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	(Sponsor this newsletter) LEGO Passes on Fan-Voted Hubble Space Telescope Model The Hubble Space Telescope's 25th anniversary celebration won't include a LEGO model of the orbiting observatory, despite the support of 10,000 fans. LEGO on Wednesday (Feb. 4) revealed the outcome of its most recent review of fan-suggested model kits submitted through its LEGO Ideas website. "We reviewed eight amazing projects that reached 10,000 supporters between June and September," Signe Lonholdt with the LEGO Ideas team said in a video announcing the results of the evaluation. The LEGO Hubble Space Telescope, which was designed by fan Gabriel Russo, reached 10,000 votes last August. Read More » NASA Demolishes Gantry Used to Lift Space Shuttles Off Jumbo Jets One of NASA's last remaining structures unique to supporting the space shuttle is no more. The Mate-Demate Device (MDD), which for 35 years was used at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to mount and remove the space shuttles from the back of their transport jumbo jets, has been demolished. The towering gantry was toppled to make way for the Florida space center's current and future needs, NASA reported on its website on Wednesday (Feb. 4). "The MDD was a solid, well-built structure," Ismael Otero, the project manager for NASA's Construction of Facilities Division in Center Operations, said in a NASA interview. Read More » Florida scientists develop way to detect mislabeled fish By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - A pair of Florida scientists have developed a device they say can genetically verify whether imported fish destined for dining tables are grouper or less expensive, potentially harmful Asian catfish often passed off for the popular firm-fleshed fillets. By early summer, Tampa-based PureMolecular LLC hopes to begin selling the fist-sized machines for about $2,000 apiece, said John Paul, the company's chief executive and a marine science professor at the University of South Florida. Retailers trying to profit from mislabeling cheaper seafood as more expensive varieties have come under increasing fire from consumer and environmental activists and from seafood vendors who find it harder to charge the full price for properly labeled fish. One group estimates that up to a third of the fish consumed in the United States could be mislabeled. Read More » Chimps Can Learn Foreign 'Dialects,' Experiment Shows The Dutch chimps loved apples, and referred to the fruit using a high-pitched grunt, whereas the Scottish chimps disliked apples, and used a much lower-pitched grunt to describe the fruit. For example, Taglialatela and his colleagues have found evidence that young chimps learn to make attention-getting sounds from their mothers. Read More » #Weed: Twitter Is Awash In Pro-Marijuana Tweets People who support pot smoking seem to be more vocal about the topic on Twitter than those who oppose lighting up, a new study of marijuana hashtags finds. Out of the more than 7.6 million tweets about marijuana during a one-month period, there are 15 pro-pot tweets for every anti-marijuana tweet published on Twitter, the researchers found. "The younger people are when they begin using marijuana, the more likely they are to become dependent," Patricia Cavazos-Rehg, the study's lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. It's possible that messages shared on social media sites influence people's behavior and opinions about marijuana, Cavazos-Rehg said. Read More » Wow! Hubble Telescope Sees Rare 3-Moon Shadow Dance on Jupiter NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured three of Jupiter's moons marching across the huge planet's disc, a stunning sight that happens only once or twice every 10 years. The rare triple-moon conjunction on Jupiter, which Hubble witnessed on Jan. 24, involved Io, Callisto and Europa — three of the gas giant's four Galilean moons (so named because they were discovered by astronomer Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century). "The apparent 'fuzziness' of some of the shadows depends on the moons' distances from Jupiter," they added. Read More » Oldest Stars in the Universe Actually Younger Than Previously Thought A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the light from some of the very first stars and galaxies lit up the universe and ended a period known as the "dark ages." New measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite — which studied the cosmic microwave background, or the light left over from the Big Bang — indicate that this period of light began about 100 million years later than Planck's previous estimate. Some of the first stars and galaxies to be born in the early universe helped end what is often referred to as the universe's "dark ages." The stars not only lit up the skies with their light, but also cleared away a fog consisting of hydrogen atoms that had come to fill cosmos. The powerful photons created by stars and galaxies ripped the atoms apart, or ionized them, which is why this era is known as reionization. Read More » Eating Organic Produce Can Limit Pesticide Exposure People who eat organic produce may have lower levels of some pesticides in their bodies than people who eat similar amounts of conventionally grown fruits and veggies, according to a new study. Organophosphates are the pesticides commonly used on conventionally grown produce. The researchers estimated pesticide exposure by comparing typical intake of specific food items with average pesticide residue levels for those items. When matched on produce intake, people who reported eating organic fruits and veggies at least occasionally had significantly lower levels of pesticide residue in their urine than people who almost always ate conventionally grown produce. Read More » Measles Outbreak, Measles Vaccine: Top Questions Answered The U.S. measles outbreak now includes at least 102 infected people in 14 states. Most of the cases of measles reported so far in 2015 are part of a large, ongoing outbreak linked to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, according to the California Department of Public Health(CDPH). The theme park has many international visitors, and measles is brought into the United States every year by unvaccinated travelers who contract the disease in other countries, especially in Western Europe, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Philippines, according to the CDPH. In 2014, there were more than 600 cases of measles in the U.S. The largest outbreak of the disease involved 383 of these cases, and occurred primarily among unvaccinated people living in Amish communities in Ohio. Read More » Herbal Supplement Controversy: Did NY Investigation Use the Right Tests? Authorities in New York have accused major retailers of selling herbal supplements that do not contain the listed ingredients. Officials said that DNA tests showed that just 21 percent of the supplements tested actually contained the ingredient listed on the label. In contrast, nearly 80 percent of supplements either contained no DNA from the substance listed on the label, or they contained other plant species not listed on the label, such as rice, asparagus or wild carrot. Many of the DNA tests could not find any botanical substance in the supplements, the attorney general's office said. Read More » NASA Probe Snaps Stunning New Views of Dwarf Planet Ceres (Video) NASA's Dawn spacecraft has taken the sharpest-ever photos of Ceres, just a month before slipping into orbit around the mysterious dwarf planet. Dawn captured the new Ceres images Wednesday (Feb. 4), when the probe was 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet, the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. On the night of March 5, Dawn will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit Ceres — and the first to circle two different solar system bodies beyond Earth. "It's very exciting," Dawn mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman, who's based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said of Dawn's impending arrival at Ceres. Read More » Mock Mars Mission Starts Saturday in Utah Desert A simulated Mars mission kicks off Saturday (Feb. 7) in Utah, and its seven crewmembers hope the experience helps them prepare for a real Red Planet expedition a decade from now. All seven explorers — who will spend two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), near the Utah town of Hanksville — are astronaut candidates for the Mars One project, which aims to launch four pioneers to the Red Planet in 2024 as the vanguard of a permanent colony. "It's not a coincidence that the whole crew is comprised of Mars One candidates — that was by design," said crewmember Kellie Gerardi, business development specialist at California-based aerospace firm Masten Space Systems. "I can only speak for myself, but my participation on a Mars One crew was an effort to show that there is so much more behind the candidates," Gerardi told Space.com via email. Read More »
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