|  Scientists name new species of wasp after Boston Bruins goalie Rask  | A team of researchers studying insects in Africa has named a newly discovered species of wasp with a distinctive yellow-and-black pattern after Boston Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask, the Boston Globe reported on Tuesday. Robert Copeland, a follower of Boston sports and an entomologist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, told the newspaper that the wasp's yellow and black coloring resembles a Boston Bruins jersey. The research also was underwritten by the government of Finland, where Rask was born. "This species is named after the acrobatic goaltender for the Finnish national ice hockey team and the Boston Bruins, whose glove hand is as tenacious as the raptorial fore tarsus of this dryinid species," the authors wrote in the paper, which is due to be published in March in the scientific journal Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae. Rask told the newspaper he was unaware of any animals named after him, other than the occasional fan's pet cat or dog.
| Read More » Scientists name new species of wasp after Boston Bruins goalie Rask  | A team of researchers studying insects in Africa has named a newly discovered species of wasp with a distinctive yellow-and-black pattern after Boston Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask, the Boston Globe reported on Tuesday. Robert Copeland, a follower of Boston sports and an entomologist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, told the newspaper that the wasp's yellow and black colouring resembles a Boston Bruins jersey. The research also was underwritten by the government of Finland, where Rask was born. "This species is named after the acrobatic goaltender for the Finnish national ice hockey team and the Boston Bruins, whose glove hand is as tenacious as the raptorial fore tarsus of this dryinid species," the authors wrote in the paper, which is due to be published in March in the scientific journal Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae. Rask told the newspaper he was unaware of any animals named after him, other than the occasional fan's pet cat or dog.
| Read More » What Would It Be Like to Live on the Moon?  | Lunar days stretch for about 14 Earth days with average temperatures of 253 degrees Fahrenheit (123 degrees Celsius), while lunar nights also last 14 Earth days (due to the moon's rotation) and maintain a frigid cold of minus 387 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 233 degrees Celsius). "About the only place we could build a base that wouldn't have to deal with these extremes is, oddly enough, near the lunar poles," said Rick Elphic, project scientist for NASA's LADEE probe, which studied the moon's atmosphere and dust environment before performing a planned crash into the natural satellitein April 2014. "Instead of the blazing heat of lunar noon, it is a kind of perpetual balmy sunset, with temperatures around 0 degrees Celsius [32 degrees Fahrenheit] due to the low angle of the sun," Elphic added.
| Read More » Chockablock with crocs: Seven species rocked ancient Amazon basin  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If one croc is reason enough to stay out of the water, how about dipping your toes in a place with seven different croc species including two 26-foot (8-meter) monsters, all living side by side eating just about anything that moves? With powerful jaws and teeth, 26-foot Purussaurus neivensis was the neighborhood bully.
| Read More » The Best Length for Eyelashes, According to Science  | Cosmeticians probably won't agree, but scientists say eyelashes have an optimal length: a third of the width of the eye. "They've been hypothesized to act as sun shades, dust catchers and blink-reflex triggers," said David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
| Read More » Ancient Croc with 'Shovel Mouth' Likely Enjoyed Clam Dinners  | A peg-toothed crocodile relative with a mouth like a shovel lived in the prehistoric swamps of Peru about 13 million years ago, a new study finds. The newly discovered reptile (Gnatusuchus pebasensis) is one of seven types of extinct crocodylians researchers found recently near the Amazon River in northeastern Peru. Two of the crocodylians were already known to scientists, but the other five are newly discovered species, said the study's lead author, Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, a graduate student at the University of Montpellier, in France, and chief of the paleontology department at the National University of San Marcos' Museum of Natural History in Lima, Peru. Salas-Gismondi and his colleagues spent more than a decade traveling to Peru to excavate the same bone bed on the banks of the Amazon River during the dry summer months.
| Read More » Scarlett and Alessandro Top Sexiest Names List Over the past five years, Laura Wattenberg, founder of BabyNameWizard.com — a website popular among expectant parents, performers and authors looking for names — asked tens of thousands of visitors to rate names for sexiness. "We wanted to be able to give our visitors a sense of how the name plays to other people," said Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard" (Three Rivers Press, 2013). The top 10 contenders for boys' and girls' names shared a number of sexy characteristics, Wattenberg wrote in her blog, published yesterday (Feb. 23). Names that sound exotic topped the list, Wattenberg noticed. Read More » Fighter Jets May Launch Small Satellites to Space  | Small satellites could hitch rides to space on an F-15 fighter jet by next year, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for developing new technologies for the U.S. military. DARPA's so-called Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (ALASA) program is an ambitious project that aims to launch small satellites more quickly, and reduce the cost of lofting them into orbit. Traditional launches using rockets cost roughly $30,000 per pound ($66,000 per kilogram), DARPA officials have said. The F-15 jet would take off on a nearly vertical trajectory, with the expendable launch vehicle mounted underneath it.
| Read More » Mummy Hair Reveals Ancient South American Diet  | A chemical analysis of the mummies' hair suggests these ancient individuals, who once lived on the southern coast of modern-day Peru, likely ate corn, beans, and marine plants and animals, the researchers found. "We can use hair to look at diet because, quite simply, we are what we eat," said the study's lead researcher Kelly Knudson, an associate professor of anthropology at the Center for Bioarchaeological Research at Arizona State University. "The textiles have been sent to museums all over the world," Knudson told Live Science. "By looking at how far the hair is from the scalp, we were able to look at what they were eating in particular weeks or months before they died," Knudson said.
| Read More » 3 Men Get Bionic Hands After Nerve Injuries  | Three men who had lost the use of their hands in accidents are now the first people with this type of injury to receive bionic hands controlled by transplanted nerve tissue, a new study reports. During the procedure, known as "bionic reconstruction," doctors amputated the useless hand, transplanted nerve and muscle tissue from another part of the body to boost nerve signals in the arm, and then used these nerve signals to control a robotic limb. "There's nothing new in the prosthetic device or the surgical techniques," said Dr. Oskar Aszmann, a professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Medical University of Vienna, in Austria, and co-author of the study published today (Feb. 24) in the journal The Lancet.
| Read More » Human Hibernation: Snowy States Cause Longer Slumbers Brant Hasler, a sleep expert and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the research, cautioned that the population in the new study is likely not completely representative of each state, because the researchers included only the people who use this particular sleep-tracking app. In addition, because the study was conducted at one point in time, it cannot say whether people's sleep habits changed in the wintertime compared to the summertime. But the finding that people sleep longer under more wintry conditions is generally consistent with what's known from previous research, Hasler said. This change in sleep habits is mainly due to the reduction in daylight hours in the wintertime, which affects people's internal circadian clocks and makes them want to sleep more, he said. Read More » Obesity Is Complicated and Needs New Approach, Scientists Say With obesity rates continuing to rise around the globe and the majority of Americans now obese or overweight, it's easy to see that we are losing the battle of the bulge. Aside from isolated areas of improvement where people are, in fact, losing weight — in a city here, a neighborhood there — no country has succeeded in reversing its obesity epidemic. In a series of six critical articles covering the health, policy, economics and politics of obesity, scientists lay out what society has been doing wrong and call for a new global action plan to meet what they call the "modest" goal of the World Health Organization: no increase in the prevalence of obesity from now through 2025. "There are clear agreements on what strategies should be implemented and tested to address obesity," said Christina Roberto, an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and lead author of the first report of the series. Read More » Astronauts leave space station for second spacewalk  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Two U.S. astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Wednesday for the second of three spacewalks to begin preparing parking spots for new commercial space taxis. Station commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, 52, and flight engineer Terry Virts, 47, left the station's Quest airlock just after 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT) and headed to the space shuttle's old docking port, a NASA Television broadcast showed. The spacewalkers struggled a bit to remove a cover protecting the berthing slip, one of two sites being reconfigured for new spaceships under development by Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. The adapters will be installed during four more spacewalks NASA plans in 2015.
| Read More » Scientists discover black hole so big it contradicts growth theory By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Scientists say they have discovered a black hole so big that it challenges the theory about how they grow. Scientists said this black hole was formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang. "Based on previous research, this is the largest black hole found for that period of time," Dr Fuyan Bian, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University (ANU), told Reuters on Wednesday. "Current theory is for a limit to how fast a black hole can grow, but this black hole is too large for that theory." The creation of supermassive black holes remains an open topic of research. Read More » The Far Side of the Moon Has Phases and Now You Can See 'Em (Video)  | A new video from a NASA satellite orbiting the moon brings the phases of the far side of the lunar body into the light. The phases of the moon — full moon, new moon, crescent and everything in between — also occur on the side facing away from Earth, according to data gathered by the NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Launched in 2009, NASA's LRO probe has imaged the far side of the moon in gorgeous detail. The phases of the moon on the far side differ from the familiar phases on the Earth-facing side.
| Read More » Mars Rover Curiosity Snaps Amazing Selfie at Latest Drilling Site (Photo)  | A new selfie taken by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows just where the six-wheeled robot has been working for the last five months. Curiosity's latest Mars photo, which was released today (Feb. 24), is a composite of dozens of images taken in late January by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Curiosity's robotic arm. The 1-ton Curiosity rover has been studying Pahrump Hills terrain since September 2014 and has performed two sample-collecting drilling operations there, on rocks dubbed Confidence Hills and Mojave 2. Curiosity landed inside the 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012 on a $2.5-billion mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.
| Read More » Pink cloud from NASA rocket lights up sky over U.S. Southwest (Reuters) - An unusual pink cloud that lit up the sky over New Mexico and Arizona early on Wednesday was caused by a NASA research rocket launched to study the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere, scientists said. The cloud stunned many residents who posted photographs online and speculated on social media about its cause, with theories ranging from shootings stars to the sprightly fictional character Peter Pan. But researchers at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico said the fluffy phenomenon had a much more Earth-bound explanation. ... Read More » Study links common food additives to Crohn's disease, colitis  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Common additives in ice cream, margarine, packaged bread and many processed foods may promote the inflammatory bowel diseases ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease as well as a group of obesity-related conditions, scientists said on Wednesday. The researchers focused on emulsifiers, chemicals added to many food products to improve texture and extend shelf life. In mouse experiments, they found emulsifiers can change the species composition of gut bacteria and induce intestinal inflammation.
| Read More » Air Force seeks rethink of 2019 deadline for new U.S. rocket engine By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday said it will release plans within months for replacing the Russian-built RD-180 motors that now power some rockets used to launch military satellites into space, but said it would likely miss a 2019 congressional deadline to start using a new U.S. engine. Air Force Secretary Deborah James told the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee that failure to extend the 2019 deadline could lead to swapping one monopoly provider of rocket launches for military satellites for another. Congress last year passed a law that requires the Air Force to develop a new propulsion system by 2019 to replace the RD-180 engine that powers one of two rockets used by the current monopoly launch provider, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co. The Air Force has said it expects to certify privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to launch some of those satellites by mid-year, but the process is still ongoing. Read More » Scientists witness carbon dioxide trapping heat in air  | WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have witnessed carbon dioxide trapping heat in the atmosphere above the United States, chronicling human-made climate change in action, live in the wild.
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