|  This Galaxy Far, Far Away Is the Farthest One Yet Found  | The galaxy EGS-zs8-1 lies 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, the largest distance ever measured between Earth and another galaxy. The universe is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, so galaxy EGS-zs8-1 is also one of the earliest galaxies to form in the cosmos. Further studies could provide a glimpse at how these early galaxies helped produce the heavy elements that are essential for building the diversity of life and landscapes we see on Earth today. EGS-zs8-1 is one of the brightest objects observed in this region, which is around 13 billion light-years from Earth.
| Read More » SpaceX to Launch Dummy on Rocket Escape Test Wednesday: Watch It Live  | SpaceX's Dragon astronaut taxi will blast off with a dummy on board Wednesday (May 6) in a crucial safety test, and you can watch all of the action live. An unmanned but dummy-carrying Dragon test vehicle is scheduled to launch Wednesday from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT), though the window extends to 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT). The Dragon pad abort test, as it is called, is designed to see how a SpaceX crew capsule would perform in the event of a launch emergency. You can watch the SpaceX test launch live on Space.com beginning at 6:35 a.m. EDT (1035 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV. The agency awarded SpaceX and Boeing $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion, respectively, last September to finish their development work on the vehicles.
| Read More » 'Albert Einstein Font' Lets You Write Like Physics Genius  | Few people can hope to achieve the feats of genius Albert Einstein, but now, there may at least be a way to write like the famous physicist, thanks to a font styled after his handwriting. The "Albert Einstein Font," which is based on hundreds of letters written by Einstein himself, lets you "write like a genius," its creators say. Through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, the project has already raised more than $7,000 of its $15,000 goal. "Einstein's equations were beautiful, so it makes sense that their presentation should be as well," said Phil Marshall, an astrophysicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, according to the Kickstarter site.
| Read More » Dave Goldberg Death: Treadmills Linked with 3 Fatalities Yearly The death of 47-year-old Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, shows that serious and even fatal accidents can happen while you're using exercise equipment. Last Friday, Goldberg was exercising at a gym in a private resort in Mexico, where he and his family were on vacation, according to the New York Times. Goldberg appeared to have fallen off the treadmill he was using, and later died from head trauma and blood loss. "This is a severe example or case where [a treadmill injury] cost him his life," said Dr. Michael Jonesco, a primary care sports medicine physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who was not involved in Goldberg's case. Read More » Inmarsat's GlobalXpress being used in Nepal ahead of global launch  | (Reuters) - The first of Inmarsat's high-capacity GlobalXpress satellites is being used in Nepal after the country was hit by an earthquake and ahead of a global launch for the technology set for later this year, the company said on Wednesday. "We were able to rush terminals into Nepal, and the feedback from that has been great," Chief Executive Rupert Pearce said following release of the British satellite maker's first-quarter earnings. He said worldwide commercial service would start in August or September, slightly later than planned due to launch timings.
| Read More » Same-Sex Marriage in History: What the Supreme Court Missed Several U.S. Supreme Court Justices asked for a history lesson on same-sex marriage last week, but the answers they got were far from complete, experts say. Three of the nine justices asked for a legal precedence of same-sex marriage, when they listened on April 28 to arguments on whether the institution should be, in essence, legal and recognized countrywide. Chief Justice John Roberts raised the question of precedence, saying, "Every definition that I looked up, prior to about a dozen years ago, defined marriage as unity between a man and a woman as husband and wife," according to court transcripts. Justice Samuel Alito added, "as far as I'm aware, until the end of the 20th century, there was never a nation or a culture that recognized marriage between two people of the same sex." He later added, "There have been cultures that did not frown on homosexuality," such as ancient Greece, but they still didn't accept gay marriage, as far as he knew. Read More » Bawdy Bard: Shakespeare Play's Lost Lines Reveal Sexual Mocking  | A lost section of "Love's Labour's Lost," a comedy written by William Shakespeare, has been rediscovered, revealing a song mocking the sexual inadequacy of one of the play's male characters. The song refers to a penis that is "too soft and too small," and would have been sung by Moth to mock Armado's sexual inadequacy.
| Read More » Sun Unleashes Most Powerful Solar Flare of 2015 (Video)  | The sun unleashed its most intense flare of the year Tuesday (May 5), a monstrous blast that caused temporary radio blackouts throughout the Pacific region. The X-class solar flare — the most powerful category of sun storm — erupted Tuesday from a sunspot called Active Region 2339 (AR2339), peaking at 6:11 p.m. EDT (2211 GMT). NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft captured a gorgeous video of the solar flare, recording it in multiple wavelengths of light. Despite the radio blackouts, the blast is unlikely to cause major issues here on Earth, researchers said.
| Read More » Open wide and say 'ah': secret of gaping whale mouths revealed  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When the fin whale gets ready to eat, Earth's second-largest animal opens its mouth so wide that it can gulp an amount of water larger than the volume of its own body as it filters out meals of tiny fish and shrimp-like krill. The force of water rushing into the mouth during "lunge feeding" turns the tongue upside down and expands the bottom of the oral cavity into a huge pouch between the body wall and the overlying skin and blubber.
| Read More » SpaceX puts Dragon passenger spaceship through test run  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A Space Exploration Technologies' passenger spaceship made a quick debut test flight on Wednesday, shooting itself off a Florida launch pad to demonstrate a key emergency escape system. The 20 foot- (6 meter) tall Dragon capsule, a modified version of the spacecraft that flies cargo to the International Space Station, fired up its eight, side-mounted thruster engines at 9 a.m. EDT/1300 GMT to catapult itself nearly one mile (1.6 km) up and over the Atlantic Ocean. The flight ended less than two minutes later with the capsule's parachute splash-down about 1.4 miles (2.6 km) east of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch site. SpaceX plans to refly the capsule later this year aboard a Falcon 9 rocket to test an abort maneuver at supersonic speed and high altitude.
| Read More » Toxic Gut Bacteria: New Treatment Could Prevent Repeat Infections In people who become infected with the difficult-to-treat gut bacteria called C. diff, the infection often comes back after treatment. Read More » Why Fructose-Laden Drinks May Leave You Wanting More The type of sugar in your drink may affect how much food you want to eat, according to a new study. Researchers found that people wanted to eat more high-calorie foods when they had a drink containing fructose, compared with when their drink contained glucose. In the study, 24 people were given drinks sweetened with 75 grams of fructose on one day, and the same amount of glucose in a drink on another day. After consuming fructose, the participants reported feeling hungrier and expressed a greater desire to eat the foods pictured than when they consumed glucose. Read More » Probiotics May Help Relieve Seasonal Allergies Probiotics, or "good bacteria," may be helpful to people with seasonal allergies, a new review suggests. Researchers analyzed the results from more than 20 previous studies and found that hay fever sufferers may get some benefits from using probiotics, improving their symptoms and quality of life. But the jury is still out about whether probiotics are actually an effective treatment for people with seasonal allergies, said lead author Dr. Justin Turner, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Additional high-quality studies are needed before doctors would recommend for or against using probiotics to help treat people with seasonal allergies, Turner said. Read More » Opportunity Rover Sees Rock Spire in Mars Crater (Photo)  | A new photo captured by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity shows a rocky spire in a shallow crater on the Red Planet. The mosaic, which combines images taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera on March 29 and March 30, depicts a shallow Mars crater called Spirit of St. Louis. The crater is "about 110 feet (34 meters) long and about 80 feet (24 meters) wide, with a floor slightly darker than surrounding terrain," NASA officials wrote April 30 in a description of the image. Spirit of St. Louis lies along the western rim of a much larger crater called Endeavour, which Opportunity has been exploring since August 2011.
| Read More » Failed Russian spacecraft expected to burn up Friday By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - An unmanned Russian spacecraft on a failed resupply run to the International Space Station is heading back toward Earth faster than original predictions, with a fiery demise in the atmosphere expected early on Friday, U.S. Air Force tracking data shows. The Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks satellites and junk orbiting Earth, found 44 pieces of debris near the Progress and its discarded upper-stage booster, a possible indication that an explosion or other problem occurred just before or during spacecraft separation. Unable to raise its altitude, the Progress capsule is being pulled back toward Earth. Read More » Brain technology patents soar as companies get inside people's heads  | By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - From ways to eavesdrop on brains and learn what advertisements excite consumers, to devices that alleviate depression, the number of U.S. patents awarded for "neurotechnology" has soared since 2010, according to an analysis released on Wednesday. Most surprising, concluded market-research firm SharpBrains, is that patents have been awarded to inventors well beyond those at medical companies. The leader in neurotechnology patents, according to the report, is consumer-research behemoth Nielsen. Patents for neurotechnology bumped along at 300 to 400 a year in the 2000s, then soared to 800 in 2010 and 1,600 last year, SharpBrains reported.
| Read More » Oregon's Mysterious 'Disappearing Lake' Explained  | During the rainy fall and winter, most Oregonians probably don't give much thought to Lost Lake, a shallow lake surrounded by pine trees that sits near a highway. "The lakebed begins to fill in the late fall, when the amount of rain coming in starts exceeding the ability of the lava tubes to drain off the water," said Jude McHugh, a spokeswoman for the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. As the rainy season peters out, the 9-foot-deep (2.7 meters) lake loses its water source, and water disappears down the lava tubes until it's gone, McHugh said.
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