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	(Sponsor this newsletter) New Horizons Glitch Won't Affect Pluto Flyby, NASA Says NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be ready for its epic Pluto flyby next week despite a recent glitch, mission team members say. New Horizons went into a precautionary "safe mode" on Saturday (July 4) after experiencing an anomaly, but the problem did not turn out to be serious. New Horizons' handlers say the probe should be back to normal science operations by Tuesday (July 7), exactly one week before it performs the first-ever flyby of Pluto. Read More » Low-Flying Science: How 2 Pilots Pulled Off Amazing Stunt We've come a long way since Kitty Hawk. A pair of British pilots recently pulled off a daring aviation stunt, becoming the first to fly two planes in formation through a building. Read More » Cats Are City Slickers Cats may be city slickers that rarely venture out into the wilderness, a new study suggests. In fact, the new study shows that feral cats roam in urban and suburban parks and yards, but they rarely set their paws down in wilder green spaces. The new finding is good news for wildlife, especially birds, in more rural settings, said study author George Hess, an urban conservation scientist at North Carolina State University. Read More » 5 Odd Facts About Lewis Carroll Alice fell down the famous rabbit hole 150 years ago, after family friend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll) told the story to the Liddell sisters on a boat trip down the Thames on July 4, 1862. Ten-year-old Alice Liddell, delighted by the tale, asked him for a written copy of the story. Carroll published the adventures in 1865, and the book hasn't gone out of print since. Read More » Why Conservatives Have Better Self-Control Conservatives may have more self-control than liberals, a new study suggests. The study researchers posit that the differences in self-control may stem from beliefs about free will, or the concept of being "responsible for your outcomes," as the study's lead author, Joshua Clarkson of the University of Cincinnati, told Live Science. "Effective self-control comes down to the extent to which you believe that you can control your behavior," Clarkson said. Read More » Universal Rhythm: People Dance to Same Beat Across the Globe Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music "the universal language of mankind." Now researchers may know why. "Our findings help explain why humans make music," study researcher Thomas Currie from the University of Exeter said in a statement. Currie, along with Pat Savage, a doctoral student at the Tokyo University of the Arts, and their colleagues analyzed music from around the world, examining 304 recordings from the online Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Read More » Overweight Colorectal Cancer Patients Survive Longer People with advanced colorectal cancer who are overweight or obese may survive longer than their thinner counterparts, a new study suggests. "These results are surprising," Dr. Yousuf Zafar, the study's lead researcher and an associate professor of medicine at Duke University, said in a statement. Obesity has long been considered a risk factor for both the development of colorectal cancer and the recurrence of the disease among those who have had it previously. Read More » Cancer Forecast: Why More People Will Die, Even As Death Rates Fall Cancer death rates will continue to decline in the United States through 2020, including death rates from some of the most common cancers in both men and women, a new study says. However, because the population is growing and getting older, the total number of cancer deaths will increase during that same period, the researchers said. The increases will be most pronounced among black and white men and black women, they said. Read More » Should Placebos Be Used to 'Treat' Patients? Placebos offer real therapeutic value: Although they cannot cure an illness, they can make patients feel better. In a provocative essay published today (July 1) in The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medical School professor Ted Kaptchuk proposes that placebos should be considered valuable components of medical care and important tools in relieving patients' symptoms — and not simply an inconvenient baseline that "real medicines" are compared to within medical studies. A placebo — the word comes from the Latin phrase meaning "I shall please" — is a fake pill or procedure that can provide a psychological benefit because the patient thinks he or she is getting real treatment. Read More » Teaching old dogs new tricks with 'smart harness' North Carolina State University researchers have developed new technology designed to improve communication between dogs and humans. Researchers at North Carolina State University are combining their love for dogs with their love of technology. A joint project between the computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments and the College of Veterinary Medicine has developed new technology designed to improve communication between dogs and humans. Read More » Spiders, Ahoy! 8-Legged Critters Can 'Sail' Over Water Spiders can dance on water like tiny ballerinas pirouetting across a slippery stage. Researchers discovered that spider dancing (also known as spider sailing) is a part of the "ballooning" process — a popular method of transportation for many species of spiders. When ballooning, spiders typically climb to the top of a plant, stick their spinnakers into the air and shoot out a long strand of silk, which catches a breeze and hoists the silk (and the spider) into the air. Read More » Company Aims to Offer On-Demand Meteor Showers A group of Japanese scientists say they have a shooting-star secret formula — an undisclosed chemical mixture packed into tiny, inch-wide balls that the team hopes to eject from a satellite to create on-demand meteor showers, AFP reports. A Japanese start-up company called ALE is partnering with researchers at multiple universities to create the artificial meteor showers, which will cost around $8,100 per meteor for buyers. Read More » Guns Don't Deter Crime, Study Finds "The one thing that would have at least ameliorated the horrible situation in Charleston would have been that if somebody in that prayer meeting had a conceal carry or there had been either an off-duty policeman or an on-duty policeman, somebody with the legal authority to carry a firearm and could have stopped the shooter," presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said in a Fox News interview on June 19. "We found no support for the hypothesis that owning more guns leads to a drop or a reduction in violent crime," said study researcher Michael Monuteaux, an epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Numerous studies have found that gun ownership correlates with gun homicide, and homicide by gun is the most common type of homicide in the United States. Read More » Historic flyby of Pluto on track despite probe glitch, NASA says By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA said on Monday it expects the New Horizons spacecraft to be back in service on Tuesday after a computer glitch on the weekend threatened its upcoming historic flyby of Pluto. Nearing the end of a 9.5-year journey to solar system's unexplored outer reaches, New Horizons shut down radio communications with Earth for a nail-biting 81 minutes on Saturday. The cause of the problem was a timing flaw in the final batch of software uploaded to the spacecraft, NASA said in a status report late Sunday. Read More » Wheel Worries: Mars Rover Curiosity Dealing With Damage NASA's Mars rover Curiosity faces ongoing wheel wear and tear as it continues its trek across the rock-strewn Red Planet. The car-size Curiosity rover has been on duty since landing on Mars in August 2012. Curiosity has six aluminum wheels, each with its own individual motor. Read More » New Brain-Like Computer May Solve World's Most Complex Math Problems A new computer prototype called a "memcomputer" works by mimicking the human brain, and could one day perform notoriously complex tasks like breaking codes, scientists say. These new, brain-inspired computing devices also could help neuroscientists better understand the workings of the human brain, researchers say. In contrast, Massimiliano Di Ventra, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues are building "memcomputers," made up of "memprocessors," that both process and store data. Read More »
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