|  Opportunity for Celebration! NASA Marathon Marks Mars Rover's Feat (Video)  | NASA's Opportunity rover recently completed a historic marathon on Mars, so folks at the robot's home base ran a race of their own to celebrate. About 90 employees of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which manages the space agency's Mars rover projects, ran a marathon-length relay around the facility's grounds on Thursday (April 9), NASA officials said. Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, landed on Mars three weeks apart in January 2004, and were tasked with three-month missions to search for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet. Opportunity is still rolling along today, though it has been experiencing some problems with its flash memory — the kind that can store data when the power is off.
| Read More » China to surpass US as top cause of modern global warming  | By Alister, Doyle,, Environment and Correspondent OSLO, April 13 (Reuters) - China is poised to overtake the United States as the main cause of man-made global warming since 1990, the benchmark year for U.N.-led action, in a historic shift that may raise pressure on Beijing to act. China's cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, when governments were becoming aware of climate change, will outstrip those of the United States in 2015 or 2016, according to separate estimates by experts in Norway and the United States. "A few years ago China's per capita emissions were low, its historical responsibility was low.
| Read More » SpaceX to Attempt Bold Rocket Landing Today: Watch It Live  | SpaceX aims to launch its robotic Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station today (April 13) at 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT), then bring the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket back for a vertical touchdown on an unmanned ship in the Atlantic Ocean. As of Sunday (April 12), Air Force forecasters were predicting a 60 percent chance of good weather for the launch, which will kick off the sixth of 12 missions SpaceX is flying to the space station under a $1.6 billion resupply contract with NASA.
| Read More » NASA Probe Circles Mars for 1,000th Time  | NASA's Mars-studying MAVEN spacecraft notched a spaceflight milestone this week — its 1,000th orbit of the Red Planet. MAVEN (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) arrived at the Red Planet in September 2014 and began its yearlong study of the Martian atmosphere on Nov. 16. The 1,000th orbit was completed on Monday (April 6), NASA officials said. "The spacecraft and instruments continue to work well, and we're building up a picture of the structure and composition of the upper atmosphere, of the processes that control its behavior and of how loss of gas to space occurs," MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, from the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, said in a statement.
| Read More » China to surpass U.S. as top cause of modern global warming  | By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - China is poised to overtake the United States as the main cause of man-made global warming since 1990, the benchmark year for U.N.-led action, in a historic shift that may raise pressure on Beijing to act. China's cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, when governments were becoming aware of climate change, will outstrip those of the United States in 2015 or 2016, according to separate estimates by experts in Norway and the United States. "A few years ago China's per capita emissions were low, its historical responsibility was low.
| Read More » SpaceX rocket poised for launch – and a landing  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - An unmanned SpaceX rocket was poised for launch from Florida on Monday to send a cargo ship to the International Space Station, then turn around and attempt to land on a platform in the ocean, company officials said. Liftoff of the 208-foot (63-meter) tall Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a Dragon capsule, was scheduled for 4:33 p.m. EDT/2033 GMT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Once the capsule is released, beginning a two-day journey to the station, the rocket's first stage will flip around, fire engines to steer its descent and deploy landing legs to touch down on a customized barge stationed about 200 miles (322 km) off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. At a prelaunch press conference on Sunday, SpaceX Vice President Hans Koenigsmann put the odds of a successful landing at 75 or 80 percent.
| Read More » Treating Troops' Sleep Problems May Reduce PTSD Sleep problems are common in members of the military, and may increase the risk of developing mental health conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a new report. The findings highlight the importance of screening military members for sleep problems and treating these issues, in order to reduce soldiers' risk of mental health conditions and other impairments in everyday life, the researchers said. "In the military, the creed is mission first, as it should be, so sleep is often scarified for operational demands," said Wendy Troxel, co-author of the report and a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. There is a need to educate service members and leaders "about the importance of sleep, how to maintain good sleep and how to identify if sleep problems are becoming debilitating," Troxel said. Read More » iPads in the Classroom, But Do They Help Kindergartners? When it comes to technology in the classroom, having kindergartners share iPads may be better for learning than simply giving each child an iPad, a new study suggests. This created a natural experiment in which one school had an iPad for every student, a second school had 23 iPads for students to share, usually in pairs, and a third school that had no iPads. In all classrooms with iPads, students used similar apps, including apps for math and literacy, and played similar games with the devices. On an end-of-year achievement test, which mostly measures early literacy skills, students who shared iPads scored about 30 points higher than both students in classrooms with an iPad for every child and students in classrooms without iPads. Read More » Cosmetic Surgery Makes Women Look More Likable  | Cosmetic surgery can make women look more likable, socially adept and feminine, a new study suggests. Women in the study who underwent facial rejuvenation — a term used to describe procedures that involve face, upper and lower eye, brow and neck lifts and chin implants — were rated more positively by strangers on several personality traits, the researchers said.
| Read More » Nature-Inspired Factories Are the Future of Manufacturing (Op-Ed)  | Ginkgo Bioworks is an OS Fund company. Follow him on Twitter at @bryan_johnson. In the 18,000-square-foot (1,672 square meters) facility, engineers churn out products ranging from scents and flavors to probiotics that fight antibiotic resistance. Ginkgo Bioworks, part of the OS Fund, is one of a growing number of companies engineering technology with lessons from nature.
| Read More » On Mars, Liquid Water Appears at Night, Study Suggests  | Liquid water lurks just below the surface of Mars on cold winter nights, according to new research. The Mars Curiosity rover has found evidence that when temperatures drop on cold winter nights, trace amounts of water from the atmosphere can turn to frost, which can then be absorbed into the upper layers of the Martian soil and liquefied. The liquid water evaporates back into the atmosphere after sunrise, when temperatures start to go up again.
| Read More » Academics rate women job applicants higher than identical men: study  | By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - When hundreds of U.S. college faculty members rated junior scientists based on scholarly record, job interview performance and other information with an eye toward which should be hired, they preferred women over identically qualified men two-to-one, scientists reported on Monday. The "candidates" were invented in order to see which factors - professional ones as well as things like gender and parental status - affect the evaluation of potential hires, part of an effort to explain women's underrepresentation in academic science. The bias toward women "was totally unexpected," said psychologist and co-author Wendy Williams of Cornell University. "We were shocked." Women have always been scarce in academic science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), now making up one-fourth of full professorships in science, engineering and health, according to the National Science Foundation.
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