|  Scientists to share real-time genetic data on deadly MERS, Ebola  | By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Genetic sequence data on two of the deadliest yet most poorly understood viruses are to be made available to researchers worldwide in real time as scientists seek to speed up understanding of Ebola and MERS infections. "The collective expertise of the world's infectious disease experts is more powerful than any single lab, and the best way of tapping into this...is to make data freely available as soon as possible," said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity which is funding the work. The gene sequences, already available for MERS cases and soon to come in the case of Ebola, will be posted on the website virological.org for anyone to see, access and use. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is a viral disease which first emerged in humans in 2012 and has been spreading in Saudi Arabia and neighbouring countries since then.
| Read More » Oklahoma scientists say earthquakes linked to oil and gas work Oklahoma geologists have documented strong links between increased seismic activity in the state and the injection into the ground of wastewater from oil and gas production, a state agency said on Tuesday. Oklahoma is recording 2-1/2 earthquakes daily of a magnitude 3 or greater, a seismicity rate 600 times greater than observed before 2008, the report by the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS) said. It is "very likely that the majority of the earthquakes" are triggered by wastewater injection activities tied to the oil and gas industry, the OGS said. Prior to 2008, Oklahoma averaged less than two a year. Read More » First experiment 'editing' human embryos ignites ethical furor By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - Biologists in China reported carrying out the first experiment to alter the DNA of human embryos, igniting an outcry from scientists who warn against altering the human genome in a way that could last for generations. The study from China appeared last weekend in an obscure online journal called Protein & Cell. In an interview published on Wednesday on the news site of the journal Nature, lead author Junjiu Huang of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou said both Nature and Science rejected the paper, partly for ethical reasons. "There have been persistent rumors" of this kind of research taking place in China, said Edward Lanphier, chief executive of California-based Sangamo BioSciences Inc and part of a group of scientists who called last month for a global moratorium on such experiments. Read More » Climate Deniers to Pope Francis: 'There Is No Global Warming Crisis'  | As Pope Francis prepares a historic document to make environmental issues a priority for Catholics, a group of climate-change deniers is trying to convince the pontiff this week that global warming is nothing to worry about. "Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God's green Earth — in fact, they are fulfilling their biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity," Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, said in a statement. The group is sending a delegation to Rome this week to try to get Pope Francis to pay attention to its position with events Monday (April 27) and Tuesday (April 28).
| Read More » Global warming to blame for most heat extremes - study By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming is to blame for most extreme hot days and almost a fifth of heavy downpours, according to a scientific study on Monday that gives new evidence of how rising man-made greenhouse gases are skewing the weather. "Already today 75 percent of the moderate hot extremes and about 18 percent of the moderate precipitation extremes occurring worldwide are attributable to warming," the climate scientists, at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, wrote. In Britain, for instance, that is 33.2 degrees Celsius (92 F) in south-east England or 27 degrees further north in Edinburgh, according to the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. The scientists, Erich Fischer and Reto Knutti, noted that a U.N. study last year found that it was at least 95 percent probable that most warming since the mid-20th century was man-made. Read More » Songbirds Emerge for Spring, But Is the Timing Off? (Essay)  | Naomi Eide is a master's student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's guide, many say the golden-crowned sparrow's whistles sound like a phrase, such as "I'm so tired" or "Oh, dear me." The air is bustling with the songs of flirting birds, yet sleeping houses remain blissfully unaware that nature's instinct has taken over with the change in day length. Climate change has disturbed the delicate choreography that synchronizes the bloom of trees and flowers with the emergence of new wildlife and native bees. "Birds are being activated to sing by virtue of the sunlight right now," said Douglas Gill, professor emeritus in the biology department at the University of Maryland.
| Read More » Study blames global warming for 75 percent of very hot days  | WASHINGTON (AP) — If you find yourself sweating out a day that is monstrously hot, chances are you can blame humanity. A new report links three out of four such days to man's effects on climate.
| Read More » Scientist Hawking tells upset fans Malik may be in parallel One Direction  | (Reuters) - What is the cosmological effect of singer Zayn Malik leaving the best-selling boy band One Direction and consequently disappointing millions of teenage girls around the world? The advice of British cosmologist Stephen Hawking to heartbroken fans is to follow theoretical physics, because Malik may well still be a member of the pop group in another universe. "My advice to any heartbroken young girl is to pay attention to the study of theoretical physics because, one day, there may well be proof of multiple universes.
| Read More » Decline in U.S. science spending threatens economy, security: MIT By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warning of an "innovation deficit," scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say declining government spending on basic research is holding back potentially life-saving advances in 15 fields, from robotics and fusion energy to Alzheimer's disease and agriculture. Science funding is "the lowest it has been since the Second World War as a fraction of the federal budget," said MIT physicist Marc Kastner, who led the committee that wrote "The Future Postponed" report, issued on Monday. Federal spending on research as a share of total government outlays has fallen from nearly 10 percent in 1968, during the space program, to 3 percent in 2015. Read More » New avian flu viruses send U.S. scientists scrambling  | By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Three highly pathogenic avian flu viruses that have infected poultry and wild birds in the U.S. Midwest appear unlikely to present a significant risk to humans. The H parts, which are highly pathogenic in poultry, originated in Asia, and the N parts come from North American, low pathogenic, avian flu viruses, said Dr. Rubin Donis, an associate director for policy and preparedness in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's influenza division.
| Read More » Human Embryo Editing Is Incredibly Risky, Experts Say With the news that Chinese scientists have attempted to modify the genes of human embryos, many scientists have called for a halt to such technology, saying the techniques are too risky to use in human embryos. In a study published Saturday (April 18) in the journal Protein & Cell, Chinese scientists reported that they had used a genetic engineering technique called CRISPR to cut out a faulty gene and replace it with a healthy one in human embryos. "This paper is a complete confirmation of the issues that were raised about the readiness of the CRISPR platform to be applied in therapeutic genome editing," said Edward Lanphier, president and CEO of Sangamo BioSciences, a company that works on genome editing in adult cells but not embryonic cells. Lanphier, along with other scientists, published a commentary in March in the journal Nature, calling for a moratorium on such research. Read More » Giant Easter Island 'Hats' Rolled Into Place, Study Says The distinctive headgear worn by some of the famous Easter Island statues may have been rolled up ramps to reach those high perches, a new study suggests. A simple analysis of the physics suggests that rolling the headwear — bulky cylindrical shapes that look like Russian fur hats — would have been a relatively easy matter, said study co-author Sean Hixon, an undergraduate student in archaeology and geology at the University of Oregon, who presented his findings here on April 16 at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archeology. Since Europeans arrived at the location in the 1700s, people have wondered how the residents of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, off the coast of Chile, raised their majestic statues. Others have argued that the native islanders chopped down the island's forests to roll the stone behemoths across the landscape, leading to environmental devastation and the collapse of the Easter Island civilization. Read More » Whooping Cough Outbreaks Traced to Change in Vaccine  | The recent outbreaks of whooping cough in the United States may be due, in part, to a change made two decades ago to vaccine ingredients, a new study finds. In 2012, the United States had about 48,000 cases of whooping cough (also called pertussis) — the most cases since 1955. They used an enormous data set from a variety of sources on whooping cough cases in the U.S. from 1950 to 2009. They found that a change in vaccine ingredients was the best explanation for the recent whooping cough outbreaks, according to the study, published today (April 23) in the journal PLOS ONE Computational Biology.
| Read More » Scientists convinced of tie between earthquakes and drilling  | LOS ANGELES (AP) — With the evidence coming in from one study after another, scientists are now more certain than ever that oil and gas drilling is causing hundreds upon hundreds of earthquakes across the U.S.
| Read More » First experiment 'editing' human embryos ignites ethical furore By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - Biologists in China reported carrying out the first experiment to alter the DNA of human embryos, igniting an outcry from scientists who warn against altering the human genome in a way that could last for generations. The study from China appeared last weekend in an obscure online journal called Protein & Cell. In an interview published on Wednesday on the news site of the journal Nature, lead author Junjiu Huang of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou said both Nature and Science rejected the paper, partly for ethical reasons. "There have been persistent rumours" of this kind of research taking place in China, said Edward Lanphier, chief executive of California-based Sangamo BioSciences Inc and part of a group of scientists who called last month for a global moratorium on such experiments. Read More » Zebrafish 'inner ear' development wins science video prize By Ben Gruber This is a video of a lateral line, an organ that allows fish to sense water movement, developing in a zebra fish. Using an imaging technique called Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy, which uses sheets of lights to illuminate sub-cellular activity, Dr. Mariana Muzzopappa and Jim Swoger from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona Spain, claimed top honors in this year's Nikon Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition. Second place went to Dr. Douglas Clark from San Francisco, California who used polarized light to create a time-lapse movie showing crystals forming on a single drop of a solution saturated with caffeine in water. Third place honors went to Dr. John Hart from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Colorado-Boulder for a detailed look at oil floating on the surface of water. Read More » Citizen Scientists Discover Five New Supernovas  | More than 40,000 citizen stargazers have helped to classify over 2 million celestial objects and identify five never-before-seen supernovas, in a massive example of citizen science at work. An amateur astronomy project of cosmic proportions, established by scientists at the Australian National University, asked volunteers to look through images taken by the SkyMapper telescope and search for new objects, with a particular focus on finding new supernovas. The project was set up using the Zooniverse platform (run by the University of Oxford), which hosts many other citizen science projects, and which was promoted on the BBC2 TV series "Stargazing Live," from March 18 to March 20. The participants were asked to look at star-filled patches of the night sky, taken by the SkyMapper telescope.
| 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 » 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 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 » 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 » NASA spacecraft to crash into Mercury  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - NASA's pioneering Messenger spacecraft is expected to end its four-year study of the planet Mercury on Thursday by crashing into the planet's surface, scientists said. Out of fuel to maneuver, Messenger is being pushed down by the sun's gravity closer and closer to the surface of Mercury. Flight controllers at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland predict that Messenger, traveling at more than 8,700 mph (14,000 kph) will hit the ground near Mercury's north pole at 3:26 p.m. EDT/1926 GMT. During its final weeks in orbit, Messenger has been relaying more details about the innermost planet of the solar system, which turns out to have patches of ice inside some of its craters, despite its sizzling location more than twice as close to the sun as Earth.
| Read More » Study: Global warming to push 1 in 13 species to extinction  | WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming will eventually push 1 out of every 13 species on Earth into extinction, a new study projects.
| Read More » NASA spacecraft makes crashing finale into Mercury  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - - NASA's pioneering Messenger spacecraft ended its four-year study of the planet Mercury on Thursday by crashing into the planet's surface, scientists said. Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland earlier estimated that Messenger, traveling at more than 8,700 mph (14,000 kph), would hit the ground near Mercury's north pole at 3:26 p.m. EDT (1926 GMT). It likely gouged a 52-foot-wide (16 meter) crater into Mercury's 's scarred face During its final weeks in orbit, Messenger relayed more details about the innermost planet of the solar system, which turns out to have patches of ice inside some of its craters, despite its sizzling location more than twice as close to the sun as Earth. "We've been concentrating on getting as much of the data down on the ground," lead researcher Sean Solomon, with Columbia University in New York, wrote in an email.
| Read More » Limiting global warming to 2 degrees "inadequate", scientists say  | By Laurie Goering LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Holding global warming to a 2-degree Celsius temperature rise – the cornerstone of an expected new global climate agreement in December – will fail to prevent many of climate change's worst impacts, a group of scientists and other experts warned Friday. With a 2-degree temperature hike, small islands in the Pacific may become uninhabitable, weather-related disasters will become more frequent, workers in many parts of the world will face sweltering conditions and large numbers of people will be displaced, particularly in coastal cities, the experts warned. The 2-degree goal is "inadequate, posing serious threats for fundamental human rights, labour and migration and displacement" the experts said in a series of reports commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of 20 countries chaired by the Philippines. Some group members, particularly Pacific island states, have previously asked for a lower temperature target of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
| Read More » Auditors: National Science Foundation suspends UConn grants The National Science Foundation has frozen more than $2 million in grants to the University of Connecticut after a foundation investigation found two professors used grant money to buy products from their ... Read More » Scientists monitor undersea volcanic eruption off Oregon coast  | By Courtney Sherwood PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - An undersea volcano about 300 miles (480 km) off Oregon's coast has been spewing lava for the past seven days, confirming forecasts made last fall and giving researchers unique insight into a hidden ocean hot spot, a scientist said on Friday. Researchers know of two previous eruptions by the volcano, dubbed "Axial Seamount" for its location along the axis of an underwater mountain ridge, Oregon State University geologist Bill Chadwick said on Friday. Last year, researchers connected monitoring gear to an undersea cable that, for the first time, allowed them to gather live data on the volcano, whose peak is about 4,900 feet (1,500 meters) below the ocean surface. "The cable allows us to have more sensors and monitoring instruments than ever before, and it's happening in real time," said Chadwick, who also is affiliated with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
| Read More » The Future Envisioned at Museum of Science Fiction (Op-Ed)  | David Brin is an American scientist and award-winning author of science fiction. Brin is also an advisory board member to the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, D.C. Greg Viggiano is the executive director for the museum. The Museum of Science Fiction's first home will be a modular preview museum, which will open in late 2015 in nearby Arlington, Va., and remain in place until the creation of the full-scale museum facility is completed about four years later.
| 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 » 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 » 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 » 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 » 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.
| 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 » 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 to catapult 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. "I think this bodes quite well for the future of the program," SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told reporters on a conference call after the flight.
| 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 » Scientists: Over 143M Americans live in quake-prone areas  | LOS ANGELES (AP) — More than 143 million people in the Lower 48 states now live on shaky ground, earthquake scientists say.
| Read More » Deals in dark helped bitcoin take off, says chief scientist  | By Jemima Kelly LONDON (Reuters) - Without dealings in the "grey areas" of the global economy, bitcoin might not have grown to be worth the $3 billion (1.99 billion pounds) it is today, according to Gavin Andresen, the closest thing the digital currency has to a CEO. Andresen, a self-confessed "all-around geek", is chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, a non-profit group he helped set up three years ago to support and promote the digital currency. Andresen acknowledged it has been used in the United States for online gambling, which was effectively outlawed there until December 2011, with banks barred from transmitting bets. "Without those uses maybe it would have taken longer (for bitcoin to get to where it is)," he told Reuters over coffee at a conference organised by the Bitcoin Foundation in London, where a push into financial technology is making the city a hub for the virtual currency.. In its early days, "the Internet was for porn.
| Read More » Deep-sea microbes called missing link for complex cellular life  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean between Greenland and Norway, scientists have found microorganisms they call a missing link connecting the simple cells that first populated Earth to the complex cellular life that emerged roughly 2 billion years ago. The researchers said on Wednesday a group of microorganisms called Lokiarchaeota, or Loki for short, were retrieved from the inhospitable, frigid seabed about 1.5 miles (2.35 km) under the ocean surface not too far from a hydrothermal vent system called Loki's Castle, named after a Norse mythological figure. The discovery provides insight into how the larger, complex cell types that are the building blocks for fungi, plants and animals including people, a group called eukaryotes, evolved from small, simple microbes, they said. These genes would have provided Lokiarchaeota "with a 'starter-kit' to support the development of cellular complexity," said evolutionary microbiologist Lionel Guy of Sweden's Uppsala University.
| Read More » Doomed Russian Spacecraft Is Falling From Space, But Where Will It Fall?  | On April 28, Russia's uncrewed Progress 59 supply ship streaked into orbit atop a Soyuz launcher, intended to dock with the International Space Station. Subsequently, a Russian mission control team could not command the cargo vessel packed with nearly 3 tons of supplies. Current forecasts predict that the Progress should fall to Earth in an uncontrolled, destructive nose-dive on Thursday (May 8) between 3:11 a.m. and 5:26 a.m. EDT (0711-0826 GMT). Some media reports from Russia are citing a Friday re-entry target.
| Read More » Asteroid-Mining Company to Deploy 1st Satellite This Summer  | Planetary Resources' Arkyd-3R probe currently sits aboard the International Space Station and is scheduled to be deployed sometime in July, representatives of the Washington-based asteroid-mining company have said. "During its 90-day Earth-orbiting mission, it will send back data on the health of its subsystems to our team at our headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and complete its mission with a fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere as a result of its natural atmospheric orbital decay," Planetary Resources representatives wrote shortly after the Arkyd-3R reached the orbiting lab aboard SpaceX's robotic Dragon cargo capsule last month. The people behind Planetary Resources, and another outfit called Deep Space Industries, aim to help humanity extend its presence out into the solar system by tapping asteroid resources such as water and precious metals — while making a nice profit along the way, of course. Asteroid mining could thus lead to the establishment of in-space propellant depots that allow voyaging spaceships to fill their tanks up on the go, and relatively cheaply, advocates say.
| Read More » Slave-Trade Fossils Help Uncover Shrouded History (Podcast)  | In the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, the largest forced migration in history, more than 12 million enslaved Africans were shipped to the New World to work on plantations in eastern South America, the Caribbean and portions of the eastern United States. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at Stanford University and the University of Copenhagen have extracted and sequenced tiny bits of DNA remaining in the skeletons' teeth.
| Read More » Deadly, Lesser-Known Head and Neck Cancers Can't be Ignored (Op-Ed) According to an estimate from the National Cancer Institute, in 2012 alone, more than 52,000 men and women were diagnosed with head and neck cancers in the United States. In fact, at least 75 percent of head and neck cancers are caused by tobacco and alcohol use, according to the National Cancer Institute. Human papillomavirus virus (HPV) is also a big risk factor for some kinds of head and neck cancers, specifically ones that involve the tonsils or base of the tongue. Read More » Black Locust: The Tree on Which the US Was Built  | This article is adapted from one that originally appeared as "Black Locust: an All American Tree" in The Interpreter. As the strongest timber in North America, black locust helped build Jamestown and hardened the navy that decided the War of 1812, yet today few Americans have heard of it. The catalpas that line the town's Palace Green, which was one of the first examples of a municipal street planting in British North America, are seldom planted today and are considered by most horticulturists as little more than weed trees. The paper mulberry, whose twisted trunks elicit so many comments from visitors, was one of the first Asian trees brought into cultivation as an ornamental tree in North America.
| Read More » People with Depression and Bipolar Disorder Feel Sadness Differently Depression and bipolar disorder can both cause people to go through periods of extreme sadness and despair, and even mental health experts may find it difficult to distinguish between the two disorders. The researchers found differences in the amount of activity in brain areas involved in regulating emotion in bipolar patients, compared with patients who had "unipolar" depression (a term used to distinguish the condition from bipolar disorder). "As psychiatrists, we have a big problem: We cannot distinguish unipolar depression from bipolar depression," said Dr. Eric Ruhe, a psychiatrist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. During manic episodes, a person with bipolar disorder may become agitated, euphoric and sometimes psychotic. Read More » Ebola Virus Lives on Hospital Surfaces for Days  | The Ebola virus can live on surfaces in hospitals for nearly two weeks, a new study suggests. Researchers tested how long the Ebola virus could survive on plastic, stainless steel and Tyvek, a material used in Ebola suits. The researchers also simulated different environmental conditions, including a climate-controlled hospital at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) and 40 percent humidity, and the typical environment of West Africa, at 80 F (27 C) and 80 percent humidity. The longest the virus was able to survive in the tropical conditions of the West African environment was three days, on Tyvek.
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