|  Dust-covered ice glaciers found on Mars  | Radar data, collected by Mars-orbiting satellites, combined with computer models of ice flows show the planet has about 5.3 trillion cubic feet (150 billion cubic meters) of water locked in the ice, according to a study published in this week's issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letter. "The ice at the mid-latitudes is therefore an important part of Mars' water reservoir," Nanna Bjornholt Karlsson, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen's Neils Bohr Institute, said in a statement.
| Read More » How the Moon Formed: Violent Cosmic Crash Theory Gets Double Boost  | The formation of the moon has long remained a mystery, but new studies support the theory that the moon was formed from debris left from a collision between the newborn Earth and a Mars-size rock, with a veneer of meteorites coating both afterward.
| Read More » Happiest US Metro Areas Revealed If you're looking to move to a happy place, you might want to check out the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida, area: The region reported the highest well-being out of the 100 most populous communities in the country, according to a new poll. Ohio also had three other communities that ranked in the bottom 10 for well-being: Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati. Read More » Why Short People May Have Higher Risk of Heart Disease Short people have an increased risk of heart disease that may be partly due to their genes, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed information from more than 65,000 people with coronary artery disease and 128,000 people who did not have this disease. Coronary artery disease is a type of heart disease in which plaque builds up in the arteries that supply blood to the heart. The researchers looked at 180 genetic markers known to affect people's height, to see if they were also linked with coronary artery disease. Read More » Arts and Crafts Activities May Stave Off Dementia Middle-age and older adults who do arts and crafts activities and socialize may reduce their risk of the thinking and memory problems that can lead to dementia, the study found. Over four years, 121 participants developed mild cognitive impairment, a condition that means having thinking and memory problems, but problems that are not severe enough to affect daily life. The people who engaged in artistic activities such as painting or drawing, in both middle age and when they were 85 and older, were 73 percent less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment than those who did not engage in artistic activities. The people who engaged in craft activities such as woodworking or pottery were 45 percent less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment than those who did not participate in such activities, the researchers found. Read More » Tornado Alert in Central US: The Science of Severe Storms  | A wide swath of the central United States is at risk of thunderstorms and possible tornadoes over the next couple of days, according to the National Weather Service. Greg Cardin, a warning co-ordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center, warned that the complexity of the current forecast means predictions could change quickly. "It's a tough, tough forecast, not just for today but also for tomorrow," Cardin told Live Science.
| Read More » Scientists seek source of giant methane mass over Southwest DENVER (AP) — Scientists are working to pinpoint the source of a giant mass of methane hanging over the southwestern U.S., which a study found to be the country's largest concentration of the greenhouse gas. Read More » California bill banning child vaccine exemptions moves ahead  | California lawmakers on Wednesday pushed forward a bill that would ban parents from citing their personal beliefs as a reason to let their school-going children remain unvaccinated. The measure passed the state Senate health committee by a vote of 6-2, the bill's co-author, Democrat Richard Pan, said in a statement. "The personal belief exemption is now putting other school children and people in our community in danger." Pan proposed the bill, which would leave in place medical exemptions to vaccinations, in the wake of a major measles outbreak in the state that began at Disneyland in December. All told, more than 150 people across the United Sates have been diagnosed with measles in recent months, 126 of them in California.
| Read More » Drunk-Dialing Shame May Help Prevent Excessive Drinking in College Kids Reminding young people about that awkward, uncomfortable embarrassment they feel the day after a night of drunken texting or tipsy Facebook posting could be an effective way to prevent excessive drinking on college campuses, a new study finds. According to the new findings, roughly two out of three U.S. college students have regretted how they've acted after drinking, whether they drunk-texted someone they had a crush on, or posted an embarrassing message on a friend's Facebook wall. The findings may help colleges tailor programs aimed at promoting responsible drinking, the researchers said. As heavy drinking has "held pretty constant over the years," the researchers said, college administrators have tried a number of ways to curb alcohol consumption, but such efforts have often focused on the severe consequences of excessive drinking, such as drunken driving and unwanted sexual experiences. Read More » Controversy Blooms Over Earliest Flower Fossil  | Did angiosperms first bloom in the Cretaceous period, or were they around earlier, in the Jurassic period, the heyday of giant, plant-eating dinosaurs like Apatosaurus? "People will have to rethink everything about angiosperms because of this fossil," said study co-author Xin Wang, a paleobotanist at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China. Much of the natural history of angiosperms, or flowering plants, seems to be missing from the fossil record. Then, about 125 million years ago, angiosperms and their flowers sprang forth during the Cretaceous period, as fully formed as Aphrodite.
| Read More » Giraffe to Give Birth at Dallas Zoo: Watch It Live Online  | Katie, a giraffe at the Dallas Zoo, is due to give birth any day now, and Animal Planet installed 10 cameras in the zoo's maternity barn to give at-home viewers a chance to witness the remarkable event and learn about the state of these animals in the wild. You can watch it live on Live Science or on the Animal Planet TV channel. Katie's window for delivery extends until mid-May, but the birth will likely happen within the next week or two, said Laurie Holloway, a spokeswoman for the Dallas Zoo. "We hope we get some signs a day or two before she actually goes into labor," Holloway told Live Science.
| Read More » What Record-Breaking Drought Means for California's Future  | Wildfires, water rationing and snow-free mountaintops are all becoming the new norm in California. "Climate change is going to lead to overall much drier conditions toward the end of the 21st century than anything we've seen in probably the last 1,000 years," said Benjamin Cook, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. But despite the drier conditions and the apocalyptic headlines, California is unlikely to become a parched, uninhabitable hellscape, experts say. Southern California's forest may transform into scrub and grassland.
| Read More » Explosive Culprit? Russian Fireball's Origins Found  | A crackling fireball that exploded over Russia last year appears to share an orbit with a huge asteroid discovered in October 2014, a new study reports. The Kola fireball was spotted on April 19, 2014, as it lit up the night sky above the Kola Peninsula near the Finnish-Russian border. Camera observations by the Finnish Fireball Network, which monitors the sky for meteors and fireballs, and video from eyewitnesses helped scientists recreate the meteoroid's trajectory and hunt down meteorite fragments on the ground. Josep Maria Trigo-RodrÃguez, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, led the international team of scientists who analyzed the meteorite's orbit.
| Read More » Tyrannosaur Skull Bears Scars of Fierce Dino Battle  | Some 75 million years ago, a towering tyrannosaur may have lit into one of its own species, ripping into its skull and leaving behind jagged scars and deep punctures that have only recently seen the light of day. The beastly tale comes from paleontologists examining the marred skull of the possible dinosaur victim, which itself was a teenage tyrannosaur. An analysis showed the bones belonged to Daspletosaurus, a genus of tyrannosaur — a group of carnivorous, bipedal dinosaurs with deep jaws and short arms that includes the notorious Tyrannosaurus rex. Although paleontologists examined the Daspletosaurus after its excavation, the researchers of the new study are the first to do an in-depth analysis of its skull marks, said the study's lead researcher, Dave Hone, a lecturer in zoology at Queen Mary University of London.
| Read More » Liquid metal discovery paves way for shape-shifting robots It may look like nothing more than a small ball of metal, but the shape-shifting and self-propulsion abilities of a liquid metal alloy discovered by scientists at China's Tsinghua University has captured the imaginations of scientists and science-fiction fans across the world. Professor Liu Jing and his team have created what they believe could prove the first step toward developing a robot similar to the infamous T-1000 shape-shifting, liquid metal assassin from the Terminator movies. The device is made from a drop of metal alloy consisting mostly of gallium, which is a liquid at just under 30 degrees Celsius. When the current was switched off, the metal returned to its original drop shape. Read More » Genetic study finds severe inbreeding in mountain gorillas  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The most extensive genetic analysis of mountain gorillas ever conducted has found the critically endangered apes burdened with severe inbreeding and at risk of extinction but the researchers still see reasons for optimism about their survival. "We found extremely high levels of inbreeding," said geneticist Chris Tyler-Smith of Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. The study in the journal Science revealed a substantial loss of genetic diversity from inbreeding caused by mating with close relatives due to small population size, with mountain gorillas inheriting identical segments from both parents in about a third of their genome. "Mountain gorillas are critically endangered and at risk of extinction, and our study reveals that as well as suffering a dramatic collapse in numbers during the last century, they had already experienced a long decline going back many thousands of years," University of Cambridge geneticist Aylwyn Scally said.
| Read More » Acidic oceans implicated in Earth's worst mass extinction  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It is one of science's enduring mysteries: what caused the worst mass extinction in Earth's history. Scientists said on Thursday that huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed from colossal volcanic eruptions in Siberia may have turned the world's oceans dangerously acidic 252 million years ago, helping to drive a global environmental calamity that killed most land and sea creatures. "This is one of the few cases where we have been able to show that an ocean acidification event happened in deep time," said University of Edinburgh geoscientist Rachel Wood, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Science. "These findings may help us understand the threat posed to marine life by modern-day ocean acidification." Various hypotheses have been offered to explain the mass extinction that exceeded even the one 65 million years ago caused by an asteroid impact that erased the dinosaurs and many other animals.
| Read More » Continental contact: the Americas may have fused earlier than thought By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The continents of North and South America came together much earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who found evidence in rock deposits from ancient rivers in Colombia of the land bridge that connected the long-isolated landmasses. The two continents are linked at Panama, but there has been a debate about when this land bridge first appeared, with most experts placing its formation at about 3 million years ago. The researchers base their estimate on the presence of small grains of a mineral called zircon unearthed in ancient river bedrock in northern Colombia that originated in Panama and were 13 million to 15 million years old. These grains suggested the land bridge must have existed at that time, they said. Read More » Stars May Be Forming in Shadow of Milky Way's Monster Black Hole Despite the harsh environment created by the monster black hole lurking in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, new observations show that stars — and, potentially, planets — are forming just two light-years away from the colossal giant. Most astronomers had said the latter idea seemed far-fetched, given that the black hole wreaks havoc on its surroundings, often stretching any nearby gas into taffylike streamers before it has a chance to collapse into stars. The findings lend support to the argument that "adult" stars observed in this region formed near the black hole. The new evidence for ongoing star formation near the black hole is "a nail in the coffin" for the theory that the stars form in situ, said lead author Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, of Northwestern University. Read More » Lowe's to eliminate pesticides that hurt crop pollinating honeybees  | Home improvement chain Lowe's Cos Inc will stop selling a type of pesticide suspected of causing a decline in honeybee populations needed to pollinate key American crops, following a few U.S. retailers who have taken similar steps last year. The class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, are sold by agrichemical companies to boost yields of staple crops but are also used widely on annual and perennial plants used in lawns and gardens. Scientists, consumer groups, beekeepers and others say bee deaths are linked to the neonic pesticides. A study released by environment group Friends of the Earth and Pesticide Research Institute in 2014 showed that 51 percent of garden plants purchased at Lowe's, Home Depot and Walmart in 18 cities in the United States and Canada contained neonicotinoid pesticides at levels that could harm or even kill bees.
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