|  Oklahoma's Surge in Earthquakes Due to Oil Production  | Oklahoma is not known for its earthquakes, but in recent years episodes of ground shaking have surged, with the U.S. Geological Survey releasing a rare warning last May saying the risk of a damaging earthquake in Oklahoma had significantly increased. Now scientists say they know why seismic events have taken such a leap in the state: wastewater from oil and gas production that gets injected back into the ground. But even if companies stop injecting the water into the ground there, the researchers say the man-made earthquakes won't suddenly come to a halt due to a time delay they found between injection and seismic activity.
| Read More » Happy New Year, Mars! NASA Toasts Martian Calendar Milestone  | It's New Year's Day on the Red Planet today and NASA is celebrating in style with an epic three-day party in Mars itself … Mars, Pennsylvania, that is. NASA scientists and Mars experts have descended on the town of Mars to celebrate the Martian New Year today (June 18) with a press conference at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), which you can watch live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV. The press briefing, which NASA will convene at a flying saucer spaceship monument in Mars, Pennsylvania, kicks off a weekend of Mars-themed activities by NASA to inspire kids to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics – all fields that the space agency says it will need in its push to the Red Planet.
| Read More » SyFy's 'Killjoys' Launches Bounty Hunters Across the Final Frontier  | A trio of bounty hunters chase wanted criminals through space in the original science fiction series "Killyjoys," which debuts on the Syfy network tonight (June 19). In the fictional world of "Killjoys," people travel via spaceship through "the Quad," a central planet and its three moons populated by an array of human cultures (the pilot episode features some stunning images of the system). You can watch the first four minutes of the pilot episode here on Space.com.
| Read More » Mix-n-Match Arms: Jellyfish Rearrange Limbs After Injury  | Common moon jellies have an uncommon fix for injuries: When they lose limbs, they don't regrow them. This "symmetrization" is a never-before-seen method of self-repair, and one that probably helps jellies stay alive in the wild. Many invertebrates can regrow limbs, but scientists had never observed this sort of rearrangement before, said study researcher Michael Abrams, a graduate student in biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
| Read More » 8 Million Dog Mummies Found in 'God of Death' Mass Grave  | In ancient Egypt, so many people worshiped Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, that the catacombs next to his sacred temple once held nearly 8 million mummified puppies and grown dogs, a new study finds. The catacomb ceiling also contains the fossil of an ancient sea monster, a marine vertebrate that's more than 48 million years old, but it's unclear whether the Egyptians noticed the existence of the fossil when they built the tomb for the canine mummies, the researchers said. Ancient Egyptians built the temple and catacomb in honor of Anubis in Saqqara, a burial ground in the country's ancient capital of Memphis.
| Read More » Gladiator Fights Revealed in Ancient Graffiti  | Hundreds of graffiti messages engraved into stone in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, in modern-day Turkey, have been discovered and deciphered, revealing what life was like there over 1,500 years ago, researchers say. "Hundreds of graffiti, scratched or chiseled on stone, have been preserved in Aphrodisias — more than in most other cities of the Roman East(an area which includes Greece and part of the Middle East)," said Angelos Chaniotis, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton New Jersey, in a lecture he gave recently at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. "Graffiti are the products of instantaneous situations, often creatures of the night, scratched by people amused, excited, agitated, perhaps drunk.
| Read More » Giant 'Earth Stethoscope' Spies on Planet's Wonky Behavior  | The international system, called the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), has been spying on Earth for the past 18 years, but researchers are still finding fresh ways to interpret its data. Here's a look at four things the CTBTO can see, hear and sniff on planet Earth. The CTBTO began as an anti-nuclear network that would help countries monitor and ban rogue explosions in the atmosphere, underwater or underground.
| Read More » Real-Life 'Jurassic World' Dinos May Be 10 Years Off, Scientist Says  | None of these sound quite as terrifying as the reptilian star in "Jurassic World," which set box-office records when it opened this past weekend. "Chickens and all birds are carrying much bigger chunks of dinosaur DNA than we are ever likely to find in the fossil record," said James Horner, the inspiration for the original Jurassic Park's Alan Grant. More recently, in his lab at Montana State University, Horner has been experimenting with bird DNA alteration for more than a decade.
| Read More » Smart cycle jacket could save lives on Mexico City's roads Mexico City's bumper-to-bumper traffic is a problem for the sprawling capital city's cyclists. Two inventors have developed a cyclist's vest complete with indicators, brake lights and an alert systems that can call for help. Damian Real, a physics students, came up with the design for the smart bike jacket with his partner Riberto Rivas, a maths major, at Mexico's National Autonomous University. Read More » 1 Ton of Illegal Ivory Will Be Publicly Destroyed in NYC Friday  | In a public display against elephant poaching, U.S. officials will pulverize a huge store of illegal ivory tomorrow (June 19) in Times Square, in the heart of New York City. "The scale of the crisis has gotten to the point where 35,000 [African] elephants are killed every year — 96 a day," said John Calvelli, executive vice president of public affairs for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Calvelli, and other representatives from government and nongovernmental agencies, will speak at the event, which is scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. EDT in Duffy Square-Broadway Plaza in Times Square.
| Read More » Did Sharks Really Kill That Cute Baby Dolphin?  | A Philadelphia woman captured a shocking photo of a half-eaten baby dolphin while visiting the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey, last Saturday (June 13). The photo of the newborn animal's decimated carcass — allegedly rendered that way by sharks — was posted to Facebook and has since gone viral. Many people who saw the photo concluded that the Jersey shore is no longer a safe place for dolphins.
| Read More » DNA sleuthing pinpoints two African elephant poaching hot spots  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - DNA testing on tons of ivory seized from traffickers has identified two elephant poaching "hot spots" in Africa in a development scientists hope will spur a crackdown on the illegal trade decimating the population of Earth's largest land animal. Scientists said on Thursday genetic tests on 28 large ivory seizures, each more than half a ton, pinpointed the geographic origin of the tusks from the two types of African elephant, the savanna elephant and the somewhat smaller forest elephant. "We were very, very surprised to find that over the last decade almost all of these seizures came from just two places in Africa," said University of Washington biologist Samuel Wasser, whose study appears in the journal Science.
| Read More » 'The Next Trans Fat': Experts Predict Coming Food Battles After years of research showing the harms of trans fat, the unhealthy substance has finally been banned as a food additive. On Tuesday (June 16), the Food and Drug Administration ruled that trans fat is not "generally recognized as safe" to be added to food, meaning that the ingredient will now be considered an illegal food additive. Companies have three years to either remove trans fat from their food, or petition the FDA for permission to use the additive in specific cases. Read More » Here's More Proof Earth Is in Its 6th Mass Extinction  | Diverse animals across the globe are slipping away and dying as Earth enters its sixth mass extinction, a new study finds. Over the last century, species of vertebrates are dying out up to 114 times faster than they would have without human activity, said the researchers, who used the most conservative estimates to assess extinction rates. Much of the extinction is due to human activities that lead to pollution, habitat loss, the introduction of invasive species and increased carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification, the researchers said.
| Read More » | |
