|  Motion capture on a whole new level By Ben gRUBER PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, UNITED STATES - Hanbyul Joo is working on his swing. As Joo swings, more than 500 cameras capture his motion on video. Combined and processed, those videos make up the elements for the most advanced 3D reconstruction ever achieved. The two story dome is called the Panoptic Studio and its made up of 20 panels, each of which houses 24 cameras. To handle that data we are using 120 hard drives only for the capture," said Hanbyul Joo, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. Thousands of cables snake around the dome feeding the video singles to a bank of computers that store the data. Read More » Scientists race to beat mosquito resistance in fight against malaria By Alex Whiting LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Mosquitoes are rapidly developing resistance to insecticides used in bednets that millions of people rely on to protect them from malaria, experts say. Scientists are racing to develop new insecticides, warning that tens of thousands of people in Africa could die every year if mosquitoes develop full resistance before replacements are found. The issue will be a concern when the World Health Assembly meets in Geneva next month to look at proposals to eliminate malaria in 35 countries by 2030. An estimated 4.3 million deaths have been prevented since 2000, many of them because of the mass distribution of treated bednets in Africa, according to Roll Back Malaria, a partnership including the World Health Organization, UNICEF and World Bank. Read More » Scientists race to beat mosquito resistance in fight against malaria: TRFN  | By Alex Whiting LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Mosquitoes are rapidly developing resistance to insecticides used in bed nets that millions of people rely on to protect them from malaria, experts say. Scientists are racing to develop new insecticides, warning that tens of thousands of people in Africa could die every year if mosquitoes develop full resistance before replacements are found. The issue will be a concern when the World Health Assembly meets in Geneva next month to look at proposals to eliminate malaria in 35 countries by 2030.
| Read More » Space Shuttle Enterprise Exhibit in NYC Dedicated to Fallen Astronaut Crews  | Three years to day after arriving in New York City for its public display, NASA's prototype space shuttle Enterprise on Monday (April 27) was dedicated to the astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of space exploration. Family members of the Apollo 1, Challenger STS-51L and Columbia STS-107 crews joined NASA officials aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum for the dedication. "It is our great privilege to stand alongside the families of the brave crew members of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia as we dedicate space shuttle Enterprise to their heroism, vision, passion and sacrifice," Susan Marenoff-Zausner, the museum's president, said. Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died Jan. 27, 1967, as a result of a fire engulfing their spacecraft during a test on the launch pad.
| Read More » Source of Antarctica's Eerie 'Bleeding Glacier' Found  | Antarctica's Dry Valleys are the most arid places on Earth, but underneath their icy soils lies a vast and ancient network of salty, liquid water filled with life, a new study finds. For instance, bacteria living under Taylor Glacier stain its snout a deep blood red. The rust-colored brine, called Blood Falls, pours into Lake Bonney in the southernmost of the three largest Dry Valleys. Now, for the first time, scientists have traced the water underneath Taylor Glacier to learn more about the mysterious Blood Falls.
| Read More » Scientists create 'ghosts' in the lab by tricking the brain By Matthew Stock Lausanne, SWITZERLAND - Neuroscientists have succeeded in creating 'ghosts' in the laboratory by tricking the brains of test subjects into feeling an unexpected 'presence' in the room. Under normal circumstances the brain is able to form a unified self-perception, but lead researcher Olaf Blanke explained that when this malfunctions the brain creates a second representation of its body. Blanke's team began by analyzing the brains of 12 patients with neurological disorders who have reported having such a secondary representation of their body, in other words a ghost sensation. MRI scans revealed abnormalities with three brain regions involved in self-awareness, movement and the sense of position in space. Read More » Doomed Antarctic Explorer's Last Photos Up for Auction  | Photographs taken by explorer Robert Falcon Scott during his ill-fated trip to Antarctica are being auctioned off in London today. The photos depict day-to-day life at the base camp on Antarctica's Ross Island in the months leading up to Scott's trek to the South Pole in 1911 — a journey from which he never returned. As Scott and his team trudged toward the South Pole, Ponting stayed behind at the Ross Island base camp, where a relief party brought Scott's camera before the captain became stranded in the snow. Now, more than 100 years after the Terra Nova expedition, those photos will be up for sale at Christie's Auction House in London today (April 28), where they are expected to fetch at least $30,000 (20,000 British pounds).
| Read More » Same-Sex Marriage: 6 Effects of Supreme Court's Decision The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today (April 28) about the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. "There are literally hundreds and hundreds of rights under state and federal law that are affected by whether you can marry or not," said Jeffrey Trachtman, a partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, a law firm with offices in New York City, Silicon Valley and Paris. Here are six ways the Supreme Court's ruling could affect the lives of same-sex couples living in the United States. If you're not married, it's generally more complicated to adopt a child, Trachtman told Live Science. Read More » US Military's Self-Steering Bullets Can Hit Moving Targets  | In what some might consider a terrifying development, the U.S. military has passed a key milestone in creating self-steering bullets.
| Read More » Supply craft cannot dock with space station: Russian space agency  | An unmanned cargo ship will not be able to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) because of problems after it launched, the head of the Russian space agency said on Wednesday. Igor Komarov, head of Roscosmos, listed a series of problems that had made the Progress M-27M freighter tumble out of control since early on Tuesday. "Because of this, the craft's continued flight and its docking with the ISS is not possible," he said, speaking at a news conference. The total cost of the failed mission to supply almost 3 tonnes (2,722 kg) of supplies to the ISS was 2.59 billion roubles ($50.7 million), a Roscosmos spokesman told Reuters.
| Read More » Doomed Russian Space Station Cargo Ship Will Fall Back to Earth Soon  | An ailing Russian cargo spacecraft is falling from space and will soon meet a fiery demise in Earth's atmosphere after suffering a serious malfunction on Tuesday (April 28), a NASA astronaut said today. The unmanned Progress 59 spacecraft is doomed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after failing to deliver more than 3 tons of supplies to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly told reporters in a series of televised interviews. "We were both told recently by both the U.S. and Russian flight control centers that Roscosmos [Russia's space agency] announced that the Progress will not be docking and will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere here some days in the future to be determined," Kelly said from the station as he and crewmate Mikhail Kornienko answered questions. The launch went smoothly, but shortly after the spacecraft separated from its rocket, Russian flight controllers had difficulty receiving telemetry data from the craft.
| Read More » Dark Knight of the Jurassic? Tiny Dinosaur Had Batlike Wings  | The creature is the first known dinosaur with membranous wings, said Xing Xu, a paleontologist at Linyi University in China, and co-author of the study published today (April 29) in the journal Nature. "This is the most unexpected discovery I have ever made, even though I have found a few really bizarre dinosaurs in my career," Xu told Live Science in an email. The fossil comes from the Middle-Upper Jurassic period (about 160 million years ago), and was found by a farmer, in the Tiaojishan Formation of Hebei Province, China.
| Read More » A pigeon-size dinosaur with bat wings? Strange but true  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists in China on Wednesday described one of the weirdest flying creatures ever discovered, a pigeon-size dinosaur with wings like a bat that lived not long before the first birds. The dinosaur, named Yi qi (meaning "strange wing" in Mandarin and pronounced EE-chee), lived about 160 million years during the Jurassic Period, about 10 million years before the earliest-known bird, Archaeopteryx. It is considered a cousin of birds, but boasted membranous wings made of skin like those of the extinct flying reptiles known as pterosaurs, which lived at the same time, and bats, which appeared more than 100 million years later, instead of the stiff, plume-like feathers of birds. "It's hard to imagine that it could have flapped very effectively, since the rod-like bone was presumably a fairly unwieldy thing to have attached to the wrist," said paleontologist Corwin Sullivan of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
| Read More » See Amazing Photos of Mercury By a Doomed NASA Spacecraft (Video)  | A new NASA video celebrates the life and accomplishments of the first probe ever to orbit Mercury, just days before the spacecraft ends its landmark mission with a death plunge onto the planet's many-cratered surface. NASA's MESSENGER probe, which has been orbiting Mercury since March 2011, is nearly out of fuel and will smash into the planet on Thursday (April 30), probably around 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT), space agency officials say. NASA released the new MESSENGER video on Monday (April 27) as a tribute, and a memorial of sorts. On March 18, 2011, MESSENGER became the first probe ever to circle Mercury and just the second to study the planet up close.
| Read More » Scientists find chemical clues on obesity in urine samples  | The findings may also help researchers identify people who have a so-called "metabolic signature" for obesity but are not overweight, the scientists said, suggesting ways could be found to prevent them developing obesity and other metabolic diseases. According to World Health Organization (WHO) data, 13 percent of adults worldwide were obese in 2014. Thanks to technologies that can analyze the metabolic content of a urine sample, scientists can extract lots of information reflecting a person's genetic makeup and lifestyle. For this study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists led by a team at Imperial College London analyzed urine samples from more than 2,000 volunteers in the United States and Britain.
| Read More » 4D Implant Saves Babies with Breathing Problems Three baby boys with life-threatening breathing problems are alive today thanks to a 4D biomaterial, a medical implant designed to change shape over time, that helped them keep breathing, researchers say. "Today, we see a way to cure a disease that has been killing children for generations," said Dr. Glenn Green, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and the senior author of a new report on the boys' cases. "The possibilities are really limitless," lead study author Dr. Robert Morrison, a research fellow and resident surgeon at the University of Michigan Health System, told Live Science. Advances in 3D printing have enabled the rapid production of medical devices that are customized for individual patients, such as hearing aids, dental implants and prosthetic hands. Read More » People Addicted to Opioids May Benefit from ER Drug Treatment For people who are addicted to opioid painkillers, getting treated for addiction in the emergency room rather than waiting to see an addiction specialist may be beneficial, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed information from 329 people with opioid addiction who ended up in the emergency room for any reason, including problems related to their addiction, or other medical conditions. These patients were divided into three groups: One group was referred to local addiction treatment centers, the second group was counseled for 10 minutes about addiction treatment and then referred to a treatment center, and the third group was immediately given a medication called buprenorphine, which helps with opioid withdrawal symptoms, and then given the same 10-minute counseling session and referral for addiction treatment. One month later, 78 percent of patients in the buprenorphine group were enrolled in a formal addiction treatment program, compared with just 37 percent of those who received referral information only, and 45 percent of those who had the counseling session before a referral, according to the study led by Dr. Gail D'Onofrio, of the Yale School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn. Read More » Having Mom in the Car Changes Teen Driver's Brain In the study, researchers designed a driving simulation test that actually encouraged risk-taking behavior, and asked 25 teens to complete the simulation as quickly as possible. The findings suggest that distraction alone can't explain why teen drivers are more reckless when they have friends in the car, the researchers said. Read More » Rare Sperm Whale Fossils Shed Light on Mysterious Family Tree  | Rare, 7-million-year-old fossils of two extinct pygmy sperm whales are helping researchers learn about the evolution of the ocean's largest toothed whale, a new study finds. It's unclear why the sperm whales' spermaceti organ shrank over time — twice in the evolutionary record, according to an analysis of several fossils — but perhaps at one time, larger spermaceti were used to attract mates, said the study's lead researcher, Jorge Velez-Juarbe, a curator of marine mammals at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. "We really need to test this hypothesis," Velez-Juarbe told Live Science.
| Read More » Hands free talk with global reach and style By Ben Gruber San Francisco - Anytime, day or night, no matter which way you look, it seems you'll see someone with a smartphone in their hand. It allows any member, no matter their location or cellular provider to speak with another member or group of members with a simple push of a button. "The range is the Internet. Read More » | |
