|  Astronauts Add Antennas, Cables to Space Station in 3rd Spacewalk  | The International Space Station is now three steps – or rather spacewalks – closer to being ready for the arrival of new U.S. commercial crewed spacecraft with the successful completion of a two-astronaut outing on Sunday morning (March 1). NASA astronauts Terry Virts and Barry "Butch" Wilmore ventured outside the orbiting outpost for the third time in eight days to prepare the station for new docking ports to be added later this year. On Sunday, Virts and Wilmore routed some 400 feet (122 meters) of cables and installed two antenna booms that will provide navigational data to spacecraft approaching the complex. Virts and Wilmore completed the 5-hour, 38-minute spacewalk at 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT), having started the excursion at 6:52 a.m. EST (1152 GMT).
| Read More » SpaceX rocket blasts off with world's first all-electric satellites By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A Space Exploration Technologies rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Sunday to put the world's first all-electric communications satellites into orbit. The 22-story tall booster soared off its seaside launch pad at 10:50 a.m. EST, the third flight in less than two months for SpaceX, as the privately owned, California-based company is known. Perched on top of the rocket were a pair of satellites built by Boeing and owned by Paris-based Eutelsat Communications and Bermuda-based ABS, whose majority owner is the European private equity firm Permira. The satellites launched on Sunday are outfitted with lightweight, all-electric engines, rather than conventional chemical propulsion systems, to reach and maintain orbit. Read More » Dirt-Watching NASA Satellite Deploys Giant Space Antenna (Video)  | A recently launched NASA satellite has just deployed a giant antenna in space. The huge tool will help scientists collect unprecedented data that could help craft better weather forecasts around the world. The space agency's Soil Moisture Active Passive spacecraft (SMAP) is tasked with beaming back new global soil moisture maps designed to aid in crafting more effective warning systems for floods, droughts and other possible emergencies. "Just this Tuesday, SMAP completed a critical step in its journey toward becoming a productive member of NASA's Earth-observing fleet," Peg Luce, deputy director of the Earth Science Division at NASA, said during a news conference Thursday (Feb. 26).
| Read More » Elusive 'Dark Photons' Still Lurking in the Shadows A giant atom smasher has found no trace of a mysterious particle called the dark photon. Read More » Ancient Bolivians Stripped Flesh from Dead Bodies in Ritual Complex  | At an ancient ritual complex in Bolivia, archaeologists discovered the ruins of a room where dead bodies were dissolved down to their bones in sizzling pots of caustic chemicals. Founded during the late first century A.D., the site known as Khonkho Wankane was one of the smaller ceremonial centers to pop up in the Andes Mountains around Lake Titicaca before the rise of the more famous nearby ancient city of Tiwanaku. At its height, Khonkho Wankane (sometimes spelled Qhunqhu Wankani) covered about 17 acres (7 hectares) with at least three sunken temples, several large platforms, a big central plaza and quite a few circular houses. "We expected to find typical household stuff — grinding stones, cooking pots and things like that — but the assemblage was quite different," said Scott Smith, an archaeologist at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
| Read More » Chatty Machines? Future Computers Could Communicate Like Humans  | Researchers are trying to break down the language barrier between humans and computers, as part of a new program from the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for developing new technologies for the U.S. military. The program — dubbed Communicating with Computers (CwC) — aims to get computers to express themselves more like humans by enabling them to use spoken language, facial expressions and gestures to communicate. "[T]oday we view computers as tools to be activated by a few clicks or keywords, in large part because we are separated by a language barrier," Paul Cohen, DARPA's CwC program manager, said in a statement. Computers previously developed by DARPA are already tasked with creating models of the complicated molecular processes that cause cells to become cancerous.
| Read More » Most Docs Have Concerns About Delaying Vaccines But Do It Anyway  | Researchers surveyed more than 500 U.S. pediatricians and family physicians, and asked whether they had received a request from parents to "spread out" their child's vaccines over a longer period than the length of the recommended vaccine schedule. Some parents make these requests because they have concerns about the recommended vaccine schedule — for example, they may think that their child is getting too many vaccines in a short period, according to the study. But nearly all doctors had concerns about straying from the recommended schedule: 87 percent said that parents who chose to spread out vaccines were putting their children at risk for contracting preventable infectious diseases, and 84 percent said the alternative schedules were more painful for children, because they had to come back to the doctor more times for injections. The doctors who were surveyed reported using a number of strategies to respond to these requests, including telling parents that they would immunize their own children according to the recommended schedule, and explaining that following an alternative schedule puts children at risk for infectious diseases.
| Read More » Bionic Eye Lets Blind Man See Again  | A bionic eye implant is now allowing a blind man to see the outlines of his wife after 10 years in darkness. The implant, called a retinal prosthesis, consists of a small electronic chip that is placed at the back of the eye to send visual signals directly into the optic nerve. The bionic eye doesn't have enough electrodes to recreate the details of human faces, but for the first time since he lost his vision, the man can make out the outlines of people and things, and walk without a cane. The Minneapolis-St. Paul man, Allen Zderad, suffered from a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, in which the cells in the retina that gather light gradually die.
| Read More » Meet 2 New Spider Species: 'Skeletorus' and 'Sparklemuffin'  | Two gorgeous new species of peacock spiders nicknamed "Skeletorus" and"Sparklemuffin" have been discovered in Australia, according to a new report. The two new species were found in southeast Queensland by Madeline Girard, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley who studies peacock spiders, and a friend who went with her into the field. Girard affectionately gave the nickname Sparklemuffin to one of the species, Maratus jactatus, which has bluish and reddish stripes on its abdomen. Sparklemuffin looks similar to three previously discovered species in this group of peacock spiders, whereas Skeletorus looks very different from all the other known species in the group.
| Read More » Using Faulty Forensic Science, Courts Fail the Innocent (Op-Ed) Karen Kafadar is Commonwealth Professor and chair of the Department of Statistics at the University of Virginia and a member of the Forensic Science Standards Board. Anne-Marie Mazza is the director of the Committee on Science, Technology and Law of the National Academy of Sciences. Historically, forensic science has had a huge impact on identifying and confirming suspects in the courtroom, and on the judicial system more generally. Forensic scientists have been an integral part of the judicial process for more than a century. Read More » These 5 Supplements Do Nothing for Alzheimer's, Despite Claims (Op-Ed) She has published widely on the dietary supplement controversy. On Feb. 3, the New York State attorney general's office demanded that four major retailers — GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreens — remove certain store-brand herbal supplements from their shelves pending further quality-control measures. DNA testing on the supplements showed that a whopping 79 percent contained none of the herbs listed on their labels. Just as bad, the tests indicated the supplements often contained cheap fillers such as powdered rice, pine, citrus, houseplants and wheat — the latter despite claims on some labels that a product was wheat- and gluten-free. Read More » Surgeon's Helper: 3D Printing Is Revolutionizing Health Care (Op-Ed)  | Scott Dunham is a senior analyst for SmarTech Markets Publishing, which focuses exclusively on additive manufacturing and 3D printing. Dunham is a regularly featured speaker at 3D printing industry events worldwide, and he will be presenting at the Additive Disruption Summit on April 1 and the RAPID conference on May 19. Health care is a constant topic of debate today — but health care is not all about politics. While makers of professional 3D printers are specifically developing, and promoting, dental uses for 3D-printed technology, the universe of non-dental medical applications is now entering a phase of rapid growth.
| Read More » Forging Metamaterials: Labs Craft Invisibility Cloaks, Perfect Lenses and Nanostructures (Kavli Roundtable)  | Alan Brown, writer and editor for the Kavli Foundation, edited this roundtable for Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The very fact that we have to specify the type of metamaterial tells you that any definition is not as simple as saying it's just something that doesn't exist in nature.
| Read More » U.S. 'Pet' Tiger Trade Puts Big Cats at Great Risk (Op-Ed) Nicole Paquette is the vice president of wildlife protection at The Humane Society of the United States. They are bred repeatedly and forced to produce litter after litter — so many litters that there are now far too many tigers in the United States, and not enough responsible and experienced facilities to care for them. One of the main causes of tiger overpopulation in the United States is some facilities use tiger cubs for public handling. For a fee, members of the public can play with, bottle-feed, swim with or have their photo taken holding a tiger cub. Read More » Mystery Woman Buried Near Richard III  | Archaeologists found a lead coffin buried in the ruins of an English medieval church, just feet from the grave of British King Richard III. When they opened the tomb, they expected to find the skeleton of a knight or a friar. She was interred sometime in the late 13th or 14th century, before Richard was hastily buried at the monastery known as Grey Friars in Leicester, England. In fact, Richard III is the only man archaeologists have examined from the site so far. "We were naturally expecting to find friars," Grey Friars site director Mathew Morris told Live Science.
| Read More » Lockheed invests in Rocket Lab's U.S. unit to keep pace with innovation Lockheed Martin Corp said on Monday it had made a strategic investment in the U.S. unit of New Zealand's Rocket Lab, which is building a carbon-composite rocket, the Electron, to launch small satellites into orbit for less than $5 million. Lockheed spokesman Matt Kramer didn't say how big the investment was, but said the company saw potential applications for Rocket Lab's technologies light lift, hypersonic flight technologies and low-cost flight testing. Rocket Lab disclosed Lockheed's investment Monday when it announced that it had completed a Series B financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Read More » Companies' tests used in 'superbug' scope cleaning flawed: FDA The scopes were linked to the exposure of 179 patients to drug-resistant bacteria at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center in Los Angeles and may have contributed to two deaths. In early 2014, following a superbug outbreak at a hospital in Illinois, the FDA asked Fujifilm Holdings Corp, Olympus Corp and Pentax, which make the devices, to submit their test results for review, Dr. Stephen Ostroff, the agency's chief scientist, said in an interview. In some cases the tests were poorly carried out. In others, they were properly conducted but the cleaning and disinfecting protocol failed, said Ostroff, who will become the FDA's acting commissioner when Dr. Margaret Hamburg leaves at the end of March. The deficiencies in the companies' tests has not been reported. The flawed data calls into question the reliability of all current cleaning and disinfecting protocols and expose a weakness in the FDA's regulation of such devices - one which the agency is now moving to close. Read More » Plant Plastics Seed New Tech, from Miatas to Tea Bags  | Jacqueline Conciatore is a science writer for the U.S. National Science Foundation. Every year in the United States, more governments enact such restrictions, which are part of a larger shift away from petroleum-based plastic. Bioplastics are made wholly or in part from renewable biomass sources such as sugarcane and corn, or from the digest of microbes such as yeast. Some bioplastics are biodegradable or even compostable, under the right conditions.
| Read More » Apple to Wal-Mart, Big Biz is Betting on Green Energy (Op-Ed) Lynn Scarlett, managing director for public policy at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. While everyone still has to carry around a phone charger for the forseeable future, Apple is taking a different approach to its own energy supply. For Apple, the benefits are clear. Apple's decision affirms that clean energy, climate solutions and economic opportunity can converge. Read More » What Would It Be Like to Live on Mars?  | The idea of living on Mars has been a staple of science fiction since the 19th century, when American astronomer Percival Lowell speculated that the channels on the Red Planet were really ancient canals built by intelligent extraterrestrials. In 1965, NASA's Mariner 4 spacecraft completed the first Martian flyby, and six years later, the Soviet Union's Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land softly on Mars. Since then, there have been numerous successful missions to the Red Planet, including the deployment of four Mars rovers — the now-defunct Sojourner and Spirit, and the still-active Opportunity and Curiosity — and NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which produced a map of the entire planet. NASA is now planning for a manned mission to Mars, which is slated for the 2030s.
| Read More » SpaceX Rocket Launches 2 Communications Satellites Into Orbit (Video)  | The private spaceflight company SpaceX launched a pair of communications satellites to space Sunday (March 1), and you can see amazing videos and photos of the liftoff. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida at 10:50 p.m. EST (0350 March 2 GMT) carrying the ABS 3A and EUTELSAT 115 West B satellites to orbit. Now firing their ion thrusters to reach geo station [geostationary orbit] over Europe & Asia," SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter just after liftoff. The two satellites are the "first all-electric propulsion satellites, they carry no liquid propellant – rather, they reach orbit entirely via a lighter and more efficient electric propulsion system," SpaceX representatives wrote in a news release.
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