe de Souto Barreto, of the University Hospital of Toulouse in France. Although the WHO recommendations are indeed linked with health benefits, a number of studies have now shown that getting less than the recommended level of physical activity still provides health benefits, compared with being completely sedentary, de Souto Barreto said.
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NASA Finds Mysterious Bright Spot on Dwarf Planet Ceres: What Is It?
 | A strange, flickering white blotch found on the dwarf planet Ceres by a NASA spacecraft has scientists scratching their heads. The white spot on Ceres in a series of new photos taken on Jan. 13 by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is rapidly approaching the round dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. "Yes, we can confirm that it is something on Ceres that reflects more sunlight, but what that is remains a mystery," Marc Rayman, mission director and chief engineer for the Dawn mission, told Space.com in an email. "We do not know what the white spot is, but it's certainly intriguing," Rayman said.
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