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United Launch Alliance Wants Your Vote to Name New Rocket
 | United Launch Alliance — the rocket company that launched NASA's New Horizons probe to Pluto — is asking people around the world to help name a new kind of booster. People have until April 6 to vote on three names — Eagle, Freedom or GalaxyOne — for the ULA rocket that the company plans to use for most of its future launches. The three names are finalists from more than 400 suggestions submitted by ULA employees and space enthusiasts earlier this year. "ULA's new rocket represents the future of space — innovative, affordable and reliable," Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO, said in a statement.
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Ancient Moon Crater Named After Amelia Earhart
 | Scientists have named a crater on the moon for perhaps the most famous female aviator of all time: Amelia Earhart. The massive crater, provisionally named Crater Earhart, was found thanks to to data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission (GRAIL). A team from Purdue University has been testing a new technique that sharpens the GRAIL observations of the moon to see smaller-scale features, like ridges and valleys.
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NASA Astronaut Already Feels at Home in Space as 1-Year Journey Begins
 | NASA's Scott Kelly — one of two people spending a year on the International Space Station — already feels like the orbiting outpost is home. "It's great to be up here," veteran astronaut Kelly said during a live interview from the space station with NASA administrator Charles Bolden today (March 30). NASA officials hope that the research Kornienko and Kelly conduct on the station during their stay could help send astronauts to Mars by the 2030s. At the moment, NASA scientists know a lot about what happens to astronauts after six months in weightlessness — the usual amount of time a crewmember spends on the station.
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Pesticides in Fruit Could Damage Sperm
For men who are having fertility problems, eating lots of pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables may be bad news, a new study suggests. Among the men in the study, who were all attending a fertility clinic, those who ate lots of fruits and vegetables known to contain high levels of pesticides had about half as many sperm, and almost a third fewer normal sperm, than men who consumed less of the toxin-laden produce. "These results do not mean you should stop consuming fruits and vegetables," said Dr. Jorge Chavarro, the senior author of the new study and a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard University's School of Public Health. Rather, the study suggests that men seeking a healthy sperm count should eat fruit and vegetables that are organically grown, or known to be low in pesticide residues, Chavarro said.
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Tampons Can Screen for Leaking Sewage
 | Ordinary tampons can detect sewage pollution, a new study shows. "It's cheap, it's easy and it does the detective work," said study co-author David Lerner, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. But study author Dave Chandler, the Sheffield graduate student who came up with the tampon test, needed a cheap way to monitor stream pollution, Lerner said. Chandler realized that tampons could absorb optical brighteners, which are additives in laundry detergent, toothpaste and other cleaners that make colors and whites seem cleaner and brighter.
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Dutch architects show off 3D house-building prowess
Dutch architects are using a giant 3D printer to construct a prototype house in a bid to pave the way to a sustainable, environmentally-friendly, future for construction. DUS Architects of Amsterdam began construction of the house in 2014 and the prototype walls can already be seen - and touched - on site by curious visitors. The house structure uses a plastic heavily based on plant oil that co-founder Hans Vermeulen, who initiated the project, says is waste-free and eco-friendly. Vermeulen says the building industry is one of the most polluting and inefficient around, whereas with 3D-printing, there is no waste, reduced transportation costs, and everything can be melted down and recycled.
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Solitair device aims to takes guesswork out of sun safety
By Matthew Stock Scientists in the UK have developed a new wearable device that monitors the correct amount of sun exposure for a person's skin type in order to stay healthy. The Solitair device consists of a tiny sensor to measure how much sunlight the user is exposed to, with the information synchronized to a smartphone app that offers real time recommendations on when it is time to seek out some shade. The developers hope Solitair will reduce the confusion that surrounds just how much sun we should be getting. UVA and UVB radiation from the sun damage skin-cell DNA and are partly responsible for skin ageing and for promoting skin cancer.
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'Super' Termite Hybrid May Wreak Havoc on Florida
 | The two most invasive termite species in the world are shacking up, producing a potentially powerful new termite hybrid in South Florida, a new study finds. Together, the Asian (Coptotermes gestroi) and Formosan (Coptotermes formosanus) subterranean termite species cause an estimated $40 billion worth of damage worldwide, the researchers said. Both types of termite have evolved separately for hundreds of thousands of years, but now human movement and trade have brought the invasive species together in Taiwan, Hawaii and South Florida. Researchers in South Florida have observed the two mating, raising concerns the hybrid offspring might have a temperature tolerance that stretches from North Carolina to Brazil, said the study's lead researcher, Thomas Chouvenc, an assistant research scientist of entomology at the University of Florida.
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Aral Sea Looks Like a Painting from Space
 | The Aral Sea is shrinking, leaving a dried-up white lakebed where there used to be blue water. The image actually combines three separate radar scans: the red parts show data from Oct. 17 2014, the green from Dec. 28 2014 and blue from Feb. 14 2015.
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How Many Americans Could Get Ebola? Study Provides Estimates
 | The United States could have had more than a dozen Ebola cases monthly during the height of the epidemic in West Africa last year, and a half dozen cases in treatment simultaneously, according to a new study. Researchers estimated the potential highest number and lowest number of U.S. Ebola cases, and how many people would need treatment in this country at the same time. For their report, the researchers took into account the number of people who traveled to the United States from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, as well as the number of health care workers involved with the Ebola response in those countries, including those who caught the disease in West Africa and were evacuated to the United States. The researchers estimated that under the 2014 conditions, there could be as many as 14 U.S. Ebola cases per month, and as few as 1 case per month.
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Letting Kids Taste Alcohol May Promote Early Drinking
Children who try a sip of alcohol before sixth grade may be more likely to start drinking by the time they enter high school, a new study suggests. Researchers found that kids who had tastes of an alcoholic beverage before they started middle school were five times more likely to have a full drink by ninth grade, compared with their classmates who had not tasted alcohol.
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Guess Your Age? 3D Facial Scan Beats Doctor's Exam
 | The researchers also found that levels of several biological markers in people's blood are associated with the markers of aging that appear on people's faces. For instance, women with older-looking faces tend to have higher levels of "bad" cholesterol, the researchers found. "3D facial images can really tell your biological age," said the study's senior researcher Jing-Dong Han, a professor of computational biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Partner Institute in Shanghai. The scientists also collected blood samples from the participants, who ranged in age from 17 to 77 years old.
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Wow! 8 Rocket Missions Launched in 6 Days Last Week
 | Spacefaring nations greeted the arrival of the Northern Hemisphere spring with a pretty impressive fireworks display last week.
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Birds' Foldable Wings Could Inspire Nimble Drones
 | A drone that mimics the way birds fold and flap their wings could improve the design of future unmanned autonomous vehicles, and could even help the machines withstand midair collisions. Now, researchers at Stanford University have designed a 3D-printed hinge inspired by this wrist joint.
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Electrical fault corrected, 'Big Bang' collider to restart soon
 | CERN engineers said on Tuesday they have resolved a problem that had delayed the relaunch after a two-year refit of the Large Hadron Collider particle smasher, which is probing the mysteries of the universe. The relaunch of the so-called 'Big Bang' machine had to be postponed last week because of the problem. These collisions, at almost the speed of light, create the chaotic conditions inside the LHC close to those that followed the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, from which the universe eventually emerged.
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NASA Chief: 1-Year Space Station Mission Advances NASA Journey to Mars (Op-Ed)
 | Charles Bolden is the NASA Administrator. Today, we launch an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to live and work in space for an entire year — the longest continuous stretch an American astronaut will have been in space.
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Shocking Discovery: Egypt's 'Mona Lisa' May Be a Fake
 | The "Meidum Geese," as modern-day Egyptologists and art historians call it, was supposedly found in 1871 in a tomb located near the Meidum Pyramid, which was built by the pharaoh Snefru (reign 2610-2590 B.C). A man named Luigi Vassalli discovered and removed the painting, which is now located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. "Some scholars compared it, with due respect, to 'The Gioconda' (Mona Lisa) for the Egyptian art," wrote Francesco Tiradritti, a professor at the Kore University of Enna anddirector of the Italian archaeological mission to Egypt, in a summary of his finds sent to Live Science. But while Tiradritti's research suggests the painting is a fake, a real one may be hidden underneath.
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