|  Deadly snakes 'milked' to create potent new anti-venom By Mathew Stock LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND / KADUNA, NIGERIA - The puff adder is one of sub-Saharan Africa's most deadly snakes. The venom extracted here is being used to create a potent new anti-venom that could treat bites from every poisonous snake found in the region. Dr. Robert Harrison is leading the research at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where they've collected 21 of the region's most lethal snake species - 450 animals in total. "32,000 people are dying from snake bite every year in sub-Saharan Africa. Read More » Oh, baby: study shows how surprises help infants learn "Our hypothesis was that infants might be using these surprising events as special opportunities to learn, and we show that is indeed the case," said cognitive psychologist Aimee Stahl of Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, whose research appears in the journal Science. The study involved 110 11-month-olds, with roughly equal numbers of girls and boys. Read More » Joni Mitchell's Mysterious Skin Disease: What Causes Morgellons?  | Joni Mitchell was hospitalized on Tuesday after being found unconscious in her apartment, according to the 71-year-old singer's website. In recent years, Mitchell has said that she suffers from many ailments, including a strange and controversial condition called Morgellons disease, The New York Times reported. People who suffer from Morgellons say they have a bizarre range of symptoms including sensations of crawling or stinging on and under their skin, skin sores and the appearance of stringlike fibers that seem to sprout from the sores, according to the Mayo Clinic.
| Read More » How a Zero Gravity Cocktail Glass Could Be Space Hospitality's Future  | This is where Samuel Coniglio said he hopes to fill the gap. The long-time space tourism advocate has created a "zero-gravity" cocktail glass designed to use grooves to keep the liquid in. Coniglio's group, called Cosmic Lifestyle Corp., launched a Kickstarter campaign to get funds and publicity for their idea. While fundraising has been slow — a little more than $3,400 raised of the $30,000 needed, with about a day to go — Coniglio said the publicity alone has been a huge success for the project.
| Read More » Manned Mars Mission Plan: Astronauts Could Orbit by 2033, Land by 2039  | NASA could get astronauts to Mars orbit by 2033 and onto the Red Planet's surface by 2039, a new report by a nongovernmental organization suggests. At a news conference this morning (April 2), representatives of The Planetary Society presented the results of a workshop organized to discuss the feasibility and cost of a crewed mission to orbit the Martian moon Phobos in 2033, leading up to a crewed landing on the Red Planet in 2039. They concluded that such a plan could indeed fit within NASA's human space exploration budget. "We believe we now have an example of a long-term, cost-constrained, executable humans-to-Mars program," Scott Hubbard, a professor in the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of The Planetary Society's board of directors, said in a statement.
| Read More » U.S. to halt expanded use of some insecticides amid honey bee decline (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Thursday it was unlikely to approve new or expanded uses of certain pesticides while it evaluates the risks they may pose to honey bees. The EPA notice came the day after Oregon's largest city suspended the use of the pesticides on its property to protect honey bees. The unanimous vote on Wednesday by the Portland City Commission came despite protests from farmers, nursery owners and others who claimed the insecticide was crucial in combating pests that destroy crops and other plants. Portland is among at least eight municipalities that have banned the chemicals. The EPA is conducting an assessment of the six types of neonicotinoids and their impact on honey bees, with its evaluation of four expected by 2018 and the remaining two a year later. Read More » What It Would Be Like to Live on Uranus' Moons Titania and Miranda  | Uranus would be a fascinating planet to visit, but living there would be extremely difficult. In all, Uranus has 27 known moons, and its five largest satellites are often considered its "major moons." If we wanted to set up permanent bases on Uranus's satellites, Titania and Miranda are great targets — Titania presents the strongest gravity (almost 4 percent of Earth's), and Miranda has a surface ripe for exploration. "When [Voyager 2] flew past in 1986, it was winter and dark on the whole northern hemispheres of all the moons, so we could only see a portion of their southern hemispheres," Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in California said. Images from Voyager 2 show that Titania's southern hemisphere has numerous craters and tectonic landforms, including canyons and faults, some of which could be interesting locations to visit.
| Read More » What It Would Be Like to Live on Saturn's Moons Titan and Enceladus  | "If you were in the outer solar system and you had to make an emergency landing, go to Titan," NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay told Space.com. Titan is the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere and thick cloud cover.
| Read More » Super Species: Animals with Extreme Powers Invade Museum  | "Given enough time, natural selection can produce some pretty wondrous things," said exhibit curator John Sparks, an ichthyologist at AMNH. As individuals reproduce, their offspring may have genetic mutations that neither of their parents had.
| Read More » Total Lunar Eclipse Saturday: How to See the Blood Moon  | Turnabout is fair play: The full moon will be totally eclipsed early Saturday morning (April 4), just 15 days after it caused a total eclipse of the sun. On that date, the so-called "supermoon" will take a deeper plunge through the umbra and will also be moving close to its maximum orbital velocity.
| Read More » Anne Frank Likely Died Earlier Than Believed Anne Frank, the young Jewish teenager whose diary became one of the most iconic portrayals of the Holocaust, likely died about a month earlier than her official death date, a new historical analysis finds. The Frank sisters died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but the exact dates of their deaths are unknown. Now, the Anne Frank House, an organization devoted to preserving Anne's memory and her family's hiding place in Amsterdam, has released a new study that puts Anne's death in February 1945, earlier than previously believed. During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Annelies Marie Frank and her family spent two years living in a secret apartment in the building where her father, Otto, worked. Read More » Cleaning with Bleach May Lead to Childhood Infections  | A splash of bleach can kill germs on a kitchen counter, but it may also cause health problems in children, a new study finds. Children in the study who lived in homes or went to schools where bleach was used for cleaning had higher rates of influenza, tonsillitis and other infections, compared with kids who weren't exposed to bleach, the researchers found. The researchers surveyed parents of more than 9,100 children ages 6 to 12 living in the Netherlands, Finland and Spain. The parents answered questions about how often in the past year their children had several infections, including the flu, tonsillitis, sinusitis, bronchitis, otitis and pneumonia.
| Read More » Odd Tune: Trumpeter's Neck Swells Like a Bullfrog  | The patient had seen numerous doctors, but none could find anything wrong with him, even after they ran a CT scan of his neck, said the report's lead author, Rachel Edmiston, an EMT trainee at Central Manchester University Hospital in the United Kingdom. They also asked him to maintain good oral hygiene and healthy eating habits, so that he could avoid bacterial overgrowth in the affected, bubblelike area.
| Read More » Drug-Resistant Stomach Bug Increasing in US The bacteria caused several outbreaks in the United States in the past year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bacteria, called Shigella sonnei, can cause diarrhea, stomach cramps and fever and is typically treated with the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. There was also an outbreak of 95 cases in San Francisco that was not linked with international travel. Shigella causes about half a million cases of diarrhea in the United States each year, and the disease can be spread from person to person, or through contaminated food or water, the CDC says. Read More » Eerie Green Space Clouds Glow in New Hubble Photos  | The eight eerie objects betray the past presence of quasars, the most luminous objects in the universe, whose powerful beams of radiation lend the clouds their ethereal glow, researchers said. "In each of these eight images, a quasar beam has caused once-invisible filaments in deep space to glow through a process called photoionization," officials with the European Space Agency (ESA), which partners with NASA on the Hubble project, wrote in a statement. "Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulphur and neon in the filaments absorb light from the quasar and slowly re-emit it over many thousands of years," the officials added. This process can result in a quasar, which blasts jets of high-energy radiation and particles out into space.
| Read More » | |
