Zap! Laser Blasts Shed Light on Cores of Alien Planets Cosmic Impacts May Have Seeded Early Earth with Ingredients for Life

	Cosmic Impacts May Have Seeded Early Earth with Ingredients for Life Bullets of ice shot at high speeds can deposit organic compounds on surfaces they strike. Craters on the moon are evidence that the Inner Solar System was prone to giant impacts from asteroids and comets during a tumultuous era, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, between 4.2 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. Intriguingly, this violent period overlaps with evidence of the earliest life on Earth, suggesting that these impacts may have played a role in the origin of life. The key building blocks of life on Earth — such as sugars, amino acids and DNA — are carbon-based molecules known as organic compounds. Read More » Magnetic Fields of Asteroids Lasted Hundreds of Millions of Years The magnetic fields of planetary building blocks lasted for a surprisingly long time in the solar system's early days, a new study suggests. The magnetic fields of these big asteroids were apparently generated by the same process that drives Earth's global magnetic activity, and could have persisted for hundreds of millions of years after the objects' formation, researchers said. The researchers probed this history using an X-ray electron microscope at the BESSY II synchrotron in Berlin, capturing the moment when the big asteroid's global magnetic field died. ?"We're taking ancient magnetic field measurements in nanoscale materials to the highest-ever resolution in order to piece together the magnetic history of asteroids," study lead author James Bryson, a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University in England, said in a statement. Read More » What Makes an Earth-Like Planet? Here's the Recipe Earth is a unique, life-supporting world, but new research shows that the "recipe" for Earth might also apply to terrestrial exoplanets orbiting distant stars. The new research suggests that other rocky, Earth-like planets follow the same basic mix of elements and likely formed the same way Earth did. These Earth-like planets include the recently discovered Kepler-93b, which is about 300 light-years from Earth. "Our solar system is not as unique as we might have thought," Courtney Dressing, lead author of the new study and a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. Read More » 'Nanostar' Particles Make Cancer Cells Light Up Finding cancer cells might one day involve shining a laser onto a certain region of the body, and watching the cancerous cells light up. Researchers have developed a new type of nanoparticle that they call "nanostars," which accumulate in tumor cells and scatter light, making the tumors easy to see with a special camera. The researchers' method of making the stars ensures that all of the particles are nearly identical, which is important because earlier efforts to make such nanoparticles weren't able to produce the consistent shapes needed, said Dr. Moritz Kircher, a molecular imaging specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ordinarily, it would be difficult to see the change in the light, but the gold amplifies it enough so that cameras can see it, Kircher told Live Science. Read More » Expensive IVF Treatment May Not Work Better for All Couples More and more couples are using a specialized in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique, but the more expensive procedure does not appear to improve pregnancy rates or birth rates more than traditional IVF methods do, a new study suggests. The study looked at the use of a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), in which clinic workers fertilize an egg cell by selecting a single sperm cell and then injecting it through a tiny needle directly into an egg cell. ICSI was introduced in the 1990s as a way to treat couples whose infertility was the result of a man's very low sperm count or other abnormalities with his sperm. ICSI is also "considerably more expensive than conventional IVF, and adds to financial burdens already experienced by many couples undergoing fertility treatment," the researchers wrote in the Jan. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Read More » Lake Tahoe's tiny creatures dying off at dramatic rate: scientist By Michael Fleeman (Reuters) - The smallest critters who occupy the bottom of the cold, clear waters of Lake Tahoe are dying off at an alarming rate and scientists are trying to find the cause to protect the fragile ecosystem of the lake high in the Sierra Nevada range. Scuba divers completed a first-ever circumnavigation of the shallow areas and certain deep spots last fall, collecting data that showed population drops in eight kinds of invertebrates that are only thumbnail-sized and smaller, including some only found in Lake Tahoe. ... Read More » The smoke around e-cig science By Sara Ledwith LONDON (Reuters) - From Apple Pie to Bubbly Bubble Gum, Irish Car Bomb or Martian bar – from Mars!, the flavors of electronic cigarette offer something for every taste. Read More » Mysterious Signal Points to Monster Black Hole Merger A mysterious light signal from a faraway galaxy could point to two supermassive black holes finishing up a merger in the galaxy's core, new research reveals. Scientists saw repeating pulses from a quasar — a bright galactic core powered by at least one huge black hole — and say the light is likely being generated during the latter stages of a monster black hole collision. The light signal from 3.5 billion light-years away was spotted by the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS), a set of three telescopes in Australia and the United States that look at 500 million light sources across 80 percent of the sky observable from Earth. "There has never been a data set on quasar variability that approaches this scope before," lead study author George Djorgovski, director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. Read More » World's Biggest Landslide Floated Like a Hovercraft The massive Heart Mountain landslide in Wyoming raced to its final resting place on a cushion of carbon dioxide gas, similar to a hovercraft gliding on air, a new study suggests. "Even I have a hard time visualizing a mountain moving 50 kilometers [31 miles], but you can move it if the friction is low enough," said lead study author Tom Mitchell, a geophysicist at University College London in the United Kingdom. The Heart Mountain landslide is the largest landslide ever found on Earth's surface (larger landslides exist in the ocean). These strange observations have fueled one of Heart Mountain's greatest mysteries: how the landslide crossed more than 28 miles (45 km) along a surface tilted at an angle of less than 2 degrees. Read More » Alexander the Great-Era Tomb Holds Bones of 5 People The skeletal remains of five people were found in an opulent Greek burial complex that dates to the time of Alexander the Great. "It is not possible to tell who these people were and certainly not from the first macroscopic analysis of the skeletal material," Christina Papageorgopoulou, an anthropologist involved in the excavation, and a professor at the Demokritus University of Thrace in Greece, said in an email. Read More » Move Over, Siri! New Software Could Make Better Personal Assistants The program, which is being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), works by allowing users to specify their preferences — for example, by telling the software if they're willing to forgo going out for breakfast in order to catch the right bus. The program, known as the Personal Transportation System, or PTS, was originally conceived as a joint project between the MERS group, the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and aerospace giant Boeing, Williams told Live Science. Read More » New Lakes Discovered Under Greenland's Ice Hint at Warming The discovery of two large lakes hidden beneath Greenland's ice suggests that climate change now cuts all the way to the bottom of the ice sheet, according to two new studies. The lakes, on opposite coasts, were only spotted because meltwater from Greenland's surface triggered gushing floods in the fall of 2011. The discovery of these lakes will help scientists better understand how Greenland's surface meltwater travels through the ice sheet. "If enough water is pouring down into the Greenland Ice Sheet for us to see the same subglacial lake empty and refill itself over and over, then there must be so much latent heat being released under the ice that we'd have to expect it to change the large-scale behavior of the ice sheet," said Michael Bevis, a geophysicist at The Ohio State University and co-author of the Nature study. Read More » Too Much Sitting Is Killing You (Even If You Exercise) People who sit too much every day are at an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and shorter life spans, even if they exercise, a new study finds. "More than one-half of an average person's day is spent being sedentary — sitting, watching television or working at a computer," Dr. David Alter, the study's senior scientist at the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, said in a statement. They found that people who sit for long periods were 24 percent more likely to die from health problems during the studies, which lasted between 1 and 16 years, compared with people who sat less. The 47 studies didn't use a standard cutoff to define how much sitting was too much, but "if you sit more than 8 hours [a day], that's probably linked to a lot of the negative health effects," said the study's lead researcher, Aviroop Biswas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto. Read More » How Genes and Environment Conspire to Trigger Diabetes Diabetes appears to be a disease written deeply in human genes, a feature millions of years old, which can emerge yet also retreat through the influence of environmental forces such as diet, a new study suggests. These epigenetic changes modify how genes behave and can alter the production of proteins necessary for proper metabolism and secretion of insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar levels. The good news is that diseases brought on by such epigenetic changes can be reversed, the scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said in their study, published Jan. 6 in the journal Cell Metabolism. The study may help explain why Type 2 diabetes, a disease that was hardly seen a few generations ago, now affects more than 300 million adults worldwide, with some populations far more affected than others — a conspiracy of both genetic and epigenetic factors. Read More » 'Innovative' Intervention Helps Babies at High Risk of Autism The results suggest that although early intervention does not prevent autism, it may lessen its features in some children who have a high risk of developing the disorder, according to the study, published online today (Jan. 21) in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry. "We preach this idea that intervention changes something in the brain, but we rarely have proof of that," said Mayada Elsabbagh, one of the study's researchers and an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. Past studies have shown that about 20 percent of such babies will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and another 20 percent to 30 percent will be diagnosed with other social and communication disorders. The other 26 families did not receive the visits, and served as a control group. Read More » 100 Million Sun Photos! NASA Spacecraft Hits Shutterbug Milestone A telescope aboard a prolific sun-watching NASA spacecraft has captured its 100 millionth image of Earth's parent star. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), one of three instruments flying on the sun-studying Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), captured its mind-boggling 100 millionth sun photo on Monday (Jan. 19), NASA officials said. "Between the AIA and two other instruments on board, the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, SDO sends down a whopping 1.5 terabytes of data a day," NASA officials said in a statement. AIA was built at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. Read More » Opioid Prescriptions May Put Unborn Children at Risk, CDC Warns Many women in the United States who are in their childbearing years are prescribed opioid pain relievers, powerful medications that can cause birth defects, a new study finds. Researchers analyzed prescriptions for opioid pain medications among U.S. women ages 15 to 44 between 2008 and 2012. They found that each year, about a quarter of women (27.7 percent) who had private insurance, and nearly 40 percent of women on Medicaid, filed a prescription for an opioid pain medicine, according to the study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Many women of reproductive age are taking these medicines and may not know they are pregnant, and therefore may be unknowingly exposing their unborn child" to the drugs, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a statement. Read More » Doomsday Clock Set at 3 Minutes to Midnight Frustrated with a lack of international action to address climate change and shrink nuclear arsenals, they decided today (Jan. 22) to push the minute hand of their iconic "Doomsday Clock" to 11:57 p.m. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doesn't use the clock to make any real doomsday predictions. Each year, the magazine's board analyzes threats to humanity's survival to decide where the Doomsday Clock's hands should be set. For instance, if nothing is done to reduce the amount of heat-trapping gasses, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere, Earth could be 5 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 8 degrees Celsius) warmer by the end of century, said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Read More » Strange Comet Discoveries Revealed by Rosetta Spacecraft Scientists are now getting an up-close-and-personal view of a comet flying through deep space, thanks to Europe's Rosetta spacecraft. The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission has now found that Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko's is even stranger than initially expected. Many scientists have dubbed comets "dirty snowballs," but now it might be more appropriate to call this comet a "snowy dustball" because of its dust-to-gas ration, said Alessandra Rotundi, the principal investigator of Rosetta's GIADA dust grain analyzer instrument. Read More » Zap! Laser Blasts Shed Light on Cores of Alien Planets Using laser blasts, scientists have recreated the extreme temperatures and pressures found inside large rocky planets known as super-Earths as well as in icy giant planets such as Neptune and Uranus, shedding light on what the interiors of these exotic worlds are like. The new findings suggest that the interiors of super-Earth exoplanets may consist of oceans of molten rock that generate magnetic fields, and that giant planets may contain solid, rocky cores, researchers say. These discoveries have revealed very different kinds of planets from those seen in the solar system, such as super-Earths, which are rocky planets that are up to 10 times the mass of Earth. These ingredients include silica, "the main constituent of rock," said lead study author Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Read More » Weird Accident Damaged King Tut's Beard The beard on the burial mask of King Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh who ruled Egypt from 1332 to 1323 B.C., was hastily glued back on with epoxy after being knocked off during cleaning, according to conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Either way, a museum staff member used epoxy glue to repair the burial mask, which damaged the artifact. "Unfortunately, he used a very irreversible material — epoxy has a very high property for attaching and is used on metal or stone, but I think it wasn't suitable for an outstanding object like Tutankhamun's golden mask," one conservator told the AP. The object now has a gap between the face and the beard, filled with a layer of transparent yellow, the conservator said. Read More » Freaky Shark 'Out of a Horror Movie' Caught by Fisherman The odd creature is a rare type of shark known as a frilled shark, and is sometimes called a fish "fossil" because its roots can be traced back 80 million years, CNN reported. It was found by fisherman David Guillot, who said he had never seen anything like it. "The head on it was like something out of a horror movie," Guillot told Fairfax Radio on Wednesday, according to The Age. Read More »