|  Minor changes turned Black Death germ from mild to murderous  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The bacterium Yersinia pestis has inflicted almost unimaginable misery upon humankind over the centuries, killing an estimated 200 million or more people and triggering horrific plagues in the 6th and 14th centuries. Yersinia pestis caused two of the deadliest pandemics in human history: the 6th century Justinian Plague, named for the Byzantine emperor who was sickened but survived, and the 14th century Black Death. The addition of the gene long ago transformed Yersinia pestis from a pathogen that caused a mild gastrointestinal infection to one that caused the fatal respiratory disease called pneumonic plague.
| Read More » Pluto and Charon Starting to Come into Focus (Photo)  | Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, posed for a solemn portrait taken by NASA's New Horizon's probe, which is only two weeks away from its close encounter with the dwarf planet. "Looking at pictures on the website, you can see that Pluto and Charon are becoming more distinct in their surface features," Alice Bowman, the missions operations manager for New Horizons, said today (June 30) in a mission update.
| Read More » Death and Medicine: Why Lethal Injection Is Getting Harder  | A controversial drug used in lethal injections will not be banned for use in the death penalty in the United States. A Supreme Court decision yesterday (June 29) found that the sedative had not been proven more "cruel and unusual" than the alternatives. The drug, midazolam, is just the latest to fall under scrutiny as more and more of the drugs used in the death penalty become unavailable, pulled from sale to prisons by manufacturers who don't want their products associated with execution.
| Read More » US Military's Hypersonic Jet Could Fly 5 Times the Speed of Sound  | The U.S. military is reportedly developing a hypersonic jet plane that could soar at up to five times the speed of sound — faster than a bullet, which generally travels at Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. The new hypersonic vehicle, which could take flight by 2023, builds upon research from a 2013 test flight of an experimental hypersonic vehicle, the X-51A Waverider, according to Military.com. At the time, U.S. Air Force officials said the flight was the longest-ever for a hypersonic vehicle of its kind.
| Read More » Survey: US political and generation gaps on science issues  | WASHINGTON (AP) — Age divides Americans on science issues just as much as political ideology, a new analysis of recent polling shows.
| Read More » There's a Sign Women Are Ovulating, But Men Can't Detect It Women's cheeks get redder when they are the most fertile, but this color change is so subtle that it is undetectable by the human eye, a new study finds. After analyzing the photos, the researchers concluded that the women's faces got redder around the time they ovulated. "This is the first study to conclusively show that women's faces do change in redness over the course of the menstrual cycle," said Robert Burriss, a co-author of the study and a research fellow in psychology at Northumbria University in England. Read More » Epic Pluto Flyby Occurs This Month  | A NASA spacecraft is less than two weeks away from a historic flyby of Pluto that will cap a nine-year trek across the solar system. NASA's New Horizons probe will cruise within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto's surface on July 14, capturing the first-ever good looks of the frigid, faraway and mysterious world. "One of my fondest hopes for the flyby, apart from the great science we'll do, is that we'll excite a lot of people about the power of exploration, the sheer audacity of our species and the great things we can achieve," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, wrote in a blog post on June 25.
| Read More » Tiny Glider Could Cruise Through Martian Skies  | NASA researchers are developing a glider, called Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars (Prandtl-m), for possible inclusion on a Mars rover mission in the 2022-2024 time frame. "The aircraft would be part of the ballast that would be ejected from the aeroshell that takes the Mars rover to the planet," Prandtl-m program manager Al Bowers, the chief scientist at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, said in a statement. "It would be able to deploy and fly in the Martian atmosphere and glide down and land," Bowers added.
| Read More » How Will Sunday's Rocket Explosion Affect SpaceX?  | Sunday's explosion of the commercial SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has put a dent in the booster's impressive track record. SpaceX must fix whatever caused the problem and return to flight in order to fulfill billions of dollars of launch orders. The company's Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated 139 seconds after liftoff Sunday (June 28), ending the seventh operational flight under SpaceX's Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA.
| Read More » Sinkholes Offer Glimpse into Comet's Heart  | Strange pits and divots observed on the surface of Ccomet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko may be sinkholes, not unlike those that appear on Earth, a new analysis suggests.
| Read More » Scientists find new evidence on GSK vaccine link to narcolepsy By Kate Kelland LONDON, (Reuters) - Scientists investigating why a GlaxoSmithKline flu vaccine triggered narcolepsy in some people say they have the first solid evidence the rare sleep disorder may be a so-called "hit-and-run" autoimmune disease. The researchers were trying to find out why, of two different flu vaccines widely deployed during the 2009/2010 swine flu pandemic, only one -- GSK's Pandemrix -- was linked with a spike in cases of narcolepsy. In a study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, they said the answer could lie in a protein in the H1N1 flu strain found in high amounts in the GSK shot but at much lower levels in the other vaccine, Novartis' Focetria. Read More » Helium Leaking from Earth in Southern California  | A natural helium leak in Southern California reveals that the Newport-Inglewood fault is deeper than once thought — with a direct line from the Earth's surface to the planet's hot, dense mantle. Helium-3 comes only from the Earth's mantle, the semisolid rock layer beneath the crust. "The fault, which I don't think people had anticipated, was deeply connected," said Jim Boles, a professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
| Read More » Rosetta spacecraft finds massive sinkholes on comet's surface  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The comet being studied by Europe's Rosetta spacecraft has massive sinkholes in its surface that are nearly wide enough to swallow Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, research published on Wednesday shows. Scientists suspect the pits formed when material on the comet's surface collapsed, similar to sinkholes on Earth, a study published in the journal Nature said. The cavities on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta has been orbiting since August, are enormous, stretching some 656 feet (200 meters) in diameter and 590 feet (180 meters) in depth.
| Read More » Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking & the 'Terminator' Talk Science What scientific questions does Mark Zuckerberg want answered? Stephen Hawking wants to know. In a town hall-style Q&A session held Tuesday (June 30) on Zuckerberg's Facebook profile, the acclaimed British physicist asked the site's co-founder and CEO to share some of the "big questions in science" that he'd like to see answered. Read More » I'll bite: ancient saber-toothed cat's teeth grew prodigiously  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ferocious saber-toothed cat Smilodon was a star in Hollywood long before it became Tinseltown, with extensive remains of this Ice Age predator that prowled North and South America preserved in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. "If you think about it, Smilodon fatalis likely left their paw prints on what is today Hollywood Boulevard long before Marilyn Monroe left her hand prints at the Chinese Theater," said paleontologist Z. Jack Tseng of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Scientists on Wednesday offered unique insight into the big cat's most famous feature: its dagger-like upper canine teeth.
| Read More » Recycled Dormitory Water: The Next Big Thing On Campus? (Video) The idea was dreamed up by Jim Englehardt, professor of environmental engineering at the University of Miami, and brought to life with support from NSF. Englehardt wanted to create a closed-loop water re-use system to treat wastewater and recycle it back to be used — all in one place. Using the Miami on-campus apartment as his guinea pig, Englehardt gave the net-zero water system of his dreams the old college try. Read More » Does Music Give You Math Skills? It's a Tricky Equation Naomi Eide is a master's student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Denny Gulick began playing piano at age 4. When Gulick was 5, his father gave him math multiplication tables that extended up to 16, and taught him pi to 15 decimal places, something Gulick has never forgotten. Read More » What? Hearing Aids Are Out of Range for Most Americans (Op-Ed)  | While Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirming the Affordable Care Act is good news for millions of Americans who receive subsidies from the program's health care exchanges, the vast majority of Americans with hearing loss will still be left with difficult choices. Hearing aids , which amplify sounds, are widely considered the gold standard and first line treatment for hearing loss — yet fewer than one in three adults age 70 and older who could benefit from hearing aids has ever used one. Part of the reason for the treatment gap is that Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people age 65 and older, does not cover any of the costs associated with hearing aids, routine hearing exams or fittings for hearing aids.
| Read More » Want to Find Life on Mars? Start in Antarctica (Podcast)  | Charlie Heck, multimedia news editor at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. One of the coldest, driest deserts on the planet, Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys may look like a frozen wasteland, but compelling new evidence shows that beneath the surface lies a salty aquifer that may support life. The environment is a possible analog for conditions beneath the surface of Mars, and other desolate locales in the solar system.
| Read More » Russian Cargo Spacecraft Will Launch to Space Station Early Friday  | A robotic Russian cargo vessel will try to buck a negative recent trend when it launches toward the International Space Station early Friday morning (July 3).
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