|  'Cave of the Skulls' Robbers Get Prison Term in Israel  | A band of antiquities thieves were sentenced to 18 months in prison after being caught red-handed looting an ancient cave in Israel. The six thieves were caught plundering the 2,000-year-old archaeological site known as the "Cave of the Skulls." In the process, they destroyed some of the cliffside where the cave was located. The looters pled guilty to damaging an ancient site, excavating an ancient site without a permit, conspiring to commit a crime, and unlawfully residing in Israel, according to a statement from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
| Read More » Dinosaur fossils preserve apparent red blood cells, collagen  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - They looked, as one researcher said, like "rubbish," eight seemingly inconsequential Cretaceous Period dinosaur fossils that sat in a London museum's collection for more than a century after being found in Canada's Alberta province. Tests showed that these had striking similarities to blood cells from an emu, a large Australian flightless bird.
| Read More » Oh, You Deer: Newborn Mini Fawn Is Seriously Cute  | A baby deer you can hold in one hand, of course. Belonging to one of the world's smallest deer species, this southern pudu deer (Pudu puda) will grow to be just 12 to 18 inches (30 to 46 cm) tall at the shoulder, according to zoo officials. There are two distinct species of pudu — the southern pudu that inhabit the lower Andes of Chile and southwest Argentina, and the northern pudu (Pudu mephistophiles) that inhabit the lower Andes of Ecuador, northern Peru and Colombia.
| Read More » Huge Supersonic Parachute Ripped to Shreds in NASA 'Flying Saucer' Test  | A gigantic supersonic parachute that NASA is developing to help land heavy payloads on Mars was torn apart during yesterday's "flying saucer" test flight over Hawaii, agency officials said. The 100-foot-wide (30 meters) parachute — the biggest such chute ever deployed — unfurled well and apparently inflated fully, or nearly fully, Monday (June 8) before being ruptured by the fast-rushing air during the second flight test of NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project. "At some point at or near full inflation, the parachute was damaged, and the damage propagated further until the parachute could no longer survive the harsh supersonic environment," LDSD principal investigator Ian Clark, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said during a news conference today (June 9).
| Read More » China's big biotech bet starting to pay off  | By Alexandra Harney and Ben Hirschler SHANGHAI/LONDON (Reuters) - Years of pouring money into its laboratories, wooing scientists home from overseas and urging researchers to publish and patent is starting to give China a competitive edge in biotechnology, a strategic field it sees as ripe for "indigenous innovation." The vast resources China can throw at research and development - overall funding more than quadrupled to $191 billion in 2005-13 and the Thousand Talents Program has repatriated scientists - allow China to jump quickly on promising new technologies, often first developed elsewhere. CRISPR, which allows scientists to edit virtually any gene they target, is akin to a biological word-processing program that finds and replaces genetic defects.
| Read More » Brain-computer interface reverses paralysis in stroke victims By Ben Gruber St. Louis, Missouri - After three strokes that left the right side of his body paralyzed, Rick Arnold told his wife Kim that he had just one wish. In the very beginning, it was to hold her hand," said Arnold, a paramedic firefighter from Missouri who suffered the first of three paralyzing strokes in 2009. These days Arnold can hold his wife's hand again thanks in part to a new device that could potentially change the rules on how well stroke victims recover. Arnold is using brain-machine interface technology developed by Eric Leuthardt, a neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis. Read More » Chimps Get Drunk on Palm Wine  | Humans' closest living relatives may have a drinking habit: Scientists spied intoxicated wild chimps soaking up palm wine with leaves and squeezing it into their mouths. Alcohol consumption is seen across nearly all modern human cultures that have access to fermentable materials. This prevalence led scientists to suggest what is known as the "Drunken Monkey Hypothesis" — that alcohol consumption might have provided a benefit of some kind to the ancestors of humanity, and perhaps also to the ancestors of chimpanzees, humanity's closest living relatives.
| Read More » Frozen Ovarian Tissue Works a Decade Later: Woman Gives Birth A 27-year-old woman in Belgium is now a mom after giving birth to a baby more than a decade after her ovarian tissue was removed and frozen, according to a new study. The woman had her ovarian tissue frozen in her early teens, before she underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat her sickle cell anemia. Such transplants involve drugs that can destroy the ovaries. Read More » Spinal Injuries Increasing Among Older Adults Although the rate of traumatic spinal cord injuries has remained relatively stable in the United States for nearly two decades, there has been a significant increase in these injuries among people ages 65 and older, according to a new study. The study included more than 63,000 patients ages 16 and older who suffered acute traumatic spinal cord injuries between 1993 and 2012. Read More » Can a Pill Increase a Woman's Libido? 5 Things That Affect Female Sex Drive Last week, an expert panel voted to recommend that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a drug called flibanserin, which is touted as boosting women's desire for sex. If the FDA decides the drug is safe and effective, it could soon find its way into bedrooms across the United States. However, sexual desire is complicated, and some experts aren't sure that a pill is really the cure for an ailing female mojo. Read More » Marijuana Exposure Among Kids Under 6 Rises Sharply The rich aromas of freshly baked chocolate brownies may lead children to inadvertently consume marijuana, researchers say. In a new study, the researchers found that the rate of marijuana exposure in young children increased significantly from 2003 to 2013. As more states look to legalize marijuana, the risk for exposure to the drug can rise among children, the researchers said. Read More » NASA Aiming for Multiple Missions to Jupiter Moon Europa  | NASA's highly anticipated mission to Europa in the next decade may be just the beginning of an ambitious campaign to study the ocean-harboring Jupiter moon. In the early to mid-2020s, NASA plans to launch a mission that will conduct dozens of flybys of Europa, which many astrobiologists regard as the solar system's best bet to host life beyond Earth. Space agency officials hope this effort paves the way for future missions to Europa — including one that lands on the icy moon to search for signs of life.
| Read More » Showering in Space: Astronaut Home Video Shows Off 'Hygiene Corner'  | Staying clean in space is a challenge, something that Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti knows well after spending several months on the International Space Station (ISS). In two videos, Cristoforetti showed off the shower aboard the station, a spot that she called the "hygiene corner," as well as one of the two toilets. "This is the place where I wash, brush my teeth or, after workouts, take a shower ISS-style," Cristoforetti said in a video produced by the European Space Agency.
| Read More » Woman's Tattoos Mistaken for Cancer on Imaging Test When a California woman with cervical cancer underwent a body image scan, doctors noticed bright areas in her lymph nodes, suggesting her cancer had spread. The 32-year-old woman with four children had recently been diagnosed with cervical cancer. In November 2012, her doctors requested the imaging scan to check to see if the cancer had spread (metastasized) to other parts of her body. Read More » Biggest Ring Around Saturn Just Got Supersized  | A giant ring around Saturn is even larger than thought, spanning an area of space nearly 7,000 times larger than Saturn itself, researchers say. "We knew it was the biggest ring, but know we find it's even bigger than we thought, new and improved," the study's lead author, Douglas Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, told Space.com. The immense ring was discovered around Saturn in 2009.
| Read More » 'Celestial Butterfly' Nebula Spreads Its Wings in Photos, Video  | The celestial view, captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, is actually the result of dust spit out of a dying star that is then shaped by a stellar companion to form what looks like a bipolar planetary nebula with symmetrical wings. ESO scientists also created a video view of the butterfly-like nebula to showcase the new images. In this case, it looks like the transition is just getting started, ESO officials explained.
| Read More » Will Dreadnoughtus Dinosaur Lose Its Heavyweight Title?  | Dreadnoughtus — the immense, long-necked dinosaur recently uncovered in Patagonia — may not be as heavy as scientists once thought, a new study suggests. Instead of weighing a whopping 60 tons, Dreadnoughtus schrani likely weighed between 30 and 40 tons, the researchers who published the new study said, although not everyone agrees on this estimate. However, Kenneth Lacovara, the paleontologist who discovered the dinosaur, isn't convinced.
| Read More » Your Birth Month May Predict Your Risk for Certain Diseases In the study, researchers found that people's birth months were linked with the risk of getting one or more of 55 different diseases. Overall, people in the study who were born in May were least likely to get a birth-month-related disease, whereas people born in October were most likely to get one. "This data could help scientists uncover new disease risk factors," Nicholas Tatonetti, the senior author of the study and an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University, said in a statement. Read More » | |
