|  Jupiter and the Moon Shine Together Tonight: How to See It  | Jupiter should be located to the left of the moon. Jupiter will reach opposition on Feb. 6, meaning that it will be opposite to the sun in Earth's sky that day. Therefore, Jupiter rises around the time the sun sets, shines highest at around midnight and setting around sunrise. Opposition is also when Jupiter is closest to the Earth for the year, appearing biggest and brightest. For amateur astronomers, Jupiter is a superb telescopic object.
| Read More » Some People Would Rather Have a Shorter Life Than Take Meds One in three people would rather live a slightly shorter life than take a daily pill to prevent cardiovascular disease, a new study suggests. In the study, researchers surveyed 1,000 people whose average age was 50, and asked how much time the participants would be willing to subtract from their lives to avoid taking daily medication for cardiovascular disease. More than 8 percent of the people surveyed said they would be willing to forfeit two years of their life, while about 21 percent said they would sacrifice between one week and one year of their lives to avoid taking a daily pill for cardiovascular disease. The study "reinforces the idea that many people do not like taking pills, for whatever reason," said study author Dr. Robert Hutchins, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco Department of Medicine. Read More » Spring Will Come, Despite What the Groundhog Says  | As most weather-minded people know, Feb. 2 is Groundhog Day. Today is also Candlemas, or the middle of the winter season, halfway between the December solstice and the March equinox. Although the altitude of the Sun has been slowly climbing, and the length of daylight has been increasing since the winter solstice on Dec. 21, changes in the length of the days have been relatively subtle.
| Read More » How Your Brain Ignores Distractions From the feeling of clothes against the skin, to the sounds of cocktail party chatter, the human brain is constantly blocking out information that could be distracting. "Moment by moment, we're really only doing one thing: We have to block things in the sensory and internal world," said Stephanie Jones, a neuroscientist at Brown University and senior author of the study published today (Feb. 3) in the Journal of Neuroscience. In addition to helping scientists understand how the brain works, the findings have the potential to help people with chronic pain. Read More » Britain votes to allow world's first 'three-parent' IVF babies  | By Kate Kelland and Kylie MacLellan LONDON (Reuters) - Britain voted on Tuesday to become the first country to allow a "three-parent" IVF technique which doctors say will prevent some inherited incurable diseases but which critics see as a step towards creating designer babies. The treatment is known as "three-parent" in vitro fertilisation (IVF) because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos, would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor. It is designed to help families with mitochondrial diseases, incurable conditions passed down the maternal line that affect around one in 6,500 children worldwide. After an emotionally charged 90-minute debate that some lawmakers criticised as being too short for such a serious matter, parliament voted 382 to 128 in favour of the technique, called mitochondrial donation.
| Read More » Both Monogamy and Polygamy May Be Natural for Humans  | It turns out, people may naturally fall into two distinct groups: those who want a long-term love, and those seeking more casual encounters, a new study suggests. Both men and women sorted into these two groups, though slightly more men tended to seek short-term encounters, the researchers found. The findings could partly explain why there's such a wide variation in sexual behaviors seen across cultures, said Rafael Wlodarski, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford in England. Human beings have much more varied mating strategies than other animals.
| Read More » Amazing New Nebula Photo Uncovers 2 New Stars (Video)  | The amazing image of the Trifid Nebula was taken by the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) VISTA telescope in Chile. While the picture does capture an amazing view of the nebula in infrared light, it also has some serious scientific merit. Researchers examining the image found two unknown Cepheid variable stars, objects much brighter than the sun that brighten and fade through time, ESO said.
| Read More » Monkey Mustaches and Beards Help Algorithm Recognize Faces  | The scientists found that a computer algorithm could correctly identify these monkeys by their faces, as well as distinguish among species. "If communicating sex was a key aim of guenon faces, males and females should look different from their facial appearance, but for most species they don't," said James Higham, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University (NYU) and one of authors of the study. The program works on the principal that variations among faces can be described numerically, with each individual face scored based on how it relates to a set of general faces ("eigenfaces"), Higham told Live Science.
| Read More » Chef Bot? Robot Learns Cooking from YouTube Videos  | The U.S. military may not be known for its haute cuisine, but it's developing a new robot that can learn how to cook from watching YouTube videos. Using its brainy programming, the robot is capable of recognizing how kitchen utensils are used in the videos, and can accurately replicate those actions without human intervention, according to the study, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Existing robots are already pretty good at recognizing objects or patterns, but it's much harder to interpret visual information and perform actions based on it, DARPA officials said. The agency has now "taken the next step" by developing a robot that processes visual information and translates it into actions, Reza Ghanadan, a program manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences Offices, said in a statement.
| Read More » Taj Mahal Gardens Found to Align with the Solstice Sun If you arrived at the Taj Mahal in India before the sun rises on the day of the summer solstice (which usually occurs June 21), and walked up to the north-central portion of the garden where two pathways intersect with the waterway, and if you could step into that waterway and turn your gaze toward a pavilion to the northeast — you would see the sun rise directly over it. Although standing in the waterway is impractical (and not allowed), the dawn and dusk would be sights to behold, and these alignments are just two among several that a physics researcher recently discovered between the solstice sun and the waterways, pavilions and pathways in the gardens of the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum built by Mughal Dynasty emperor Shah Jahan (who lived from 1592 to 1666) for his favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal (who lived 1592-1631). Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, a physics professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy, reported the alignments in an article published recently in the journal Philica. Read More » 2 Billion Years Unchanged, Bacteria Pose an Evolutionary Puzzle  | Both sets of microbes were indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found off the coast of Chile. "It seems astounding that [this] life has not evolved for more than 2 billion years — nearly half the history of the Earth," the study's leader, J. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA, said in a statement. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection states that all species develop from heritable genetic changes that make an individual better able to survive in its environment and reproduce. True, the deep-sea bacteria in this study haven't changed for eons, but neither has their environment, Schopf said.
| Read More » Elon Musk Names SpaceX Drone Ships in Honor of Sci-Fi Legend  | The robotic ships that serve as landing platforms for SpaceX rockets now have names that honor legendary sci-fi author Iain M. Banks. Late last month, SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk announced that he had named the company's first spaceport drone ship "Just Read the Instructions." The second autonomous boat, which is under construction, will be called "Of Course I Still Love You," Musk added. On Jan. 10, SpaceX tried to bring the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket back for a soft landing on the ship, which was positioned in the Atlantic Ocean a couple of hundred miles off Florida. The bold and unprecedented maneuver — which came after the Falcon 9 had sent SpaceX's robotic Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station on a cargo run for NASA — nearly worked.
| Read More » Newfound Frog Has Strange Breeding Habits  | A new species of frog has hopped onto the radar of researchers in Bangladesh. Most frogs have a specific mating season, but researchers found that one frog bred all year long, even in the winter, said study lead researcher M. Sajid Ali Howlader, a doctoral student of biosciences at the University of Helsinki in Finland. The newfound frog's mitochondrial genes are between 5.5 percent and about 18 percent different from other frog species in the same genus, the researchers found.
| Read More » HIV, Syphilis Tests? There's an App for That Now you can add "run an HIV test" to the list. A device invented by biomedical engineers at Columbia University turns a smartphone into a lab that can test human blood for the virus that causes AIDS or the bacteria that cause syphilis. Once the blood is inside the device, it meets chemicals that react with markers for HIV and syphilis. This kind of test is called an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and is considered one of the best methods for diagnosing diseases, said Samuel Sia, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia, who led the research. Read More » | |
