|  Horse dung has scientists on scent of antibiotic success Chemists around the world are involved in a race against time to find a solution to the growing problem of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. It's a major threat to the health of the global population, which had long assumed that antibiotics would always be available to cure bacterial illness. The scientific community hopes to be able to develop a new range of antibiotics to replace those that are increasingly losing their ability to work against infections like Tuberculosis (TB). A research team led by Markus Aebi, Professor of Mycology at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), believe they may have found the answer. Read More » When Will Virtual-Reality Headsets Stop Making People Sick?  | From the Oculus Rift headsets to the new HTC Vive, virtual-reality devices will soon be flooding the gaming market. Companies have long known that virtual-reality headsets, 3D movies and related types of technology can cause "cybersickness," which has symptoms similar to motion sickness. In the real world, a person processes input from multiple senses that are all in perfect agreement, said Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at UCLA who studies how VR affects the brains of rats. Perhaps the best-known virtual-reality product on the horizon is the Oculus Rift headset, made by Facebook-owned Oculus VR, a company based in Irvine, California.
| Read More » Superconductors Could Help Physicists Find 'Gravity Particles'  | It may be possible to draw energy from a vacuum using gravity, a theoretical physicist says. "The most exciting thing about these results is that they can be tested with current technology," study author James Quach, a theoretical physicist at the University of Tokyo, told Live Science. Showing that gravitons exist would help scientists who have long sought to develop a "theory of everything" that can describe the workings of the cosmos in its entirety. Whereas quantum mechanics can explain the behavior of all the known particles, general relativity describes the nature of space-time and gravity.
| Read More » Ancient Receipt Proves Egyptian Taxes Were Worse Than Yours  | But just how much was 90 talents worth in ancient Egypt? Instead people made up the sum using coins that were worth varying amounts of drachma. It "would have taken 150 of these coins to make a talent, and 13,500 of them to equal 90 talents," Lorber told Live Science in an email. What likely happened is that one or more tax farmers (people charged with collecting certain types of taxes) got 90 talents' worth of coins from the individuals paying this tax, the researchers said.
| Read More » Coral Pyramids in Micronesia Date Back to Middle Ages  | The royal tombs are tucked away in an artificially built ancient city called Leluh just off the mainland of Kosrae, a Micronesian island. Leluh was home to Kosraean high chiefs (as well as some lower chiefs and commoners, too) from about 1250 until the mid-1800s, when foreign whalers, traders and missionaries started to arrive on the island. With impressive canals and walled compounds built from basalt, Leluh is often considered a companion city to the more famous Micronesian settlement of Nan Madol, on the nearby island of Pohnpei. While the tiny islets of Nan Madol were built on top of a coral reef, at Leluh, coral was actually incorporated into the construction material of many buildings, including the royal tombs.
| Read More » Forged in a Flash: Volcanic Lightning Forms Glass Balls  | Inside towering clouds of volcanic ash, stunning lightning storms can create tiny crystal balls, a new study reports. Researchers recently discovered smooth glass spheres in ash from explosive volcanic eruptions. Kimberly Genareau, a volcanologist at the University of Alabama, first spotted the orbs while scanning ash from Alaska's 2009 Mount Redoubt eruption with a powerful microscope. Both volcanoes blasted out billowing ash clouds that triggered spectacular displays of volcanic lightning.
| Read More » Will the Apple Watch Catch On? Apple's newest product — the souped-up timepiece called the Apple Watch — is bound to become a cultural phenomenon that millions of people will buy, according to marketing experts not affiliated with the company. "It's got the Apple name and mystique behind it," said Scott Thorne, a marketing professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Jefferson City. "I'm not sure if it will be quite the game-changer that, say, the iPhone was, because it's really hard to capture the proverbial lightning in the bottle twice," Thorne told Live Science. Samsung, LG, Pebble, Asus and other manufacturers already produce smartwatches, most of which cost far less than even the lowest-priced Apple Watch, and these other devices have failed to catch on. Read More » Chilean Volcano Coated in Ash After Eruption, New Images Show  | New images of the recent eruption of one of Chile's most active volcanoes reveal how powerful blasts of lava and ash blanketed the mountain's side with volcanic material. The Villarrica volcano erupted in the early morning hours of March 3, 2015, forcing thousands of people to evacuate the region, according to reports from Chile's National Geology and Mining Service. Two NASA satellites snapped photos of the volcano, one before and one after the eruption. In the first image, snow surrounds the volcano, but in the second, a large amount of volcanic material, called tephra, coats the volcano's eastern side.
| Read More » Confirmed: Disneyland Measles Outbreak Linked to Low Vaccination Rates Low vaccination rates are likely responsible for the large measles outbreak that began at Disneyland in California last December, a new analysis suggests. The researchers estimated that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination rate among the people who were exposed to measles in that outbreak may be as low as 50 percent, and is likely no higher than 86 percent. Since the beginning of this year, 127 cases of measles in the United Stateshave been linked to the Disneyland outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because measles is such a highly contagious virus, vaccination rates of 96 percent to 99 percent are necessary to prevent outbreaks, Majumder said. Read More » Seven strategies for keeping women in STEM fields Now an academic panel has developed a seven-point plan for achieving gender equity in so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. The 28-member Initiative on Women in Science and Engineering Working Group hopes to "ensure that women not just enter science, but remain, compete, and truly excel in scientific careers." Women account for half the college-educated American workforce but only 28 percent of science and engineering workers, according to the National Science Board. Susan Solomon, CEO of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, who convened the panel, says STEM fields are too critical to leave behind half the nation's brainpower. Co-author Paola Arlotta, a Harvard University professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, won such an award at Massachusetts General Hospital, where the Claflin Distinguished Scholar Award helps sustain research productivity during child-rearing years. Read More » Total Solar Eclipse of 2015 Occurs This Week: How to See It  | This week, the moon will completely cover the disk of the sun, creating a solar eclipse that only a small part of the world can see. The shadow will then pass over the Danish-owned Faroe Islands, the sparsely inhabited Norwegian island group of Svalbard and then it will hook counterclockwise toward the northwest, where it leaves the Earth's surface just short of the North Pole. If you don't have the chance to see the solar eclipse in person, you can catch it live online as well. The Faroes are an island group consisting of 18 major islands with a total area of approximately 540 square miles (1,400 square kilometers) and a population of almost 50,000 people.
| Read More » XCOR Aerospace Picks Ex-Air Force Official as New CEO  | The private spaceflight company XCOR Aerospace is getting a new CEO. Representatives with XCOR Aerospace — the company responsible for developing the Lynx space plane — announced today (March 16) that John "Jay" Gibson will lead the commercial spaceflight company. The former CEO, Jeff Greason, will remain with the company as chief technology officer and focus on helping to develop Lynx and other projects, according to XCOR. "After a thorough search for the ideal candidate, we decided on Jay Gibson," Greason said in a statement.
| Read More » Yeti Debate Swirls: Study Reveals Origin of Mysterious Hairs  | The yeti, a legendary shaggy, bipedal beast from the Himalayas, made headlines last year when a geneticist said he had solved the mystery of its origins. "There is essentially no reason to believe that they [the hairs] belong to a species other than the brown bear," said one the new study's researchers, Eliécer Gutiérrez, a postdoctoral fellow of evolutionary biology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
| Read More » El Niño Can Predict Tornado Season's Severity  | This year's El Niño may not only bring a bit of drought relief to parched Western states, but also could deliver a quiet tornado season, a new study finds. Much of the southeastern United States faces a lower risk of tornadoes during El Niño years, the new research shows. The effects are strongest in Oklahoma, Arkansas and northern Texas. Damaging hail is also less likely during a strong El Niño, researchers report today (March 16) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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