|  Germanwings Crash: Mental Illness Alone Does Not Explain Co-Pilot's Behavior, Experts Say Investigators may never know exactly why Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz carried out what is believed to have been a deliberate plane crash in the French Alps on Tuesday, but mental health experts say that any mental illness that Lubitz may have had is just one possible contributor to the tragedy. Read More » NASA Mercury Probe Trying to Survive for Another Month  | A NASA Mercury probe isn't ready to finish its groundbreaking work at the solar system's innermost planet just yet.
| Read More » Astronomers On the Hunt for Exomoons That May Host Alien Life  | The search for alien life doesn't end within the boundaries of our solar system.Scientists are now search for moons orbiting alien planets that might play host to extraterrestrial life. A new project called the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) is the first systematic search for exomoons, or moons that circle planets outside our solar system.HEK astronomers, led by David Kipping at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, simulate billions of possible star-planet-moon arrangements using NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer. So far, the team has surveyed 56 of about 400 Kepler planet candidates that could have an exomoon. The Pleiades Supercomputer, which performs over 3 quadrillion calculations per second, knocks that number down to 30,000 processing hours per object and should complete the project in two years.
| Read More » Medieval Parasite-Filled Poop Found in Jerusalem Latrine  | The excavation of a roughly 500-year-old latrine in Jerusalem has uncovered thousands of eggs from human parasites, including some that may have come from Northern Europe, a new study finds.
| Read More » Antarctica's Ice Shelves Are Thinning Fast  | Antarctica's floating ice collar is quickly disappearing in the west, a new study reports.
| Read More » Quantum Record! 3,000 Atoms Entangled in Bizarre State  | Using a single particle of light, scientists have for the first time linked together thousands of atoms in a bizarre state known as quantum entanglement, where the behavior of the atoms would stay connected even if they were at opposite ends of the universe. The behavior of all the known particles can be explained using quantum physics. A key feature of quantum physics is that the world becomes a fuzzy, surreal place at its very smallest levels. One consequence of quantum physics is quantum entanglement, wherein multiple particles can essentially influence each other simultaneously regardless of distance.
| Read More » Unlocking the Brain, Earth's Most Complex Biological Structure (Essay)  | James Olds is head of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Directorate for Biological Sciences and is a named professor of molecular neuroscience at George Mason University. Federally funded in 2015 at $200 million, the initiative is a public-private research effort to revolutionize scientists' understanding of the brain.
| Read More » How Real-Life AI Rivals 'Star Wars': A Universal Translator?  | In this five-part series Live Science looks at these made-for-the-movies advances in machine intelligence. Right now, such networks merely supplement phrase- or statistics-based translation, Hughes said.
| Read More » 6 Crazy Skills That Prove Geckos Are Amazing  | Geckos can hang by their toe hairs, scamper up walls and regrow their tails. Geckos are amazing creatures with a toolbox full of tricks that science is continuing to uncover. How do dirty geckos take a bath? Geckos are covered with hundreds of thousands of tiny, hairlike spines that trap pockets of air to help repel water, according to the study, published in the April issue of the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.
| Read More » Despite deforestation, the world is getting greener - scientists  | By Alisa Tang BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The world's vegetation has expanded, adding nearly 4 billion tonnes of carbon to plants above ground in the decade since 2003, thanks to tree-planting in China, forest regrowth in former Soviet states and more lush savannas due to higher rainfall. It is present in the atmosphere primarily as carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main climate-changing gas - and stored as carbon in trees. Through photosynthesis, trees convert carbon dioxide into the food they need to grow, locking the carbon in their wood. The 4-billion-tonne increase is minuscule compared to the 60 billion tonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and cement production over the same period, said Yi Liu, the study's lead author and a scientist at the University of New South Wales.
| Read More » Woolly Mammoth DNA Inserted into Elephant Cells  | The idea of bringing extinct animals back to life continues to reside in the realm of science fiction. Harvard geneticist George Church and his colleagues used a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to insert mammoth genes for small ears, subcutaneous fat, and hair length and color into the DNA of elephant skin cells. Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) have been extinct for millennia, with the last of the species dying out about 3,600 years ago. But we won't be seeing woolly mammoths prancing around anytime soon, "because there is more work to do," Church told U.K.'s The Times, according to Popular Science.
| Read More » This Device Records Your Snores to Track Your Sleep  | Researchers in Israel developed an algorithm to analyze a person's recorded breathing sounds, in order to measure sleep duration and detect sleep disorders.
| Read More » Bionic ants could be tomorrow's factory workers By Amy Pollock Robotic ants the size of a human hand that work together could be the future of factory production systems. The developers, German technology firm Festo, say it's not just the unusual anatomy of real-world ants that inspired the bionic version - the collective intelligence of an ant colony was also something they wanted to replicate. Festo says that in the future production systems will be based on intelligent individual components that adjust themselves to different production demands by communicating with each other. Read More » Angelina Jolie Pitt's Surgery: What Are the Risks of Early Menopause? Angelina Jolie Pitt's surgery to remove her ovaries has the side effect of putting her into early menopause, a condition which itself comes with some health risks, experts say. On Tuesday, Jolie Pitt revealed that she had surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes to prevent ovarian cancer. The actress said she carries a genetic mutation in the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases her risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and she has previously undergone a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. Removing the ovaries reduces her risk of ovarian cancer by 85 to 90 percent, but it will also put her into menopause immediately, at age 39, around a decade before the average woman enters menopause naturally. Read More » Ebola Cases in West Africa Reach Low for 2015 The number of new Ebola cases in West Africa last week was the lowest it has been in 2015, health officials said today. Between March 15 and March 22, there were 79 new Ebola cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to a new report from the World Health Organization. Health officials reported 45 new Ebola cases in Guinea (a drop from 95 cases the week before) and 33 new cases in Sierra Leone (a drop from 55 the week before). Read More » Kids with Autism Are More Likely to Have Gastrointestinal Problems Children with autism may be more likely to have gastrointestinal problems early in life, compared with children who don't have the condition, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed information from children in Norway whose mothers had answered questions about their child's health during infancy and early childhood. Many of the children with autism had been diagnosed after their mothers completed the study survey. The mothers' reports showed that children with autism had higher odds of experiencing symptoms such as constipation, food intolerance and food allergies at ages 6 to 18 months than the typically developing children did. Read More » Egyptians Brewed Beer in Tel Aviv 5,000 Years Ago  | Tel Aviv's reputation as a party city for expats might have started 5,000 years ago. During the Bronze Age, Egyptians were making beer in what is today downtown Tel Aviv, new archaeological evidence suggests. When archaeologists were conducting salvage excavations ahead of construction on new office buildings along Hamasger Street, they found 17 ancient pits that were used to store produce, according to an announcement from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). "On the basis of previously conducted excavations in the region, we knew there is an Early Bronze Age site here, but this excavation is the first evidence we have of an Egyptian occupation in the center of Tel Aviv at that time," Diego Barkan, an archaeologist who was conducting the excavation on behalf of the IAA, said in the statement.
| Read More » | |
