|  Pee-power toilet to light up disaster zones Led by Professor Ioannis Ieropoulos, the scientists are working with aid agency Oxfam to install cubicles like this in refugee camps. Read More » Dog Flu Outbreak: What You Need to Know  | A new strain of flu that likely came from Asia has sickened thousands of dogs in the Midwest, experts say. The new dog flu virus, which has not been seen before in U.S. dogs, has infected more than 1,000 dogs and is responsible for six dog deaths in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, according to experts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cornell University who have been collecting and testing samples of the virus. "The dog population here has never seen this strain before," said Dr. Keith Poulsen, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The canine sickness causes symptoms similar to those of the human flu, such as coughing, nasal discharge, fever and loss of appetite, though a small percentage of dogs can be carriers of the virus without showing symptoms, Poulsen said.
| Read More » 11,000 Years of Isolation: Remote Village Has Unusual Gut Bacteria  | A medical checkup of people living in remote villages deep in the Amazon rainforest in Venezuela has uncovered striking details about these villagers' microbiomes, the bacteria living on and in their bodies, a new study finds. The villagers appear to have the highest levels of bacterial diversity ever reported in a human group, the researchers found. Some of these genes could even make these bacteria resistant to synthetic drugs — an alarming discovery, given that these villagers had never had contact with either people of industrialized societies or commercial antibiotics prior to the study, the researchers said. The Venezuelan Ministry of Health routinely visits newfound communities, and provides them with medical services, including vaccinations aimed at protecting villagers from diseases brought by illegal miners and others venturing into the Amazon, said the study's senior author, Gloria Dominguez-Bello, an associate professor of translational medicine at the New York University School of Medicine.
| Read More » X-Ray Scans 'Dig' Beneath Layers of Rembrandt Painting  | The oil painting, dated and signed in 1647, hangs in Gemäldegalerie, an art museum in Berlin, Germany. The painting illustrates the biblical story of Susanna, who is caught bathing by a group of elders and is blackmailed into coming with them. But the researchers didn't choose to study "Susanna and the Elders" on a whim.
| Read More » Post Chimp Work, Jane Goodall's Passion for Conservation Still Going Strong  | Jane Goodall, the British primatologist who gained worldwide fame for her studies of wild chimpanzees in East Africa, greeted a packed audience here at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night (April 15) with a series of apelike howls. Though the 81-year-old scientist and activist seems to have a never-ending passion for her first love, chimpanzees, she also revealed the ways in which her life and interests have evolved over the past few decades. She shared stories from the 55 years she has spent studying the social interactions of humans' closest living animal relatives at a national park in Tanzania, and the environmental conservation and advocacy she has devoted herself to for the past 30 years. She also spoke out against climate change, genetically modified foods and human destruction of the environment.
| Read More » Incredible Video: Curious Whale Inspects Underwater Robot  | A lucky group of ocean lovers got the surprise of a lifetime when a huge sperm whale swam into their live video broadcast. The incredible whale footage was filmed yesterday (April 14) by the Nautilus Live expedition, which is exploring the Gulf of Mexico's seafloor methane seeps. The whale suddenly appeared while scientists were watching methane bubbles and sampling seawater with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), called Hercules. The researchers laughed with delight as the curious sperm whale gracefully maneuvered around Hercules, never once bumping the 11-foot-long (3.3 meters) ROV or rubbing its cables.
| Read More » New Roadkill Map Finds California 'Ring of Death'  | Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have plotted some 29,000 reports of roadkill to identify the most hazardous roadways for the state's wildlife. The volunteer reports, collected over the past five years, cover more than 40 percent of California's highways and roads. "Larger animals can cause fatal collisions and people will sometimes swerve to avoid smaller animals," said Fraser Shilling, co-director of the UC Davis Road Ecology Center, which coordinates the study. In Southern California, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) plans to build five new wildlife crossings along state Route 94 in San Diego County, where the study identified roadkill hotspots, Shilling said.
| Read More » Angry Chimp Attack! 5 Bizarre Drone Crashes Drones are becoming increasingly popular in everyday life, but the technology still has some kinks to work out. Read More » Scary Inhaler Accident: What a Woman Learned from It  | A woman in Australia had an unexpected medical emergency on New Year's Eve after she accidentally inhaled one of her earrings, according to a new case report. She had asthma, and reached into her purse for her inhaler, according to the report published April 9 in the journal BMJ Case Reports. The inhaler rattled when she picked it up, but the woman dismissed it as a loose connection within the device. "Unfortunately, she was not taught to replace the cap on the inhaler after she has used it," said the lead author of the case report, Dr. Lucinda Blake, a core medical trainee at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney.
| Read More » What Your Poop Says About Your Lifestyle Your lifestyle affects the bacteria in your poop, a new study shows: The poop of people who live in Western countries may contain a less-diverse group of bacteria than the poop of people who live of nonindustrialized countries, according to the study. In the study, researchers compared poop samples from people in the United States with samples from people in Papua New Guinea, a nation in the South Pacific that is one of the least industrialized countries in the world. The results showed that the diversity of bacteria in the poop was greater in the samples from Papua New Guineans than in those from U.S. residents. In fact, the U.S. poop samples lacked about 50 bacterial types that were found in the samples from the Papua New Guineans. Read More » '$5 Insanity': 5 Crazy Facts About Flakka The drug, which has the street name of Flakka, is a synthetic stimulant that is chemically similar to bath salts. Flakka is fast developing a reputation for what seem to be its nasty side effects, including a tendency to give people enormous rage and strength, along with intense hallucinations. "Even though addicted, users tell us they are literally afraid of this drug," said James Hall, an epidemiologist at the Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. From what it is to how it may work, here are five facts about Flakka. Read More » Launch, Land, Repeat: Reusable Rocket Technology Taking Flight  | SpaceX performed another high-profile rocket reusability test Tuesday (April 14) during the launch of its Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station. The first stage of the company's Falcon 9 rocket came back down to Earth and nearly pulled off a soft landing on an "autonomous spaceport drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean. "Looks like Falcon landed fine, but excess lateral velocity caused it to tip over post landing," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday. SpaceX also tried such a rocket landing in January, during the launch of the previous Dragon cargo mission.
| Read More » Mars Rover Curiosity Runs 10K on Red Planet  | Just three weeks after NASA's Opportunity rover completed the first-ever Mars marathon, the robot's bigger, younger cousin wrapped up its own long-distance race on the Red Planet. A 208-foot-long (65 meters) drive pushed the car-size Curiosity rover's odometer past 10 kilometers (6.21 miles) on Thursday (April 16), NASA officials said. Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars' huge Gale Crater since August 2012, is currently studying the foothills of Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the sky from Gale's center. "We've not only been making tracks, but also making important observations to characterize rocks we're passing, and some farther to the south at selected viewpoints," Curiosity science team member John Grant, of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in a statement.
| Read More » Humanoid robot can recognize and interact with people  | A humanoid robot which can mimic human expressions greeted visitors on Saturday (April 18) at a Hong Kong electronics fair. About 40 motors control his face to form delicate facial expressions, according to product manager at Hanson Robotics, Grace Copplestone. "So Han's really exciting because not only can he generate very realistic facial expressions, but he can also interact with the environment around him. So he has cameras on his eyes and on his chest, which allow him to recognize people's face, not only that, but recognize their gender, their age, whether they are happy or sad, and that makes him very exciting for places like hotels for example, where you need to appreciate the customers in front of you and react accordingly," Copplestone said.
| Read More » Did Neanderthals Die Off Because They Couldn't Harness Fire? Neanderthals may have died off because they failed to harness the power of fire to the extent their human cousins did, a new data analysis suggests. Over time, the anatomically modern human population would have risen, while the Neanderthal population plummeted toward extinction, according to the model. "Fire use would have provided a significant advantage for the human population and may indeed have been an important factor in the overall collapse or absorption of the Neanderthal population," said Anna Goldfield, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Boston University, who presented the findings here on Thursday (April 16) at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Neanderthals had been living on the continent for hundreds of thousands of years when the first modern humans showed up about 45,000 years ago, Goldfield said. Read More » Hubble Telescope at 25: The Trials and Triumphs of a Space Icon  | This week, the Hubble Space Telescope completes 25 years in orbit around Earth, and for much of that time, the telescope has sent home photographs that have wowed the world. The film "Hubble's Cosmic Journey," premiering tonight (April 20) at 10 p.m. EDT on the National Geographic Channel, features many of the men and women who worked with the telescope and helped it overcome its many challenges. "Hubble was touted as the best thing for astronomy since Galileo pointed a telescope at the heavens," Jeff Hester, a NASA scientist and chief engineer who appears in the film, told Space.com at the film's world premiere. The idea stayed with the United States' growing space agency, which, in the 1970s, began funding a space telescope named for famed American astronomer Edwin Hubble.
| Read More » True to Their Name, Vampire Squid May Have Long Lives  | No one has ever seen vampire squid mate in the wild. While most female squid and octopuses have just one reproductive cycle before they die, vampire squid go through dozens of egg-making cycles in their lifetimes, scientists have found. The discovery suggests vampire squid may live several years longer than coastal squid and octopuses. During mating, the male squid gives the female a sperm packet, which somehow gets mobilized once she is ready to release her eggs, said Henk-Jan Hoving of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany.
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