|  SpaceX rocket blasts off to put weather satellite into deep space  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A SpaceX rocket blasted off on Wednesday to put a U.S. satellite into deep space, where it will keep tabs on solar storms and image Earth from nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) away. Weather was pristine for launch on Wednesday, but high seas prompted SpaceX to cancel a test to land the rocket's discarded first stage on a platform in the ocean. "Unfortunately we will not be able to attempt to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9," SpaceX said in a statement.
| Read More » SpaceX Launches DSCOVR Space Weather Satellite, But No Rocket Landing  | The third time was the charm for SpaceX Wednesday (Feb. 11) with the launch of a long-delayed space weather satellite on a million-mile trek into deep space. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched into orbit at 6:03 p.m. EST (2303 GMT) carrying the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite designed to serve as an early-warning system for potentially dangerous solar storms. SpaceX was initially schedule to deliver the satellite on Sunday, but a series of delays pushed the launch to today. Video of the SpaceX launch showed the rocket soaring serenely into the sunset sky above its Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch site in Florida.
| Read More » SpaceX rocket blasts off to put weather satellite into deep space | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A SpaceX rocket blasted off on Wednesday to put a U.S. satellite into deep space, where it will keep tabs on solar storms and image Earth from nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) away. Weather was pristine for launch on Wednesday, but high seas prompted SpaceX to cancel a test to land the rocket's discarded first stage on a platform in the ocean. "Unfortunately we will not be able to attempt to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9," SpaceX said in a statement.
| Read More » Tests planned on mysterious 'milky rain' in U.S. Pacific Northwest By Courtney Sherwood PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - Scientists from two U.S. Pacific Northwest laboratories plan to conduct tests of unusual precipitation that fell across the region over the weekend in hopes of pinpointing the origins of so-called "milky rain" that has mystified residents, officials said on Wednesday. Officials at both the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Benton Clean Air Agency, both in Washington state, said they had collected samples of the rain, which left a powdery residue on cars across a wide swath of the two states. Scientists at the Richland lab said they believe the rain may have carried volcanic ash from an erupting volcano in Japan, while the clean air agency said its staffers believe dust from central Oregon was the culprit. The National Weather Service has said it believes the powdery rain was most likely a byproduct of dust storms hundreds of miles away in Nevada, although it could not rule out volcanic ash from Japan as a possible culprit. Read More » Depression in Teachers Impacts Classroom Learning Elementary school teachers who have more symptoms of depression may have a negative influence on some students' academic performance, a new study suggests. In the small study, third-grade teachers who were struggling with symptoms of depression — such as poor appetite, restless sleep, crying spells and feeling like a failure — were generally less likely to create and maintain a high-quality classroom environment for their students compared with teachers who had fewer signs of depression. The research also showed that students who had weak math skills tended to be more affected by their teachers' depressive symptoms and the poorer-quality classroom environment. In contrast, the performance of their classmates with stronger math skills was not affected by the learning environment. Read More » Alcohol May Help Elderly Women, But Not Men, Live Longer Despite what you may have heard, the only older adults who get health benefits from drinking alcohol are women ages 65 or older, according to a new study of people over age 50. They found that in women ages 65 and older, those who drank moderately lived longer than those who never drank. Read More » Baby Born Pregnant with Her Own Twins A baby born in Hong Kong was pregnant with her own siblings at the time of her birth, according to a new report of the infant's case. "Weird things happen early, early in the pregnancy that we just don't understand," said Dr. Draion Burch, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Pittsburgh, who goes by Dr. Drai. The World Health Organization considers a tiny fetus found within an infant to be a kind of teratoma, or tumor, rather than a normally developing fetus. The newborn baby was referred to Dr. Yu Kai-man, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong, because the baby was suspected to have a tumor, according to the case report. Read More » Opportunity Rover on Mars to Hit Marathon Milestone Soon  | NASA's long-lived Opportunity Mars rover is about to run a marathon on the Red Planet. Opportunity has now covered 26.094 miles (41.994 kilometers) since touching down on Mars in January 2004, leaving the rover just 660 feet (200 meters) shy of the marathon milestone, NASA officials said today (Feb. 10). Opportunity should surpass the milestone when it reaches its next destination along the western rim of the 14-mile-wide (22 km) Endeavour Crater. "When Opportunity was in its prime mission 11 years ago, no one imagined this vehicle surviving a Martian winter, let alone completing a marathon on Mars," Opportunity project manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
| Read More » Self-Driving Vehicles Could Cut Car Ownership Nearly in Half, Report Finds  | In the not-too-distant future, the typical picture of a big American household in the suburbs might include just one car in the driveway: A new report finds that self-driving cars have the potential to cut U.S. car ownership nearly in half. For the report, Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute looked at 2009 data from the U.S. National Household Travel Survey, which found that 31.9 percent of households had one car, 41.6 percent had two cars and 26.5 percent had three or more vehicles. Only 14.7 percent had two drivers with overlapping trips, and less than 2 percent of households reported conflicting schedules that required three or more cars. This means the average number of cars per household is currently 2.1, but the minimum number of vehicles needed in a household is 1.2, on average, according to Schoettle and Sivak's analysis.
| Read More » Did Ocean's Big Burps End Last Ice Age? A massive outpouring of carbon dioxide from the deep ocean may have helped end the last ice age, scientists report today. Carbon dioxide levels are lower during an ice age and higher when an ice age ends. "The oceans are leaking carbon dioxide to the atmosphere," said study co-author Gavin Foster from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. A certain chemical ratio involving boron is a proxy for the carbon dioxide concentration in seawater thousands of years ago, when the microbes lived and died. Read More » Happy Words Dominate Most Languages  | A team of scientists used Big Data techniques to examine a massive amount of data on 10 languages, from Korean Twitter feeds to Russian literature, and found that the most commonly used words in each language were all skewed toward the positive. This positive bias in language "is not what people think when they read the paper or listen to music on the radio or read YouTube comments," said Christopher Danforth, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont and co-author of the study. "The concept has been around for a while that maybe we are hard-wired to communicate in a way that encourages us to get along," Danforth told Live Science. In the new study, Danforth and his team took a more data-driven approach.
| Read More » World's First Robot-Staffed Hotel to Open in Japan  | What if you could check into a hotel, have your luggage carried to your room and order a coffee — all with help from a team of robots? A new hotel at a theme park in Nagasaki, Japan, hopes to make that dream a reality. The Henn-na Hotel (whose name means "strange hotel") will be partially staffed by androids that work as reception attendants, robot waiters, cleaning staff and a cloakroom attendant, The Telegraph reported. Developed by Japan's Osaka University and manufactured by the Japanese robotics company Kokoro, many of the "Actroid" robots resemble a young Japanese woman.
| Read More » Firefighting Robots Could Help US Navy Snuff Out Fires at Sea  | A prototype of an adult-size firefighting bot was unveiled this week at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the exposition was the perfect place to show off a futuristic robot equipped to fight fires at sea. Standing on two "legs," SAFFiR is about the size of an adult man, measuring 5 feet 10 inches (1.8 meters) tall and weighing about 140 lbs. (64 kilograms). Dexterous enough to hold a fire hose, SAFFiR can both detect and put out a blaze. Engineering students from the Terrestrial Robotics Engineering and Controls Lab and the Extreme Environments, Robotics & Materials Laboratory at Virginia Tech created the firefighting bot as part of a Navy initiative aimed at helping sailors fight fires at sea.
| Read More » Polyamory Stigma Lessens with Familiarity Chances are, the more you know about the relationship style called polyamory, the more accepting you are of such setups, according to new research. "If people know even one gay person that they like in their life — a friend, a relative — their attitudes are much more favorable," said study researcher Traci Giuliano, a psychologist at Southwestern University in Texas. Likewise, the study found that "the more aware people were of polyamory, the more positive their attitudes were," Giuliano told Live Science. Polyamory is often confused with swinging, but the terms are not interchangeable. Read More » People with Mental Disorders Risk an Early Death  | People with mental disorders are two times more likely to die early than their peers in the general population — and not just because of factors like suicide, a new study suggests. More than half of the early deaths analyzed in the study were blamed on natural causes, such as acute and chronic illnesses like heart disease. "I think it's an important study that's drawing attention to the general health risk that's associated with a range of psychiatric disorders," said Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who wasn't involved in the study. There are hundreds of studies going back decades that produced data on the mortality rates of people with mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder.
| Read More » Waiting for Mr. Right May Be an Evolutionary Wrong  | "Primitive humans were likely forced to bet on whether or not they could find a better mate," study author Chris Adami, a microbiologist at Michigan State University, said in a statement. The whole population may have benefited from the fact that a range of behaviors evolved, with some people willing to take more risks, and others less so, Adami said.
| Read More » NASA Sun-Watching Probe Celebrates 5 Years in Space (Videos)  | A prolific NASA's sun observatory is celebrated its fifth year in space this week, and the space agency marked the milestone with two new videos celebrating the probe's images and scientific accomplishments. Indeed, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), one of three instruments flying aboard SDO, captured its 100 millionth sun photo last month. "There have now been more than 2,000 scientific papers published based on SDO data," SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. NASA released two videos Wednesday to celebrate the mission's five-year anniversary.
| Read More » Hillary Clinton on vaccines: 'The science is clear' Hillary Rodham Clinton is tweaking Republicans who say vaccinations should be optional, writing on social media that vaccines protect the lives of children. Clinton says on Twitter, "The science is ... Read More » How Many Licks Does It Take to Get to the Center of a Lollipop?  | How many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop? Science now has an answer to the famous question asked in the iconic Tootsie Roll Pop commercial: about 1,000. Researchers at New York University arrived at the number by custom-making their own candy spheres and cylinders to test how materials dissolve in a flow. "But then, the flow starts to dissolve the solid, so now something about the flow is being imprinted on the solid object," Ristroph told Live Science.
| Read More » Worst Megadroughts in 1,000 Years Threaten US  | Before this century ends, the Southwest and Central Plains states are likely to shrivel under a decades-long megadrought worse than those that ended the Ancestral Pueblo civilization in the last millennia, a new study finds. Based on tree-ring records, scientists know that severe droughts coincided with the collapse of the Ancestral Pueblo culture. After analyzing climate models that include historical records and looking at drought trends revealed in tree rings over the last 1,000 years, scientists predict a strong possibility of megadroughts before 2100 in the Southwest and Central Plains. There is an 85 percent chance of a drought lasting 35 years or more between 2050 and 2100, said study co-author Toby Ault, a climate scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
| Read More » New development goals risk failure without clearer targets, scientists warn By Magdalena Mis LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - U.N. development goals for 2030 risk failure without clearer, more measurable targets that are based on the latest scientific evidence, researchers warned on Thursday. World leaders are due to adopt later this year a set of new development objectives, such as ending hunger, promoting healthy lives and tackling climate change, to replace eight expiring U.N. Millennium Development Goals. "Having robust targets that are clearly specified is key for the monitoring," said Anne-Sophie Stevance, lead coordinator of the report by the International Council for Science and the International Social Science Council. The study said only a third of the targets was well defined and based on latest scientific evidence, while more than half needed more work and 17 percent were weak or unneccessary. Read More » | |
