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	(Sponsor this newsletter) U.S. must invest to keep ahead of China in space, hearing told By David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China's space program is catching up with that of the United States and Washington must invest in military and civilian programs if it is to remain the world's dominant space power, a congressional hearing heard on Wednesday. Experts speaking to Congress's U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said China's fast advances in military and civilian space technology were part of a long-term strategy to shape the international geopolitical system to its interests and achieve strategic dominance in the Asia-Pacific. They also reflect an enthusiasm for space exploration which in the United States has faded since the Apollo Program which landed Americans on the moon in 1969, they said. "China right now is experiencing its Apollo years," Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told the hearing. Read More » Star Explosions Help Solve Mineral Mystery of the Universe An explosion on the surface of a dying star has is helping to clear up a mystery behind copious amounts of lithium seen in the universe. By studying Nova Delphini 2013 (V339 Del), astronomers were able to detect a precursor to lithium, making the first direct detection of the third lightest element whose abundance had long remained in the theoretical realm. "There have been no direct observational evidence for lithium production in novae before our result," lead author Akito Tajitsu, of the National Observatory of Japan, told Space.com via email. When V339 Del was spotted by an amateur astronomer on Aug. 14, 2013, it was just beyond the limit of being visible to the naked eye, though it was visible in binoculars and telescopes. Read More » Chinese New Year: How to See the New Moon Live Online Thursday Whether or not you believe babies born in the Year of the Goat will have a lifetime of bad luck and unhappiness, tomorrow is a day of celestial significance. To mark the beginning of the Chinese New Year, the online Slooh Community Observatory will broadcast real-time views of the new moon on Thursday (Feb. 19). The Chinese zodiac's 12-year cycle — with each year represented by a different animal with its own virtues and flaws — is based on the lunar calendar. "Before this modern era where the moon is scarcely visible against city lights and irrelevant to our everyday lives, moonlight often made a life-or-death difference as to whether we dared venture out at night," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement. Read More » Marijuana Munchies May Come from Scrambled Neuron Signals People who get "the munchies" after smoking marijuana may owe their sudden craving for food to certain neurons in the brain that are normally responsible for suppressing appetite, according to a new study on mice. The researchers also looked to see what was going on with the rest of the brain circuitry involved in appetite regulation in the mice whose hunger was stimulated. Although the investigators anticipated that the neurons that typically suppress appetite would be "turned off" by the process of appetite stimulation, instead, they saw that the appetite-suppressing neurons were being activated. "We found that these neurons, under the influence of cannabinoids, switch the chemicals that they release," study author Dr. Tamas Horvath, a professor of neurobiology at Yale University, told Live Science. Read More » Some Racing Raindrops Break Their 'Speed Limit' Some radical raindrops are flouting the rules: The wet-weather drips seem to be breaking a physical speed limit, sometimes falling 10 times faster than they should, scientists have found. This terminal velocity is reached when the downward tug of gravity equals the opposing force of air resistance. In 2009, physicists reported that they had discovered small raindrops falling faster than this terminal velocity. In that study, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Alexander Kostinski and Raymond Shaw of Michigan Technological University, along with Guillermo Montero-Martinez and Fernando Garcia-Garcia of the National University of Mexico, measured 64,000 raindrops, and found clusters of "superterminal" drops falling faster than they should based on their size and weight, especially as the rain became heavier. Read More » Slimy Microbes May Have Carpeted Earth 3.2 Billion Years Ago Nitrogen fixation involves breaking the powerful chemical bonds that hold nitrogen atoms in pairs in the atmosphere and using the resulting single nitrogen atoms to help create biologically useful molecules. Microbes that live in the roots of legume plants and in soils are key to modern nitrogen fixation. Now, scientists looking at some of the planet's oldest rocks have found evidence that life was already practicing nitrogen fixation about 3.2 billion years ago, nearly three-quarters of the way back to the birth of the planet. Read More » Galaxy Merger Caught in Stunning Hubble Telescope Photo, Video A spiral galaxy gets twisted out of shape after coming too close to a cosmic neighbor in a gorgeous photo captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Between 100 million and 200 million years ago, NGC 7714 drifted too close to a smaller, neighboring galaxy called NGC 7715. The resulting galaxy merger has been violent and dramatic, changing the structure and shape of both NGC 7714 and NGC 7715, researchers said. "Tell-tale signs of this brutality can be seen in NGC 7714's strangely shaped arms, and in the smoky golden haze that stretches out from the galactic center," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a description of the new image. Read More » World's Largest Atom Smasher Returns: 4 Things It Could Find The world's largest particle collider is gearing up for another run of smashing particles together at nearly the speed of light. After a two-year hiatus for upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will restart this year, and is expected to be twice as powerful as it was during its first run. In 2012, the LHC helped to find evidence of the Higgs boson, the particle that is thought to explain how other particles get their mass. The discovery vindicated theoretical calculations made decades ago, and bolstered the Standard Model, the current framework of particle physics. Read More » Chemical in Plastics May Alter Boys' Genitals Before Birth It confirms earlier findings in humans and animals that exposure to certain types of chemicals called phthalates may lead to changes in the way the male reproductive tract develops, said Dr. Russ Hauser, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved in the new study. Phthalates are a large group of industrial chemicals used in a variety of consumer products, such as food packaging, flooring, perfumes and lotions. The changes seen in the babies in the study were small, said lead author Shanna Swan, a reproductive health scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "There was nothing clinically abnormal or noticeably different about these boys," Swan told Live Science. Read More » This State Is the Nation's Happiest for the First Time Alaska edged out Hawaii and is now at the top of the rankings of the nation's happiest states for the first time. Read More » Diseases affecting the poorest can be eliminated, scientists say By Alex Whiting LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - It is a little known disease but it could make medical history if scientists' predictions are correct: yaws could completely disappear by 2020, given the right resources. Guinea worm is nearly there, and polio too could be added to the list. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday urged developing countries to invest more in tackling so-called neglected tropical diseases such as yaws, saying more investment would alleviate human misery and free people trapped in poverty. When the WHO launched mass treatment campaigns with penicillin vaccines, the number of cases plummeted by 95 percent by the end of the 1960s, according to David Mabey, an expert in yaws and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Read More » Diseases affecting the poorest can be eliminated, scientists say By Alex Whiting LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - It is a little known disease but it could make medical history if scientists' predictions are correct: yaws could completely disappear by 2020, given the right resources. Guinea worm is nearly there, and polio too could be added to the list. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday urged developing countries to invest more in tackling so-called neglected tropical diseases such as yaws, saying more investment would alleviate human misery and free people trapped in poverty. When the WHO launched mass treatment campaigns with penicillin vaccines, the number of cases plummeted by 95 percent by the end of the 1960s, according to David Mabey, an expert in yaws and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Read More » Moon, Venus, Mars Meet in Friday Night Sky: How to See It Mars, Venus and the moon will meet up in a particularly beautiful cosmic display Friday (Feb. 20). If you've been watching the evening twilight sky over the past few weeks, you will have seen the brilliant planet Venus gradually moving away from the sun, setting slightly later every evening. At the same time, the planet Mars has been gradually moving downward toward the sun, setting slightly earlier every evening. The three cosmic bodies will form a triangle only 2 degrees across, small enough to fit into a low-power telescope's field of view. Read More » NASA Spacecraft Spies 2 Tiny Moons of Pluto (Photos, Video) A NASA spacecraft speeding toward an epic flyby of Pluto on July 14 has beamed home its first good looks at two moons of the dwarf planet. The New Horizons probe captured images of Nix and Hydra, two of Pluto's five known satellites, from Jan. 27 through Feb. 8, at distances ranging from 125 million miles to 115 million miles (201 million to 186 million kilometers), NASA officials said. NASA released the new footage Wednesday (Feb. 18), 85 years to the day after American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. "It's thrilling to watch the details of the Pluto system emerge as we close the distance to the spacecraft's July 14 encounter," New Horizons science team member John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. Read More » Diseases affecting the poorest can be eliminated, scientists say By Alex Whiting LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - It is a little known disease but it could make medical history if scientists' predictions are correct: yaws could completely disappear by 2020, given the right resources. Guinea worm is nearly there, and polio too could be added to the list. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday urged developing countries to invest more in tackling so-called neglected tropical diseases such as yaws, saying more investment would alleviate human misery and free people trapped in poverty. When the WHO launched mass treatment campaigns with penicillin vaccines, the number of cases plummeted by 95 percent by the end of the 1960s, according to David Mabey, an expert in yaws and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Read More » Shrimpy Sharks to Great Whites: Marine Animals Have Gotten Bigger Over Time Animals tend to evolve toward a larger body size over time, and marine animals are no exception, a study suggests. In fact, the average size of marine animals has increased significantly over the past 542 million years, according to researchers who recently compared the body sizes of ocean-dwelling creatures from five major groups ranging from arthropods to vertebrates. The findings support a theory that biologists call Cope's rule, which holds that animals in a given group tend to grow larger over the course of their evolution, the researchers said. Cope's rule is named after American paleontologist Edward Cope. Read More » Bigger is better: 19th century hypothesis gets fresh endorsement By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Renowned 19th century American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope proposed "Cope's Rule," hypothesizing that animal lineages tend to increase in body size over time. Scientists on Thursday said the most comprehensive test of "Cope's rule" ever conducted, involving 17,208 different marine animal groups spanning the past 542 million years, demonstrated a clear trend toward larger size over time. Read More »
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