NASA Probe Snaps Amazing New Views of Dwarf Planet Ceres (Photos, Video)

	NASA Probe Snaps Amazing New Views of Dwarf Planet Ceres (Photos, Video) A spacecraft closing in on the dwarf planet Ceres in the solar system's asteroid belt has captured tantalizing new views of the huge space rock, revealing hints of craters and other structures on the surface of this mysterious body. NASA's Dawn spacecraft snapped the new images of Ceres, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on Jan. 13. Dawn is rapidly approaching Ceres and is due to arrive in orbit around the dwarf planet on March 6. "The [Dawn] team is very excited to examine the surface of Ceres in never-before-seen detail," Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, said in a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Read More » Coffee May Protect Against Some Skin Cancers A new study suggests that people who are in the habit of drinking coffee regularly may be protected against malignant melanoma, the leading cause of skin-cancer death in the United States. People in the study who drank four or more cups of coffee daily were 20 percent less likely to develop malignant melanoma than noncoffee drinkers, according to the study published today (Jan. 20) in JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Of course, the findings don't give you license to fire up the Mr. Coffee and then spend your day lounging in the sun without any sunscreen — the best way to prevent skin cancer remains avoiding sun exposure and ultraviolet radiation, said study researcher Erikka Loftfield, a doctoral student at the Yale School of Public Health and a fellow at the National Cancer Institute. Previous studies had found hints that drinking coffee might be linked to lower rates of nonmelanoma skin cancers, but the findings were mixed when researchers looked at coffee and melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Read More » Elon Musk Reveals Test Site for Futuristic 'Hyperloop' System On Jan. 15, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced a preliminary plan to build a test track for the Hyperloop, his proposed high-speed transport system, in Texas. Musk first revealed the idea for this "fifth mode of transportation" (i.e., not a car, train, plane or boat) in August 2013. But during a speech at the Texas Transportation Forum on last week, Musk said he is planning to build a 5-mile (8 kilometers) track to test prototype versions of the pods that could one day travel the Hyperloop at speeds of up to 760 mph (1,220 km/h). Musk says the Hyperloop is a great solution for traveling between congested cities that aren't very far apart (no farther than 900 miles, or 1,450 kilometers apart, to be exact). Read More » Ancient scrolls charred in Vesuvius eruption come to life By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The contents of hundreds of papyrus scrolls that were turned into charcoal in the eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD - one of the great natural disasters of antiquity - have long remained a mystery. Scientists said on Tuesday a sophisticated form of X-ray technology has enabled them to decipher some of the writing in the charred scrolls from a library once housed in a sumptuous villa in ancient Herculaneum, a city that overlooked the Bay of Naples. Read More » SpaceX raises $1 billion in funding from Google, Fidelity (Reuters) - Elon Musk-backed Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) said it has raised about $1 billion in a financing round with two new investors, Google Inc and Fidelity. Google and Fidelity will collectively own just under 10 percent of SpaceX, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. (Reporting by Avik Das in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza) Read More » Elon Musk's SpaceX Gets $1 Billion from Google and Fidelity Google and Fidelity Investments have invested $1 billion in SpaceX, representatives of the private spaceflight company announced today (Jan. 20). Google and Fidelity now together own about 10 percent of SpaceX, which is run by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Other SpaceX investors are Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn, company representatives said. The cash infusion could help SpaceX — which to date has made its name with rockets and a spaceship called Dragon — get its bold new satellite program off the ground. Read More » Atlas rocket blasts off from Florida with military communications satellite By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Tuesday with a next-generation communications satellite designed to provide cellular-like voice and data services to U.S. military forces around the world. The 20-story-tall rocket, manufactured and flown by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, lifted off at 8:04 p.m. EST, the first of 13 missions the company plans for this year. Perched on top of the rocket was the third spacecraft for the U.S. Navy's $7.3 billion Mobile User Objective System, or MUOS, network, which is intended to provide 3G-like cellular technology to vehicles, ships, submarines, aircraft and troops on the move. "MUOS is a game-changer in communications for our warfighters," Iris Bombelyn of satellite manufacturer Lockheed Martin said in a statement before launch. Read More » Obama calls for major new personalised medicine initiative President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday that his administration wants to launch a new push to use personalized genetic information to help treat diseases like cancer and diabetes. Obama urged Congress in his address to boost research funding to support new investments in "precision medicine." "I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine – one that delivers the right treatment at the right time," Obama said, noting the approach had helped reverse cystic fibrosis in some patients. "Tonight, I'm launching a new precision medicine initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes – and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier." The sequencing of individual genomes, read-outs of a person's complete genetic information, could speed scientific research and help drug companies and physicians tailor medicines to an individual's genetic profile. Read More » Obama calls for major new personalized medicine initiative President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday that his administration wants to launch a new push to use personalized genetic information to help treat diseases like cancer and diabetes. Obama urged Congress in his address to boost research funding to support new investments in "precision medicine." "I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine – one that delivers the right treatment at the right time," Obama said, noting the approach had helped reverse cystic fibrosis in some patients. "Tonight, I'm launching a new precision medicine initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes – and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier." The sequencing of individual genomes, read-outs of a person's complete genetic information, could speed scientific research and help drug companies and physicians tailor medicines to an individual's genetic profile. Read More » How Did Life Become Complex, and Could It Happen Beyond Earth? Instead of there being some kind of multicellular organism on, say, Jupiter's moon Europa, scientists instead aim to find something more like a microbe. Frank Rosenzweig, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Montana, is looking into such questions over the next five years with funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute. "Over my career, I've been interested in what are the genetic bases of adaptation and how do complex communities evolve from single clones," Rosenzweig said. Complex life is only known to exist on Earth, but scientists aren't ruling out other locations in the Solar System. Read More » New Farm Maps Offer In-Depth Picture of Global Agriculture All farmers on the ground know their land as well as their own wrinkled hands, but totaling up all the world's cropland is a difficult task. Two new maps released Friday (Jan. 16) considerably improve estimates of the amount of land farmed in the world — one map reveals the world's agricultural lands to a resolution of 1 kilometer, and the other  provides the first look at the sizes of the fields being used for agriculture, the researchers said. "The field-size map is really unique — no such global product currently exists," study co-author Linda See, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, said in a statement. The researchers built the cropland database by combining information from several sources, such as satellite images, regional maps, video and geotagged photos, which were shared with them by groups around the world. Read More » Mysterious 15th-Century Irish Town Found Near Medieval Castle The medieval Dunluce Castle, located on the craggy rocks of Northern Ireland's coast, is neighbors with a mysterious stone settlement, according to a recent excavation. The castle dates back to the 15th century, and once housed the powerful MacQuillan family, which controlled a large amount of territory in Northern Ireland. On a recent dig, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency planned to uncover part of the lost 17th century town of Dunluce near the castle. "This is a tremendously exciting historical development," Mark Durkan, Northern Ireland's environment minister, said in a statement. Read More » Doctors Need More Evidence About Opioids, Report Says In fact, the scientific evidence on the topic is so scarce that doctors have little choice but to rely on their own experiences in treating patients to make decisions, a new report concludes. The increasing use of opioids to treat people with chronic pain has created serious concerns about misuse and addiction in the medical community. Now, a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health has taken a deep look at the data, finding that in the absence of solid evidence on the effectiveness of opioids, many doctors prescribe doses of the painkillers that are too high. On the other hand, some doctors avoid prescribing opioids altogether, out of fear of sending patients down a path to addiction. Read More » New satellite system to track illegal 'pirate fishing' By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - About 20 percent of the world's fishing catch is taken illegally by poachers, experts estimate, but a new satellite tracking system launched on Wednesday aims to crack down on the industrial-scale theft known as "pirate fishing." Run by the British technology firm Satellite Applications Catapult and backed by environmental groups, Project 'Eyes on the Sea' will open a "Virtual War Room". Experts will be able to watch satellite feeds of the waters around Easter Island, a Chilean territory in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, and the western Pacific island nation of Palau, which lacks the resources to monitor all the illegal fishing taking place near its waters. The technology analyses numerous sources of live satellite tracking data, enabling monitors to link to information about a ship's country of registration and ownership history to spot suspicious vessels. "This system will enable authorities to share information on those vessels operating outside the law, build a comprehensive case against them, track them into port or within reach of enforcement vessels, and take action against them," Joshua Reichert from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the environmental group driving the project, said in a statement. Read More » Mummy Mask May Reveal Oldest Known Gospel A text that may be the oldest copy of a gospel known to exist — a fragment of the Gospel of Mark that was written during the first century, before the year 90 — is set to be published. In recent years scientists have developed a technique that allows the glue of mummy masks to be undone without harming the ink on the paper. The first-century gospel is one of hundreds of new texts that a team of about three-dozen scientists and scholars is working to uncover, and analyze, by using this technique of ungluing the masks, said Craig Evans, a professor of New Testament studies at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Not just Christian documents, not just biblical documents, but classical Greek texts, business papers, various mundane papers, personal letters," Evans told Live Science. Read More » Growing Human Kidneys in Rats Sparks Ethical Debate "Our long-term goal is to grow human organs in animals, to end the human donor shortage," said study co-author Eugene Gu, a medical student at Duke University and the founder and CEO of Ganogen, Inc., a biotech company in Redwood City, California. But the research raises a number of ethical questions, including whether it is acceptable to use human fetal organs in research, or to transplant human organs into animals. Previously, other scientists had attempted to grow immature human kidneys in the abdomens of mice, but the new research "is definitely the first time an actual whole human organ has been grown in an animal, and has sustained the life of that animal," Gu told Live Science. In the new study, Gu and his colleagues obtained human fetal kidneys from Stem Express, a Placerville, California-based company that supplies researchers with tissue from deceased adults and fetuses. Read More » People Really Do Use Restaurant Calorie Labels Chain restaurants in the United States are now required to put calorie information on their menus, but is this information really influencing what people order? A new study from Seattle suggests people are paying attention to calorie postings — the percentage of people in the area who said they used the calorie information on restaurant menus tripled in the years after the labels became mandatory in the region. Researchers analyzed information from more than 3,000 people living in King County, Washington, (which includes Seattle), an area that in January 2009, started to require chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus. Read More » US Navy Launches Next-Generation Military Communications Satellite A huge satellite launched to orbit late Tuesday (Jan. 20) in a dazzling launch for a mission to help improve the U.S. military's tactical communications capabilities. Read More » Obama Hails NASA Astronaut Set for 1-Year Space Voyage in State of the Union President Barack Obama recognized the first American astronaut who will spend a year in space during the State of Union address Tuesday night (Jan. 20). NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, scheduled to launch to the International Space Station for a 12-month stay in March, was hailed for his role in advancing Obama's goal of sending astronauts to Mars. Kelly attended the speech as a guest of First Lady Michelle Obama. Read More » Scientists create 'genetic firewall' for new forms of life By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - A year after creating organisms that use a genetic code different from every other living thing, two teams of scientists have achieved another "synthetic biology" milestone: They created bacteria that cannot survive without a specific manmade chemical, potentially overcoming a major obstacle to wider use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The advance, reported on Wednesday in Nature, offers what one scientist calls a "genetic firewall" to achieve biocontainment, a means of insuring that GMOs cannot live outside a lab or other confined environment. Although the two labs accomplished this in bacteria, "there is no fundamental barrier" to applying the technique to plants and animals, Harvard Medical School biologist George Church, who led one of the studies, told reporters. Read More » Closer to Self-Destruction? Doomsday Clock Could Move Tomorrow The ominous hands of the "Doomsday Clock" have been fixed at 5 minutes to midnight for the past three years. The clock is a visual metaphor that was created nearly 70 years ago by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Each year, the magazine's board assesses threats to humanity — with special attention to nuclear warheads and climate change — to decide whether the Doomsday Clock needs an adjustment. Tomorrow (Jan. 22), at a news conference in Washington, D.C., The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will announce where the hands will rest for 2015. Read More »