|  Delta rocket blasts off from Florida with improved GPS satellite By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - An unmanned Delta 4 rocket blasted off from Florida on Wednesday to deliver the ninth of 12 next-generation Global Positioning System satellites into orbit. The 207-foot (63 meter) booster, built and flown by United Launch Alliance, bolted off its seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 2:36 p.m. EDT, the third launch in 25 days from the nation's busiest spaceport. ULA is a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co. ... Read More » For Asteroid-Capture Mission, NASA Picks 'Option B' for Boulder  | NASA's bold asteroid-capture mission will pluck a boulder off a big space rock rather than grab an entire near-Earth object, agency officials announced today (March 25). NASA intends to drag the boulder to lunar orbit, where astronauts will visit it beginning in 2025. The space agency decided on the boulder snatch — "Option B," as opposed to the whole-asteroid "Option A" — Tuesday (March 24) during the mission concept review of the asteroid-redirect effort, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot told reporters during a teleconference today. Option B will probably cost about $100 million more than Option A would have, but its advantages are worth the price-tag bump, Lightfoot said.
| Read More » The Surprising Story Behind 1-Year-Mission Astronaut Scott Kelly's Space Patches  | Scott Kelly's astronaut name tags were supposed to be aboard the International Space Station by now. In fact, the pair of name tags had been packed aboard a U.S. commercial cargo freighter that was on its way to the space station last October.
| Read More » NASA picks an asteroid rock to pave the road to Mars By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A NASA robot ship will pluck a large boulder off an asteroid and sling it around the moon, becoming an ad hoc destination to prepare for future human missions to Mars, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday. It would be followed five years later by a human expedition to the space rock, a modification of a plan proposed by President Barack Obama in 2010. NASA also considered bagging a smaller asteroid and relocating the entire body into a high orbit around the moon. After extensive studies, NASA opted to collect and move a boulder, a mission that will cost about $100 million more, but which better prepares the agency for the ultimate goal of landing astronauts on Mars. Read More » Ebola Death Rates Vary Widely by Age Group  | Young children who are infected with Ebola may be more likely to die from the virus than older children or adults who are infected, according to a new study. In the study, researchers examined Ebola cases in children younger than 16 during the current outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and compared them with adult cases. Among children older than 15 and adults, the mortality rate was 65 percent. "The very youngest of children — neonates —appear to have the worst outcomes from Ebola," study co-author Dr. Robert Fowler, an associate professor of critical-care medicine at the University of Toronto, said in a statement.
| Read More » More Infidelity Uncovered in King Richard III's Family Tree  | The remains of Richard III may be locked away in a coffin to be reburied this week, but the 15th-century king's genome is still offering scientists a chance to unravel royal mysteries. "Having worked in the world of genetic genealogy for years, this is not at all surprising to me," said Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester. In the general population, false paternities occur in about 1 percent to 2 percent of births, King said. They found a match between Richard's mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down only through the mother) and the mitochondrial DNA from two living female-line descendants of Richard's sister Anne of York: Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig.
| Read More » Snow Melting 16 Days Earlier in Wyoming Mountains The spring snowmelt now comes more than two weeks earlier than it did in the 1970s in Wyoming's Wind River Range, a new study finds. Several independent studies have found the spring snowmelt starts up to 20 days earlier in the West than in the past because there's less snow falling each winter and warmer spring weather means the snow that does fall melts earlier. The double whammy is hurting water resources in states, such as Wyoming, that rely on snowmelt. "Earlier snowmelt impacts the water resources of most of the state of Wyoming, which has been undergoing a drought since 1999," Dorothy Hall, lead author of the study and a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. Read More » Gorgeous Satellite Image Reveals Galloping Antarctic Glacier  | One of West Antarctica's largest glaciers surged a staggering 325 feet (about 100 meters) in less than two weeks this month, the European Space Agency reports.
| Read More » How Real-Life AI Rivals 'Terminator': Robots Take the Shot  | From the Turing-bashing "Ex Machina" to old friends R2-D2 and C-3PO, and new enemies like the Avengers' Ultron, sentient robots will demonstrate a number of human and superhuman traits on-screen. In this five-part series Live Science looks at these made-for-the-movies advances in machine intelligence. As he's so often promised, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back, once again taking on his iconic killer-robot role in July's "Terminator Genisys." While no Skynet-like AI has sent red-eyed robots after humanity (thankfully), the prospect of weaponized AI has gotten much more likely in the years since the first "Terminator" film in 1984. Autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are now "an integral part of military operations," said drone historian Richard Whittle, as reported by CNET.
| Read More » US Air Force Launches Advanced GPS Satellite into Orbit  | The U.S. Air Force has launched an advanced new satellite to help upgrade the nation's Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation. The GPS IIF-9 satellite blasted off atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Wednesday (March 25) at 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT). "I'm elated with today's successful launch," Brig. Gen. Bill Cooley, director of the Global Positioning System Directorate at the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said in a statement. The IIF-9 spacecraft joins 30 other operational GPS satellites in Earth orbit.
| Read More » Get Amazing Views of the First-Quarter Moon This Week  | When you look at the moon with binoculars or a small telescope, the first thing you notice is that not all parts of the moon look the same. Without any optical aid at all, you can see the patterns formed by gray maria and white highlands, the familiar shapes known as "the man in the moon," but also seen as different shapes by different cultures.
| Read More » 5 Human Body Questions the 1-Year Space Station Mission May Answer  | NASA has a lot of questions about what happens to people who live in space for long periods of time, and it's almost time to get some answers. When NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russia's Mikhail Kornienko fly up to the International Space Station Friday (March 27) for a yearlong stay on the orbiting outpost, space agency scientists will get to work on experiments that could help get people to Mars one day. Officials have a lot of information about what happens to a body in weightlessness for six months, but the 12-month space mission will mark the first time researchers can gather data about what happens to people in space for longer periods of time. It takes more than one year to get to Mars using currently understood propulsion methods, so learning more about the ways long spaceflight affects humans is key to one of NASA's main future goals: getting people to the Red Planet.
| Read More » Are Smart Pills & Brain Zapping Risky? Bioethicists Weigh In Now, bioethicists are weighing in, saying that while such cognitive enhancement is neither bad nor good, it deserves more research. In the past, "there have been many arguments that suggest one should take an ethical stance for or against cognitive enhancement" of healthy individuals, said Amy Gutmann, chairwoman of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which released the second part of a report today (March 26) on ethics in neuroscience research, commissioned by President Barack Obama as part of the BRAIN Initiative, a collaborative effort to develop tools to study the human brain. "We as a commission recommend there is no bright line to be drawn here," Gutmann told Live Science during a news conference yesterday. The new report focused on three main areas: cognitive enhancement, informed consent in mentally impaired individuals and the use of neuroscience in the legal system. Read More » Jockey motion tracking reveals racing prowess By Matthew Stock A research team from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) is using motion tracking technology to try to establish the optimal riding position for jockeys, as well as enhance the performance of racehorses and reduce the risk of injury to both horse and jockey. The project, entitled "Apprentice to Journeyman: the influence of jockey technique on thoroughbred racehorse locomotion", is analyzing the riding style of more experienced jockeys compared with novice riders to try to determine if the technique differs significantly between the two skill levels. They wanted to see how more experienced jockeys' movement, stability and positioning differed from the novice. RVC researcher Dr Anna Walker explained that more experienced jockeys commented on how different the experience was on a simulator compared to a real horse. Read More » Scientist defends WHO group report linking herbicide to cancer  | A World Health Organization group's controversial finding that the world's most popular herbicide "probably is carcinogenic to humans" was based on a thorough scientific review and is a key marker in ongoing evaluations of the product, the scientist who led the study said Thursday. There was sufficient evidence in animals, limited evidence in humans and strong supporting evidence showing DNA mutations ... and damaged chromosomes," Aaron Blair, a scientist emeritus at the National Cancer Institute, said in an interview. Blair chaired the 17-member working group of the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which rocked the agricultural industry on March 20 by classifying glyphosate as "probably" cancer-causing. Monsanto Co , which has built a $15 billion company on sales of glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and crops genetically engineered to tolerate being sprayed with Roundup, has demanded a retraction and explanation from WHO.
| Read More » EU to resume Galileo satellite launch program By Francesco Guarascio BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is set to send two navigation satellites into orbit on Friday aboard a Russian rocket, in its first launch since a botched deployment in August that cost several million euros to fix. The Galileo project to set up an EU alternative to the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) is obliged to use the Russian Soyuz system until a development of Arianespace's European Ariane 5 rocket is ready around the end of the year, despite strained relations with Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine. An official at the European Commission, which oversees the program, said the EU executive was tendering for insurance cover for future satellites and had set up an insurance scheme for the launches. The two launched in August have since been nudged into viable orbits and are fit for use, a spokesman for the European Space Agency said. Read More » Ebola 'Supervirus' Is Unlikely, Experts Say  | The Ebola virus that is causing the current outbreak in West Africa is not mutating as quickly as earlier reports had suggested, a new study finds. In the study, published online today (March 26) in the journal Science, researchers compared virus samples from people in Africa who became infected with Ebola up to nine months apart. "We do not see any evidence that the virus is mutating any more rapidly than has been reported in previous outbreaks," said Thomas Hoenen, a postdoctoral fellow in virology at the National Institutes of Health and one of the researchers on the study. In a 2014 study published in the journal Science, researchers had suggested that the Ebola virus in the West African epidemic was mutating twice as fast as other Ebola virus strains.
| Read More » Richard III Gets a Regal Tomb 530 Years After His Death  | One of history's most infamous kings, Richard III, was reburied today (March 26) in a lavish ceremony in Leicester, England, 530 years after his violent death in battle. Capping a week of events and processions celebrating the medieval monarch, Richard's stark oak casket was lowered into a brick-lined vault near the altar at Leicester Cathedral in front of hundreds of people today. In 2012, archaeologists seeking Richard's lost grave amazingly found the king's battle-scarred bones under a parking lot in Leicester. When Richard's skeleton was discovered in the ruins of Grey Friars, it provided scientists a rare opportunity to intimately examine the body of a historical figure.
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