FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) Missing Electrons in the Atmosphere Possibly Found It turns out that a layer of invisible meteor dust falling to Earth every day may be sucking up electrons coming from higher in the atmosphere, creating the so-called "D-region ledge," where the concentration of electrons suddenly plunges, Earle Williams, an atmospheric electrician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Physicists have long been hunting for the disappearing electrons, and had turned to everything from high-flying ice clouds to electrically charged water clusters in the atmosphere to explain the sudden drop-off in this region, he said. "It's the most dramatic gradient anywhere in the ionosphere," Williams said, referring to the part of Earth's upper atmosphere where the D-region ledge is found. Read More » Mattel Goes High-Tech with Virtual Reality View-Master Toy One of your favorite childhood playthings just got a high-tech makeover, thanks to a collaboration between toy-maker Mattel and Google. In October, Mattel unveiled an updated version of its View-Master — a toy that traditionally resembled a pair of plastic binoculars but was fitted with cardboard "reels" of photographs or drawings that could be viewed in three dimensions. The new View-Master adds a smartphone to the mix. Read More » Everybody Freeze! The Science of the Polar Bear Club The event is organized by the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, a group of dedicated open-water swimmers who brave the numbing ocean every Sunday from November through April. An estimated 2,000 swimmers participated in 2014, with around 6,000 to 7,000 spectators looking on, said Dennis Thomas, the club's president and a member for three decades. Thomas described preparation requirements for the dip as "rigorous" — participants must be able to put on a bathing suit. Read More » Disney's New Robot Scales Walls…Like Spidey A new four-wheeled bot named VertiGo looks like a remote-controlled car that a kid might build. Researchers at Disney Research Zurich worked together with mechanical engineering students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) to design and build the gravity-defying bot. The robot's front wheels are steerable — like the front wheels of an automobile — which lets the person who controls the bot change its direction as it zooms around. Read More » 5 Facts to Know About the California Methane Leak A methane leak in Southern California has forced thousands of people from their homes. Although the gas first began spewing from a leaky underground well in October, the gas company only recently identified the source of the leak. Here are five things to know about the Southern California methane leak. Read More » James Bond Villain Gets 'A' for Evil, But 'F' for Brain Surgery The latest James Bond villain in the new movie "Spectre" may get an "A" for his evil schemes, but he failed spectacularly at neuroanatomy, according to a new report. Blofeld restrains the British spy with a head clamp before revealing his evil plan: The villain plans to use a robotic drill to torture 007 and drill into his brain, erasing Bond's memories of people's faces. But Blofeld's anatomical measurements were way off, according to Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) Trail from Ship Exhaust Leaves 'A' in the Sky You may not have seen it, but in July there was a large "A" written in the sky over the ocean near the Kamchatka Peninsula, in far-eastern Russia. The image of the A, published on Sunday (Dec. 27) on NASA's Earth Observatory website, shows how ocean-going ships produce a stream of exhaust gases that leaves tracks across the sky behind them, called ship tracks. A camera aboard NASA's Aqua satellite took the image on July 27. Read More » Google Glass Redux: High-Tech Wearable Gets Ready for Business Google Glass is alive and well, and it could be coming to a workplace near you. Although Google announced nearly a year ago that it would no longer be producing its futuristic Internet-connected spectacles, the company now appears to be working on a modified version of the product, for a different kind of user, according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filings posted yesterday (Dec. 28). The new version of Google's product has been dubbed the "enterprise edition" or "Google Glass EE," according to the tech website 9to5Google, which has been reporting the news of Glass' evolution from geeky prototype to workplace tool for months. Read More » Forget the Flashlight: New Ninja Shark Species Lights up the Sea It joins a group of nearly 40 other species commonly called lanternsharks, which are marine predators with the ability to glow that live in oceans around the world, including the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, said Vicky Vásquez, lead author of the new report and a graduate student in marine science at the Pacific Shark Research Center in California. The new report documents the first time a lanternshark has ever been found off the Pacific coast of Central America, Vásquez told Live Science. The new species had a uniform dark-black coloring, as opposed to the greys and browns seen on other lanternsharks, Vásquez said. Read More » 3D printing process brings art to blind people By Sharon Reich Writer and pod cast host Romeo Edmead is using his fingers to unlock a world he has never experienced before. Edmead lost his sight when he was just two-years-old, so he has always had a complicated relationship with art and museums.     While he has heard of classical paintings, he says school trips to museums were uncomfortable.     "I knew that what my friends would experience, because I went to public schools with sighted kids, and knew that what they would experience, I wouldn't necessarily experience because they could use their sense of sight and I didn't have that. ... Read More » India test-fires long range surface-to-air missile developed with Israel By Sankalp Phartiyal NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India successfully test-fired on Wednesday a new long range surface-to-air missile capable of countering aerial threats at extended ranges, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushes to enhance the country's military capabilities. India, which shares borders with nuclear-armed China and Pakistan, is likely to spend $250 billion over the next decade to upgrade its military. It is the world's biggest buyer of defense equipment but Modi is trying to build a defense industrial base in the country to cut overseas purchases. Read More » Camera trap system could help fight against poaching By Joel Flynn The Zoological Society London (ZSL), whose mission is to promote and achieve the world-wide conservation of animals and their habitats, says it may have taken a step closer to fulfilling that with the development of a new camera, which it calls Instant Detect. Developed in partnership with other companies like Seven Technologies Group, which specializes in security technology and helped train rangers on conservation sites on how best to use Instant Detect devices, ZSL hopes it could help the fight against poaching, as well as the monitoring of endangered and other species. Instant Detect is a camera trap system that uses satellite technology to send images from anywhere in the world, according to ZSL Conservation Technology Unit Project Manager, Louise Hartley. Read More » Giant Comets Periodically Smash Earth, Scientists Say Giant comets that originate in the planetary fringes of the solar system pose a greater threat of colliding with Earth than do asteroids, which originate closer to the sun, a new review paper argues. No centaur poses a known immediate threat to Earth, but the discovery of this massive population has led a group of astronomers to re-assess the threat of these seemingly distant bodies to this planet. Estimates currently suggest that one of these giant comets crosses Earth's orbit on average only once every 40,000 to 100,000 years, at which time the comet is believed to break up into dust and debris that can collide with the planet. Read More » Baghdad Blasts: Earthquake Detectors Map Sounds of War Seismic equipment that was installed in Iraq to detect earthquakes has also recorded plenty of other big bangs — explosions from nearby mortars and car bombs. In Baghdad throughout 2006, the sound of bombs was common. What happened at the ammunition depot, captured by onlookers on video, is referred to in the military as a "cook-off," when excessive heat causes ammunition to explode prematurely. Read More » Tasmanian Devils' Mysterious Cancer May Come in Two Varieties The Tasmanian devil has long been known to suffer from an unusual type of cancer that can spread from animal to animal, but now researchers say the endangered species is plagued by at least two kinds of infectious cancer. The finding suggests that Tasmanian devils are especially prone to the emergence of contagious tumors, and that transmissible cancers may arise more frequently in nature than previously thought, scientists added. The furry, dog-size mammals are found only on the island of Tasmania, which sits about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Australia. Read More » Volcanoes Sparked an Explosion in Human Intelligence, Researcher Argues Vast lava flows may have provided humans with access to heat and fire for cooking their food millions of years ago, one researcher has proposed. That, in turn, would have enabled the evolution of human intelligence, Michael Medler, a geographer at Western Washington University, said at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union earlier this month. If cooked food provided the extra calories that allowed people to evolve big brains, and big brains are required to start fires, then how did hominins, with their teensy brains and relatively meager smarts, produce fire in the first place? Read More » Space Fuel: Plutonium-238 Created After 30-Year Wait Scientists have produced a powder of plutonium-238 for the first time in nearly 30 years in the United States, a milestone that they say sets the country on a path toward powering NASA's deep-space exploration and other missions. Plutonium-238 (Pu-238) is a radioactive element, and as it decays, or breaks down into uranium-234, it releases heat. During the Cold War, the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina was pumping out Pu-238. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015 Every year, scientists wade into jungles, deserts and museum collections to examine animals and, if they're lucky, discover a new species. Read More » Pocket-Size Device Turns Smartphone into a High-Powered Microscope A sleek, smartphone-powered microscope, dubbed μPeek, recently reached its funding goal on Kickstarter. The device, which attaches to the back of any smartphone (over the top of the camera lens), is about the size of a credit card and is controlled via an app, allowing you to view crystal-clear images of tiny objects and make adjustments to the microscope right on your phone. The microscope is equipped with a motorized lens and sophisticated optical components — two things usually found on expensive (and relatively big) professional microscopes. Read More » Turtles' Wayward Travels May Mean BP Oil Spill's Impact Was Global The far-flung journeys of juvenile sea turtles could mean that the impact of 2010's Deepwater Horizon oil spill was global. More than 300,000 sea turtles were likely in the region of the Gulf of Mexico affected by the oil spill, according to a new computer simulation. Others hailed from South America, Costa Rica and as far away as western Africa. Read More » From Blood Rain to Green Poo: 10 Weirdest Science Stories of 2015 The rain in Spain seemed to turn a gory shade of blood red. Last fall, residents of several villages in northwest Spain were alarmed when the water in their local fountains turned an unsettling shade of crimson. A study published in September 2015 found that Spain's bloodbaths were teeming with the microscopic freshwater algae Haematococcus pluvialis, which produce a red pigment when they're stressed. Read More » HyQ2Max: the robot you can't keep down Step forward HyQ2Max - the latest and most powerful four-legged robot to come out of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). Animal-like in posture and movement, HyQ2Max is an improved version of their hydraulic quadruped robot HyQ. Read More » Smart wheelchair moves by dummy sucks A Barcelona-based disability foundation has created an intelligent chair so that severely disabled children can better explore their surroundings. Previous models of wheelchair were usually joystick-operated and were unusable for children without the necessary motor skills or with limited awareness of their environment. This model of wheelchair responds to voice command, head movement, or sucks of a dummy. Read More » Ram Statue Unearthed on Christmas Eve May Represent Jesus A hand-carved marble statue of a ram that was uncovered last week along Israel's Mediterranean coast has archaeologists guessing about who carved the creation. Archaeologists found the statue on Thursday (Dec. 24), but they say its unclear whether it was carved by Byzantine artisans, or if it was made by Romans and then later repurposed by the Byzantine church, the Israel Antiquities Authority said. The researchers found the statue during the excavation of an ancient church in Caesarea Harbor National Park, a landmark about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Haifa. Read More » New Kind of Hydrothermal Vent Forms Ghostly Chimneys Deep in the Caribbean Sea, researchers have discovered a new type of hydrothermal vent unlike any seen before, with huge, ghostly mounds formed from an ingredient common in baby powder. Typical hydrothermal vents consist mostly of sulfide minerals, but these vents in the Von Damm Vent Field south of the Cayman Islands are made mostly of talc, a magnesium-silicate mineral. "This vent site is home to a community of fauna similar to those found at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Atlantic Ocean," study researcher Matthew Hodgkinson, a postgraduate scientist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said in a statement, referring to the plate boundary that slices through the Atlantic. Read More » Russia to rewrite space program as economic crisis bites By Dmitry Solovyov MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is to revise its space program, the national space agency said on Tuesday after a newspaper published a report that billions of dollars of cuts may be afoot including to ambitious Moon exploration plans. Several Russian government ministries were engaged in revising the space program up to 2025, Roscosmos said in a written statement to Reuters. The authoritative Izvestia newspaper published details of what it said was a draft proposal sent by Roscosmos to the government which showed big spending cuts were being proposed to the Moon exploration program. Read More »
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