|  Teens Are Less Familiar with Marijuana, E-Cigarette Health Risks Researchers found that although teens are familiar with the negative effects of smoking cigarettes, they know little about the health risks of using marijuana and e-cigarettes, and even describe some benefits they think are related to these products. "The main implication of these findings is that teens are receiving the health messages about smoking cigarettes, but they are not hearing much information about the risks of these other products, so they may perceive them as being OK," said Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, co-author of the study and a professor of pediatrics and adolescent medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. During these discussions, the teens were asked to describe the risks and benefits of using conventional cigarettes, marijuana and e-cigarettes, as well as how, where and from whom they learned information about these products. Read More » Many Medical Marijuana Edibles May Have Inaccurate Labels The labels of many edible medical marijuana products may not accurately reflect the actual doses of the compounds within the marijuana, according to a new study. Researchers found that only 13 of the 75 edible marijuana products they tested in the study had labels that accurately listed the product's levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, one the compounds that is thought to drive its health effects. "The majority of the products we tested were inaccurately labeled," said study author Ryan Vandrey, of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Read More » Spot Elusive Planet Mercury in the Predawn Sky This Week  | Mercury is a difficult object to spot, because it's always clinging closely to the sun's apron strings. Because of the tilt of the ecliptic — the path the sun and planets follow across the sky — some apparitions of Mercury are more favorable than others. A secondary factor affecting Mercury's visibility is the tilt and eccentricity of its orbit.
| Read More » Pluto Probe Spies Weird 'Dark Pole' on Big Moon Charon (Photos)  | NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has spotted a strange dark patch at the pole of Pluto's big moon Charon, further whetting researchers' appetites ahead of the probe's epic flyby of the dwarf planet system next month. New Horizons has also detected a rich diversity of terrain types in Pluto's "close approach hemisphere" — the side of the planet New Horizons will zoom past at a distance of just 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) on July 14. The newly resolved features, which New Horizons captured in images taken from May 29 through June 19, are visible in a Pluto-Charon video NASA released today.
| Read More » Jersey Shore Situation: Man-of-War 'Jellyfish' Pays a Visit  | The Jersey Shore is the place to be this summer (if you're a dead sea creature). Last week, a baby dolphin that had been torn apart by sharks washed up in Wildwood, New Jersey. The potentially deadly creature, which can deliver a paralysis-inducing sting, washed ashore at Harvey Cedars, on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, on Sunday (June 21).
| Read More » Watch Ring-Shaped Molecule Unravel in Record-Fast Movie  | For the first time, scientists have observed a chemical reaction as it was happening at the molecular level, at speeds that previously were too fast to see. "We kind of know what CHD looks like," Michael Minitti, lead author of the new study and a staff scientist at SLAC told Live Science. The latter chemical is made of the same chemical elements but is arranged to form a different shape.
| Read More » Shark-Mounted Cameras Reveal Predators' Deep-Sea Secrets  | Previously, scientists assumed that sharks were negatively buoyant (meaning they have a natural tendency to sink) or neutrally buoyant (meaning their buoyancy is canceled out by their weight in the water). Now, by combing through photos and data captured by the swimming sharks, researchers have found that two species of these deep-sea creatures — sixgill and prickly sharks — have a small amount of positive buoyancy that pushes them toward the surface. Scientists at the University of Hawaii and the University of Tokyo attached a flashlight-size camera to deep-sea sharks to study their swimming habits.
| Read More » Rough-and-Tumble Roach Bots Barrel Over Obstacles  | Robots inspired by cockroaches can use the shape of their bodies — particularly, their distinctive round shells — to maneuver through dense clutter, which could make them useful in search-and-rescue missions, military reconnaissance and even on farms, according to a new study. Although many research teams have designed robots that can avoid obstacles, these bots mostly do so by evading stumbling blocks. This avoidance strategy typically uses sensors to map out the environment and powerful computers to plan a safe path around the obstacles.
| Read More » Roughhousing and Climbing Trees: Some Risks May Be Good for Kids Kids who engage in thrilling, risky activities, such as roaming far from home, may be healthier, both psychologically and physically, according to a new analysis of existing research. The risky activities could include iconic childhood pursuits like climbing a tree, sledding down an icy hill, play-fighting and even venturing through a wooded area and getting a little lost. "Engaging in risky play increased physical activity, it decreased sedentary behavior, and it promoted social health and behavior," said study co-author Mariana Brussoni, a developmental psychologist and injury prevention researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Read More » Fitbit May Help Boost Activity in Older Women In the study, women who wore a Fitbit saw a boost in their physical activity over a four-month period. About half of these women were given a Fitbit One, a fitness tracker that clips to a person's waistband and tracks a number of metrics: how many steps they take, the total distance they move, the number of floors they climb, the calories they burn, and the total number of minutes during the day that they are active. Both groups were asked to try to do 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week. Read More » Rosetta to Spiral onto Comet's Surface After Extended Mission  | Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, which is currently orbiting a comet as it hurtles around the sun, has been given nine additional months of operation time and will likely end its life by spiraling down onto the comet's surface, officials said. The European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement yesterday (June 23) that it would extend the mission, which was originally funded until the end of December 2015, through September 2016. By December of 2015, Rosetta will no longer receive enough sunlight to continue operations, and its propellant will also be depleted.
| Read More » It's no hallucination, that creature is just really weird Hallucigenia is one of the species emblematic of the Cambrian Period, a pivotal juncture in the history of life on Earth when most major groups of animals first appeared and many unusual body designs came and went. "It is nice to finally know rather fundamental things such as how many legs it has, and to know its head from its tail," University of Cambridge paleontologist Martin Smith said. Hallucigenia, whose fossils have been unearthed in the Burgess Shale site in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, belongs to a primitive group of velvet worms, animals that still exist today. Read More » Shell shock: Triassic reptile was 'grandfather' of all turtles  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It looked like an odd lizard with a bulky body and only the skeletal precursor of a shell, but scientists say 240 million-year-old fossils unearthed in a quarry in southern Germany represent the grandfather of all turtles. The scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of the oldest-known turtle, an 8-inch (20-cm) Triassic Period reptile combining traits of its lizard-like ancestors with a set of emerging turtle-like features. It is far older than all so far known turtles.
| Read More » Bizarre Cometlike Alien Planet Is First of Its Kind  | The strange, cometlike planet, known as GJ 436b, is orbiting a red dwarf star and is about 22 times as massive as Earth. Astronomers detected the giant gas cloud around the planet using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. With an orbit of only about 3 million miles (4.8 million kilometers), "GJ 436b is 33 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, and 13 times closer than Mercury," Ehrenreich told Space.com.
| Read More » Ancient Carbon Haze Offers Clues to Galaxy Evolution  | Astronomers have detected carbon smog permeating the interstellar atmospheres of early galaxies, helping confirm that these ancient galaxies were mostly dust free. The discovery sheds light on how some of the first galaxies to form in the universe grew and evolved, researchers said. Gas and dust are the main components of the interstellar medium, the matter in galaxies that constitutes the building blocks of stars and planets.
| Read More » Zombie Burials? Ancient Greeks Restrained the Undead  | Archaeologists have known about these two peculiar burials since the 1980s, when they uncovered the graves along with nearly 3,000 others at an ancient Greek necropolis in Sicily. The ancient Greeks believed that, "to prevent them from departing their graves, revenants must be sufficiently 'killed,' which [was] usually achieved by incineration or dismemberment," Carrie Sulosky Weaver wrote in the article, published June 11 in the online magazine Popular Archaeology. Sulosky Weaver, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, studied the necropolis for part of her forthcoming book, "The Bioarchaeology of Classical Kamarina: Life and Death in Greek Sicily" (Wordsworth Books and Co., 2015).
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