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See Mystery Spots on Dwarf Planet Ceres Shine in New Video
 | The dwarf planet Ceres' puzzling bright spots are starting to come into focus. NASA's Dawn spacecraft has obtained the best views yet of the mysterious features, capturing them from a distance of just 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers) in a series of images that mission team members combined to make a new video of the bright spots on Ceres.
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Merck KGaA, Threshold win fast track for pancreatic cancer drug
Germany's Merck KGaA said that experimental cancer drug evofosfamide, which it is jointly developing with Threshold Pharmaceuticals, won fast track status for the treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Merck had licensed in evofosfamide, previously known as TH-302, from Threshold in 2012. The drug, currently being tested in the third and last phase required for regulatory approval, already has the FDA's fast track designation for treatment of soft tissue sarcoma.
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Healthy Woman's Stroke Linked to Drug in Sports Supplement
A woman in Sweden had a stroke while exercising, and doctors suspect it was caused by an ingredient in a workout supplement that she was taking — a compound similar to amphetamine. Consumers should avoid preworkout supplements in general, because "we have found too many times that they are spiked with synthetic drugs like BMPEA," Cohen said.
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Aerojet Rocketdyne, others look at keeping Atlas 5 rocket in use
 | By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Aerojet Rocketdyne and two other firms on Monday said they are exploring options to obtain data rights to the Atlas 5 launch vehicle and to swap its Russian-built engine with the AR1 engine that Aerojet Rocketdyne is developing. The Pentagon is scrambling to comply with a U.S. law that bans use after 2019 of the Russian RD-180 rocket engine that fuels the Atlas 5 rocket for military and intelligence satellite launches. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co that now launches most big U.S. military and spy satellites, is working to develop a less expensive U.S.-fueled rocket called Vulcan, to use for military, civilian and commercial launches from 2022 or 2023. The joint venture hopes to use a new engine being developed by Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, but sees Aerojet Rocketdyne's AR1 engine as a backup.
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Cyborg beetles to the rescue
By BEN GRUBER BERKELEY, California - In the wake of the devastating Nepal earthquake, researchers are hard at work developing the next generation of search and rescue tools in the hopes of saving more lives in the aftermath of deadly natural disasters. At a laboratory in Singapore, a researcher uses a joystick to control the movements of a giant beetle in flight. Depending on the signal the beetle turns accordingly. From a scientific point of view the experiments, led by Hirotaka Sato, have proven a huge success. From a practical point of view it means that we are one step closer to remote controlled cyborg beetles that could search for survivors in disaster zones where it's too dangerous for humans to operate. Michele Maharbiz, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California Berkeley, has been at the forefront of cyborg beetle research.
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Mediterranean Diet May Be Good for Your Brain
Eating a Mediterranean diet that is rich in nuts and olive oil may help delay cognitive decline in older adults, according to a new study. In the study, 155 of the people who were on a Mediterranean diet were asked to include one liter of extra virgin olive oil in their diet per week, and 147 people were asked to supplement their diet with 30 grams per day of a mix of walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds. After four years, researchers compared the cognitive function of the people in each group. It turned out that the groups of people who followed the Mediterranean diet experienced an improvement in cognitive function over four years, whereas it declined in the people eating the low-fat diet.
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No Warp Drive Here: NASA Downplays 'Impossible' EM Drive Space Engine
 | Despite the fevered reports rocketing around the Internet recently, NASA is not on the verge of developing a fuel-free, faster-than-light propulsion system, space agency officials stress. A team based at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston reportedly tested a prototype engine system in a vacuum recently and determined that it produced a small amount of thrust. But NASA is downplaying the research and its potential to deliver a huge propulsion breakthrough in the near future. "While conceptual research into novel propulsion methods by a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston has created headlines, this is a small effort that has not yet shown any tangible results," NASA officials told Space.com in a statement.
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Advanced Alien Civilizations Still Science Fiction — For Now
 | A wide-ranging search of faraway galaxies has turned up no obvious signs of advanced alien civilizations. A team of scientists dug through observations made by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft, hunting for telltale heat signatures coming from 100,000 galaxies— a strategy suggested by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson back in the 1960s. "Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, spaceflight, communication or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the midinfrared wavelengths," study co-author Jason Wright, of Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement. The team found no smoking guns during this pilot study, known as the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies Survey (G-HAT).
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Snapshot of a Storm: Scientists Capture 1st 'Image' of Thunder
 | Lightning strikes Earth more than 4 million times every day, but the physics behind these electric bolts and their accompanying thunder is still poorly understood. Scientists at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, generated artificial lightning by launching a tiny rocket trailing a grounded copper wire into the clouds. "The initial constructed images looked like a colorful piece of modern art that you could hang over your fireplace," said Maher A. Dayeh, a research scientist in the Space Science Department at SwRI.
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Amazing Images of Proteins May Help Scientists Design Drugs
 | This unprecedented view of the molecular world may help researchers design drugs and understand how medications interact with the environment in the human body, the researchers said in their report on the technique, published online today (May 7) in the journal Science Express. "This represents a new era in imaging of proteins in humans with immense implications for drug design," Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said in a statement.
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Giant Whales' Mouths Have Unique Nerves: They Stretch
 | Researchers discovered the surprisingly elastic nerves after collecting samples from a commercial whaling station in Iceland. "This discovery was totally unexpected and unlike other nerve structures we've seen in vertebrates, which are of a more fixed length," said Wayne Vogl, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Rorqual whales represent the largest group among baleen whales, tipping the scales at 40 to 80 tons.
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Autism Truths and Myths: The State of the Science (Op-Ed)
 | Francesca Happé is president of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) and director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. Autism is everywhere. Characters with autism, especially high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome, abound in TV shows, films and novels. You can barely look at a newspaper, magazine or newsfeed without finding something about autism: a new "miracle cure," a claim that "the gene for autism" has been discovered, or talk of scientists creating autistic mice.
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Some Native Hawaiians see telescope as science learning boon
 | HONOLULU (AP) — Before going up to Mauna Kea's summit on Hawaii's Big Island, Heather Kaluna makes an offering to Poliahu, the snow goddess of the mountain. She holds it sacred, as do other Native Hawaiians.
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Failed Russian spacecraft falls from orbit, burns up
 | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - An unmanned Russian spaceship loitering in orbit after a failed cargo run to the International Space Station plunged into Earth's atmosphere on Thursday, the Russian space agency reported. The capsule, loaded with more than three tons of food, fuel and supplies for the station crew, fell from orbit at 10:04 p.m. EDT (0204 GMT), the Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a statement. At the time, the Progress-59 spacecraft was flying over the central Pacific Ocean, the statement said. Most of the spacecraft was expected to burn up during its high-speed descent through the atmosphere, but small pieces of the structure could have survived and splashed down in the ocean.
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Huffing and puffing won't blow these straw homes down
A batch of straw houses have gone on sale in the UK - and their manufacturers insist that unlike the home featured in classic nursery rhyme The Three Little Pigs, huffing and puffing will not lead the buildings to blow down. In fact, the architect of the scheme, Professor Pete Walker of the University of Bath, says that using straw in home construction isn't just viable, but safer than other traditional building materials, and will lead to vastly reduced energy bills for inhabitants. According to Walker, "you can see that the building is clad in red brick but underneath that are the straw bales which form this super-insulated wall construction, whereas the houses around here are largely brick cavity construction. So the innovation really has laid in developing the suitability of straw as a construction material and also convincing people that straw is a viable construction material.
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