|  Awesome New SpaceX Video Shows Rocket Landing Try and Crash  | Those of you who wanted to see the explosive last seconds of SpaceX's daring rocket-landing attempt Tuesday (April 14) are in luck. A new video shows the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket crashing and burning after nearly pulling off an unprecedented touchdown on an unmanned "drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean. The booster stage attempted the landing after successfully launching SpaceX's robotic Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station on a cargo mission for NASA. SpaceX released the video on Wednesday (April 15), one day after the company unveiled a greenier, grainier and shorter version that stopped just when the rocket stage was about to topple over and explode.
| Read More » Beyond Hubble: Will Future Space Telescope Seek Alien Life by 2030?  | The iconic Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 this month, and getting the ball rolling on a life-hunting successor instrument would be a fitting birthday present, one prominent researcher argues. Hubble, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), blasted off aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Spacewalking astronauts fixed a serious problem with the telescope's optics in 1993, and Hubble has been transforming astronomers' understanding of the cosmos — and bringing gorgeous images of the universe into laypeople's lives —ever since. "It has really allowed people to participate in the excitement of discovery," said Mario Livio, an astrophysicist based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates Hubble's science program.
| Read More » Rita Wilson's Cancer Diagnosis: When to Get a Second Opinion Actress Rita Wilson attributes the early diagnosis of her breast cancer to the fact that she got a second opinion, a step that experts say is particularly important when the consequences of a medical test or treatment are serious. Wilson revealed this week that she underwent a double mastectomy as treatment for invasive breast cancer, according to a statement in People Magazine. Read More » Lockheed, Boeing venture says engine uncertainty could jeopardize new rocket By Andrea Shalal COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - A joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co on Wednesday said uncertainty over its use of Russian rocket engines for Air Force satellite launches could undermine its plans to build a new rocket with a U.S. engine. Tory Bruno, president of the United Launch Alliance joint venture, told Reuters that Lockheed and Boeing could halt investment in the new rocket unless ULA gets permission to use 29 already ordered Russian engines for Air Force launches. Read More » U.S. FAA says plans careful look at Orbital report on rocket blast  | COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration will carefully review an Orbital ATK-led investigation into an October rocket explosion to ensure that all possible causes were properly considered, a top FAA official said Wednesday. "We eagerly look forward to seeing what they have to say and making sure we understand it and agree with it before allowing them to go ahead with future launches," George Nield, associate administrator for commercial space transportation, told Reuters after a speech at the annual Space Symposium conference. ...
| Read More » Fatal Brain Disease in US Man Likely Came from UK Beef  | A U.S. man who developed a rare and fatal brain disease likely got the disease from eating beef while living abroad more than a decade earlier, according to a new report of the case. Because the condition, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is so rare, the man was misdiagnosed and even hospitalized for psychiatric symptoms multiple times before doctors suspected the true cause of his symptoms, according to the report from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Baylor College of Medicine. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is thought to arise from eating beef contaminated with infectious prions, which are proteins that fold abnormally and form lesions in the brain. In the United Kingdom, there have been nearly 200 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease tied to eating contaminated beef in the 1980s and 1990s.
| Read More » Spooky Ring of Light Created by Arctic's Ice-Mapping Lasers (Photo)  | The image, released April 5 by NASA's Earth Observatory, shows pulses of laser light hitting Arctic sea ice — the ice that forms and floats in Arctic waters. As part of this year's campaign, researchers flew across the North American side of the Arctic Ocean, traveling from north of Greenland, past Canada, and to Alaska.
| Read More » 1 Million Orders and Counting: Why So Many Covet the Apple Watch More than 1 million Apple Watches were pre-ordered last week, on the first day the device went on sale, according to a firm that tracks consumer spending. There are some likely explanations for why people are crazy about the Apple Watch, which is scheduled to be released on April 24. The conventional view is that it's merely a cool new gadget, said Markus Giesler, a marketing professor at York University in Canada. "When you buy an Apple Watch, you're not just buying this watch — you're also buying the interface into this matrix Apple has created" — a world that consists of other Apple products, such as the iPhone, iPod, MacBook and iPad, he said. Read More » Octopuses Have Moves, But No Rhythm  | Octopuses move with a simple elegance, but they have no rhythm, according to new research. Each of an octopus's eight arms is soft, flexible and muscular, and acts like it has an infinite number of joints, said the study's lead author, Guy Levy, a postdoctoralresearcher of neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "The octopus, as usual, surprised us," Levy told Live Science. Octopuses use unique strategies to coordinate their arms while crawling, the researchers found.
| Read More » Older Mothers Tend to Have Bigger Gap Between Pregnancies Women in the United States usually have about a two-year gap between pregnancies, and older women tend to have their children further apart, a new report finds. The spacing between pregnancies can affect the health of the baby, according to the report from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, about 30 percent of the women had a gap of less than 18 months between pregnancies, according to the report, which looked at data from 2003 to 2011. The pattern in pregnancy spacing seen in the new report was similar to findings from the 2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth, the researchers said. Read More » 'Puppy Eyes' Help Dogs Bond with Humans, Study Suggests  | Because dogs don't otherwise use eye contact as a way to cement bonds with other dogs, the study researchers suggest that man's best friend may have gotten its prized place in human hearts by tapping into an ancient human bonding pathway. "We humans use eye gaze for affiliative communications, and are very much sensitive to eye contact," study co-author Takefumi Kikusui, a professor of veterinary medicine at the Companion Animal Research Lab at Azabu University in Japan, said in an email.
| Read More » A dog's life: study reveals people's hormonal link with tail-waggers  | Researchers in Japan said on Thursday oxytocin, a hormone that among other things helps reinforce bonds between parents and their babies, increases in humans and their dogs when they interact, particularly when looking into one another's eyes. "Oxytocin has many positive impacts on human physiology and psychology," said Takefumi Kikusui, a veterinary medicine professor at Japan's Azabu University, whose research was published in the journal Science. In one experiment, dogs were put in a room with their owners. The researchers tracked their interaction and measured oxytocin levels through urine samples.
| Read More » Colossal Ancient Galaxies Die from the Inside Out  | A new survey of 22 elliptical galaxies (most of which were the same size or larger than our own Milky Way) revealed that the most massive galaxies from about 10 billion years ago have stopped forming stars in their centers while formation continued on the outskirts. "These galaxies lived 10 billion years in the past — three billion years after the Big Bang — and are star-forming at high rates, and are the progenitors of the massive dead galaxies of today's universe," lead author Sandro Tacchella, a Ph.D. student at ETH Zurich's institute for astronomy in Switzerland, told Space.com. One leading theory says that a supermassive black hole drives gas out and disrupts star formation, while the other supposes there is a yet-unexplained mechanism that switches off the gas supply in the center. Also interesting was the smaller, elliptical galaxies from this era were still churning out stars throughout their masses.
| Read More » Giant Radio Telescope Peels Away Magnetic Field Shrouding Black Hole  | Astronomers have peeled away most of the gas and dust enshrouding a monster black hole, taking a close look at the giant that lies some 68 thousand light-years away. A Swedish team of scientists has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — a huge radio telescope in Chile — to unmask a supermassive black hole's extremely powerful magnetic field. The team, led by Ivan Marti-Vidal from the Onsala Space Observatory and Chalmers University of Technology, was therefore able to peer deep into the heart of the distant galaxy where the black hole lies, and see the region just light-days away from the behemoth. "Our discovery is a giant leap in terms of observing frequency, thanks to the use of ALMA, and in terms of distance to the black hole where the magnetic field has been probed," said co-author Sebastien Muller, also from Onsala Space Observatory and Chalmers University of Technology, in a statement.
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