|  From Sputnik to Spock: Crowdsourced Names for Pluto Map Submitted  | Researchers working on NASA's New Horizons mission have submitted for official approval a long list of crowdsourced names that will help fill out the first-ever maps of Pluto and its five moons. New Horizons team members submitted names generated by the "Our Pluto" campaign to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) today (July 7), one week before the probe makes history's first flyby of the faraway dwarf planet. The July 14 close encounter — in which New Horizons will zoom within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto — will reveal many different surface features, such as craters and mountains, on the dwarf planet and its satellites (Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx).
| Read More » 'Not Yet Explored' No More: New Horizons Flying Stamp to Pluto  | They are three words that, after next week, will never be used to describe the dwarf planet Pluto again. The phrase, which first appeared in 1991 along the bottom of a 29-cent U.S. postage stamp depicting Pluto, is now affixed — in the form of one those 24-year-old stamps — on NASA's New Horizons robotic probe, which as of Tuesday (July 7) is just one week out from flying by the mysterious dwarf planet. Not only is it thought to be the first time that a U.S. postage stamp has been present for the event that effectively made its design outdated, but it is also the farthest that any stamp has ever traveled before.
| Read More » People Who Can Imagine Aromas Vividly Tend to Weigh More Previous research has shown that food cravings are associated with obesity, and that the intensity of people's food cravings is related to the vividness of their mental images of food, said the new study's lead researcher, Barkha Patel, a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry at Yale University. To investigate, the researchers gave 25 people three questionnaires asking them to rate their mental-imagery abilities, including the vividness of their visual imagery, olfactory imagery and food imagery. In fact, olfactory imagery was the best predictor of BMI out of all the measures, the researchers considered, including visual imagery and food imagery, they found. Read More » Smartphone App Tells You When to Stop Drinking There are smartphone apps that can help you keep track of healthy habits, like how much exercise you do and the number of steps you take in a day. The app is aimed at helping drinkers better manage their alcohol intake, the researchers said. The developers noted that researchers have found that apps that promise to track users' blood alcohol content are highly unreliable. Read More » Spidey Senses Tingling! Arachnids Feel Sex  | The male uses the palpal organ to transfer sperm into the female. Several studies of the palpal organ had found no evidence of nerve tissue, suggesting the spider mating apparatus was totally numb. "Put it simply, males of this spider species are likely able to outsmart females," Lipke and Michalik wrote in an email to Live Science.
| Read More » Why Matisse's Vibrant Painting of Nudes Is Fading  | Scientists are peeling back layers of paint to get to the root of an enduring plague that is threatening century-old art by the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. By studying the yellow paint from Matisse's "The Joy of Life" — a vibrantly colored land- and seascape dotted with several nude figures — researchers have found the chemical process that weakens the brilliant sunflowerlike color, called cadmium yellow, to a milky-gray hue in this and other artworks. "We can finally see across several different countries, across several different artists and several different paintings, we can see the same mechanism going on.
| Read More » Starry Vortex Takes Top Spot in Nightscapes Photo Contest  | Winner Eric Nathan, a self-taught freelance photographer, stacked more than 900 30-second exposures to create the image, which shows star trails caused by the rotation of the Earth. "The play of light patterns here, with the circling stars set against the urban labyrinths, makes this image a delight to explore, while at the same time showing the power of city lights to dominate the natural world," contest judge James Richardson, a National Geographic photographer, said in a statement. The overall contest theme was "Dark Skies Importance." Light pollution at night is such a problem that even the most remote telescopes are having trouble breaking through the glare.
| Read More » How Asteroid Mining Could Open Up the Solar System (Podcast Transcript)  | Asteroid mining is considered by many to be a key to the colonization of outer space, the space equivalent of California's Gold Rush. NASA is planning missions to advance asteroid mining — OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security and Regolith Explorer) — in partnership with two leading private industries: Planetary Resources, Inc. and Deep Space Industries. Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and conducts research in plasma turbulence and astrophysics.
| Read More » As Ancient Livestock Disappear, Frozen Embryos Restore Ancient Breeds  | Recently, deposits of this genetic material have increased to an unusual bank, the SVF Foundation, with vaults containing not cash and gold, but cryopreserved animal embryos, semen and blood. Fueling the increase is one of the first successful applications of in vitro fertilization (IVF) for rare livestock breeds anywhere in the United States, if not the world, according to Dorothy Roof, SVF's laboratory supervisor.
| Read More » Driving with a Marijuana High: How Dangerous Is It? Most Americans think that driving while high on marijuana isn't that dangerous, according to a recent Gallup poll. About 70 percent of people polled said that people who drive while impaired by marijuana are "not much of a problem" or only a "somewhat serious problem," whereas just 29 percent said it was a very serious problem. But is it really safe to drive while high on marijuana? Read More » The Illusion of Time: What's Real? Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of "Closer To Truth," a public television and multimedia program featuring the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions regarding the cosmos, consciousness and a search for meaning. Kuhn is co-editor (with John Leslie) of The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? Kuhn contributed this article, based on two recent "Closer To Truth" episodes (produced/directed by Peter Getzels), to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Read More » Only Climate Action Can Save Polar Bears  | Margaret Williams, managing director of the Arctic program at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Living in Alaska, I have seen firsthand that the Arctic is rapidly changing. This environment has also put the Arctic's unique wildlife in trouble, particularly ice-dependent species such as polar bears.
| Read More » How to Find Pluto in the Night Sky: July 8  | On July 14, a NASA spacecraft will make a close flyby of Pluto, sending back the first up-close images of the dwarf planet's surface. In anticipation of the New Horizons flyby, this sky chart can help you find Pluto in the night sky (with the assistance of a high-power telescope). The chart shows the positions of Pluto and New Horizons as seen through a high-power telescope eyepiece with a field of view of 15 arc minutes.
| Read More » Israeli life science firms seek help to follow Teva's lead By Tova Cohen TEL AVIV (Reuters) - As Israel's biggest company Teva strives to get even bigger by swallowing up rival Mylan for more than $40 billion, further down the food chain a raft of upstart life science firms are struggling to climb onto the global ladder. Now the government is starting to take notice, urged on by influential advocates, including Teva Pharmaceutical Industries' own boss, who says the country's economic future depends on replicating his company's success. Israel has a burgeoning life science industry comprising around 1,380 mostly very small companies. Read More » Tar Balls from California Oil Spill Litter Beach in NASA Photo  | Spotting dark, gooey and flammable tar on the beach — remnants from an oil spill in Southern California in May — just got a lot easier, thanks to NASA. The agency recently captured a light-sensitive image of tar-seeped sand and water in Santa Barbara to help officials study and respond to the spill. "Mapping tar on beaches using high-resolution imaging spectroscopy techniques that can identify tar of this type has never been done before, and is a natural extension of oil-on-water remote sensing," Ira Leifer, principle investigator of the oil spill and an environmental consultant, said in a statement.
| Read More » Neptune's Strange Magnetic Field Stretches Arms in New Model (Video)  | Scientists knew Neptune's magnetic field was strange — just not this strange. Neptune, the eighth planet from the sun, has vivid blue clouds and fierce windstorms, but also a badly behaved magnetic field. The field is 27 times more powerful than Earth's and sits at an angle on the planet, changing chaotically as it interacts with the solar wind.
| Read More » Futuristic Jetpack Will Go on Sale for $200,000 Next Year  | It's a firefighter wearing a jetpack!" That could be something you find yourself saying as early as next year. A company in New Zealand recently announced that its futuristic product — a fan-propelled, personal flying machine— will be commercially available during the second half of next year. The company sees the pack as a tool for "saving human lives," and some of the potential applications listed on its website include fire services, border patrol and search-and-rescue operations.
| Read More » Technical solutions alone can't fix climate change - scientists By Laurie Goering PARIS (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Dealing with climate change and its risks will require not only technical responses like drought-resilient crops and higher sea walls but also reshaping economic and political incentives that are driving global warming, scientists said on Wednesday. "The biggest risk of all that we face is that we're addressing the wrong problem," University of Oslo sociologist Karen O'Brien told a week-long conference of climate researchers in Paris. Read More » Technical solutions alone can't fix climate change: scientists By Laurie Goering PARIS (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Dealing with climate change and its risks will require not only technical responses like drought-resilient crops and higher sea walls but also reshaping economic and political incentives that are driving global warming, scientists said on Wednesday. "The biggest risk of all that we face is that we're addressing the wrong problem," University of Oslo sociologist Karen O'Brien told a week-long conference of climate researchers in Paris. Read More » Gene therapy for deafness moves a few steps closer By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Gene therapy for deafness is moving closer to reality, with new research on Wednesday showing the technique for fixing faulty DNA can improve responses in mice with genetic hearing loss. Separately, a clinical trial backed by Novartis is under way to help a different group of people who have lost their hearing through damage or disease. After missteps in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when safety scares set back research, gene therapy is enjoying a renaissance, with positive clinical results recently in conditions ranging from blood diseases to blindness. Read More » Massive 'Magnet' May Have Powered Monster Cosmic Explosion  | Scientists suspect that there are at least two different sources of gamma-ray bursts. A new study looking at one of the longest and most intense bursts ever detected suggests there may be another source: a magnetic hunk of material only a few tens of miles across, but with a magnetic field 5,000 trillion times that of Earth. Gamma-ray bursts are traditionally divided into two groups — long and short — depending on whether they last more or less than 2 seconds.
| Read More » Frills and Whistles: Triceratops Relative Had Bizarre Head of Horns  | The 79-million-year-old bones of four pickup truck-size horned dinosaurs have been unearthed in Alberta, Canada, and the discovery reveals how the distant relatives of Triceratops got their horns, a new study finds. Wendy Sloboda, a renowned fossil hunter, discovered the fossils in 2010 while walking her German shepherds in the badlands of southern Alberta, just north of Montana. "She said, 'I found some ceratopsian material,' which she knows I love," said co-author Michael Ryan, the curator and head of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
| Read More » Pluto's 'Heart' Spied by New Horizons Spacecraft (Photo)  | The image, which New Horizons took yesterday (July 7) when it was less than 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto, shows a large, heart-shaped feature on the dwarf planet's surface. The bright "heart" is about 1,200 miles (2,000 km) wide, NASA officials said. New Horizons should get much better looks at both of these intriguing features in the coming days — especially during its July 14 flyby, when the probe will zoom within 7,800 miles (12,500 km) of Pluto's surface.
| Read More » Who is Wendy and why is this dinosaur named after her?  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's not every day a dinosaur gets named after you, so Canadian fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda celebrated in a unique way. It is pretty exciting for me," said Sloboda, who first spotted the fossils of the dinosaur now named Wendiceratops in southern Alberta's remote badlands. Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of Wendiceratops, a 20-foot-long (6-meter) two-ton beast with a prominent, upright horn atop its nose and a series of short, forward-curling hooks adorning a bony, shield-like frill at the back of its head.
| Read More » Staying in School Would Help People Live Longer, Study Suggests Staying in school has not only financial advantages, but also health benefits: A new study estimates that more than 145,000 deaths per year could be averted in the United States if everyone who didn't finish high school had earned their high school degrees. People with higher levels of education may live longer for many reasons, including that they tend to have higher incomes, healthier behaviors and better psychological well-being, the researchers said. Read More » | |
