Food diversity under siege from global warming, UN says

	Pizza Prescription: Kids Should Eat Less, Researchers Say Children consume an average of 136 calories per day from pizza, the new study found. For the new study, Powel and her colleagues looked at questionnaires about the diets of children and teens ages 2 to 19, that were completed every two years between 2003 and 2010. The researchers found that the number of calories children consumed from pizza decreased 25 percent between 2003 and 2010, which is good news, they said. On such days, teens consume an average of 230 extra calories, and younger children consume an average of 84 extra calories, compared with the days on which kids don't eat pizza. Read More » Earth Can Contaminate Alien Meteorites Quickly, Study Shows A team of scientists has published the results of an investigative survey into the Sutter's Mill meteorite that landed in California in 2012. The results reveal that the meteorite contained a number of features associated with minerals such as olivines, phyllosilicates, carbonates, and possibly pyroxenes, as well as organics. However, a key conclusion of the paper, and one that is likely to be of keen interest to astrobiologists, is confirmation that meteorites can become contaminated by Earth-based organics very quickly. Several fragments of the meteorite were recovered, four of them shortly after the fall, and others several days later after a heavy rainstorm.  The research team used infrared spectroscopy, employing several different analytical devices to obtain spectra from very small samples. Read More » Food diversity under siege from global warming, U.N. says By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change threatens the genetic diversity of the world's food supply, and saving crops and animals at risk will be crucial for preserving yields and adapting to wild weather patterns, a U.N. policy paper said on Monday. Certain wild crops - varieties not often cultivated by today's farmers - could prove more resilient to a warming planet than some popular crop breeds, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said. Ensuring food security and protecting at-risk species in the face of climate change is one of "the most daunting challenges facing humankind", the paper said. Between 16 and 22 percent of wild crop species may be in danger of extinction within the next 50 years, said the FAO paper. Read More » Food diversity under siege from global warming, UN says By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change threatens the genetic diversity of the world's food supply, and saving crops and animals at risk will be crucial for preserving yields and adapting to wild weather patterns, a U.N. policy paper said on Monday. Certain wild crops - varieties not often cultivated by today's farmers - could prove more resilient to a warming planet than some popular crop breeds, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said. Ensuring food security and protecting at-risk species in the face of climate change is one of "the most daunting challenges facing humankind", the paper said. Between 16 and 22 percent of wild crop species may be in danger of extinction within the next 50 years, said the FAO paper. Read More »

Solar Plane's Route for Around-the-World Flight Revealed

	Big data tops humans at picking 'significant' films: study By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - In the escalating battle of big data vs. human experts, score another win for numbers. The most accurate predictions of which movies the U.S. Library of Congress will deem "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" are not the views of critics or fans but a simple algorithm applied to a database, according to a study published on Monday. The crucial data, scientists reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are what the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) calls "Connections" - films, television episodes and other works that allude to an earlier movie. For 15,425 films in IMDB.com examined in the study, the measure that was most predictive of which made it into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, which honors "significant" movies, was the number of references to it by other films released many years later. Read More » How to Recreate a Sloppy Ancient Greek Drinking Game They got drunk on wine, and in the name of competition, they hurled their dregs at a target in the center of the room to win prizes like eggs, pastries and sexual favors. "Trying to describe this ancient Greek drinking game, kottabos, to my students was always a little bit difficult because we do have these illustrations of it, but they only show one part of the game — where individuals are about to flick some dregs at a target," said Heather Sharpe, an associate professor of art history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. So, with a 3D-printed drinking cup, some diluted grape juice and a handful of willing students, Sharpe did just that. Read More » Underwater Drones Map Algae Beneath Antarctic Ice Although the surface of Antarctica is almost completely white, a field of green and brown algae clings to the underside of the sea ice around the frozen continent. The researchers plan to use the same drones to study sea ice algae in the Arctic next year. Read More » Couples Who Work Together to Get Healthy Have More Success The study shows that "changing together" is associated with even better outcomes than even having a partner with a consistently healthy lifestyle, said study researcher Jane Wardle, a psychology professor and director of the health behavior research center at the University College London. "Our study didn't address the reasons for success," Wardle told Live Science. The men and women were participants in a long-term study on aging, and they regularly completed questionnaires about their health behaviors for up to a four-year period. The researchers looked at the effect of one partner's decision to make a positive change in one of three health behaviors — smoking, exercising or losing 5 percent of their body weight — on the other partner's health habits. Read More » New Telescope in Chile Now Searching for Alien Planets A new alien-planet–hunting telescope has just come online in Chile, and it could help scientists peer into the atmospheres of relatively small planets circling nearby stars. The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS for short) — located at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Paranal Observatory — is designed to seek out planets two to eight times the diameter of Earth as they pass in front of their stars. "We are excited to begin our search for small planets around nearby stars," Peter Wheatley, an NGTS project lead from the University of Warwick, U.K., said in as statement. The NGTS is made up of 12 telescopes that will operate robotically, according to ESO. Read More » First round-the-world solar flight to take off next month By Stanley Carvalho ABU DHABI (Reuters) - A plane powered by the sun will attempt an unprecedented flight around the world next month, the project's founders said, seeking to prove that flying is possible without using fossil fuel. Solar Impulse 2 is set to take off from Abu Dhabi with stopovers in India, Myanmar and China before crossing the Pacific Ocean and flying across the United States and southern Europe to arrive back in Abu Dhabi. On its five-month journey of 35,000 km (22,000 miles), the engines will be powered only by solar energy. "Miracles can be achieved with renewables such as solar power. Read More » Bye, Bye Baubles: New 3D Printers Could Build Implants, Electronics Several new 3D printers showcased at CES 2015 in Las Vegas earlier this month suggest that the 3D printing industry — best known for churning out brightly colored plastic doodads — could be turning over a new, more scientific leaf. Another printer uses a combination of conductive inks and filaments to print quadcopters already embedded with the electronics that allow them to hover in the air. The message these companies are sending couldn't be clearer: 3D printing isn't just for makers anymore. Increasingly, this trendy technology is turning into a must-have tool for doctors, researchers and engineers, according to Nick Liverman, CEO and founder of Old World Labs (OWL), a Virginia-based company that designs dissolvable 3D-printed implants. Read More » Understanding Earth by Eavesdropping on Urban Noise Researchers are tuning in to urban seismic noise, the man-made signals from human activity, to view geologic structures and track the rhythms of cities. "For seismologists, the focus was, 'If a train is passing, let's make sure we can remove those trains,'" said Nima Riahi, a researcher and seismologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Now, scientists are returning to the city, tapping into the weak signals from trains, planes, cars and other human noise as a cheap alternative to more expensive surveying techniques, according to research presented last month (December 2014) at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco. "This technology is still in its infancy, but the initial results are very promising," said Larry Brown, a seismologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Read More » Different Tastes: How Our Human Ancestors' Diets Evolved Our human ancestors began tasting food differently sometime after the human family tree branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees, researchers say. By analyzing the genes of Neanderthals and other extinct human ancestors, scientists also found that modern humans may be much better at digesting starch than any other known member of the human family tree. Although modern humans are the world's only surviving human lineage, other human lineages also once dwelled on Earth. These included Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives to modern humans and Denisovans, whose genetic footprint apparently extended across Asia. Read More » What's the Secret to Getting Kids to Eat Veggies? Let Them Play First! "Recess is a pretty big deal to kids," said lead researcher Joe Price, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. For four days in the spring and nine days in the fall, the researchers measured how many fruits and vegetables each student ate during lunch. In the schools that switched recess to before lunch, children ate 54 percent more fruits and vegetables than they did before the switch, the researchers found. Previous studies had attempted to encourage children to eat healthier by increasing the variety of fruits and vegetables available or providing small incentives for the kids to eat them. Read More » Aww! Primordial Reptile Fossils Show Mother Caring for Babies The fossilized remains of a small aquatic reptile surrounded by six babies suggest that the extinct animal was caring for the little ones when they died, a new study finds. The reptile is an extinct species called the philydrosaurus, and likely lived during the Early Cretaceous, a time period that spans about 145 to about 100 million years ago. An anonymous farmer donated the "beautifully preserved skeletons" to the Jinzhou Museum of Paleontology in northeastern China in 2010, the scientists added. Read More » New Tech Could Reveal Secrets in 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls Hundreds of ancient papyrus scrolls that were buried nearly 2,000 years ago after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius could finally be read, thanks to a new technique. The X-ray-based method can be used to decipher the charred, damaged texts that were found in the ancient town of Herculaneum without having to unroll them, which could damage them beyond repair, scientists say. One problem with previous attempts to use X-rays to read the scrolls was that the ancient writers used a carbon-based material from smoke in their ink, said study co-author Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy. "The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink," Mocella told Live Science. Read More » Solar Plane's Route for Around-the-World Flight Revealed In about a month, two Swiss pilots will attempt a record-setting flight around the world without using any fuel, and today (Jan. 20), they announced the route for their ambitious journey aboard their solar-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2. Read More »