|  'Mission Pluto' Documentary to Premiere Next Week (Exclusive Video)  | Space.com has an exclusive sneak peek at the new "Mission Pluto" documentary, which will premiere next week on the same day that NASA's New Horizons probe performs the first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet. "Mission Pluto" will air on National Geographic Channel at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT on July 14. The timing is appropriate, for the documentary tells the story of New Horizons, which on that very morning will cruise within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto's surface, returning history's first up-close looks at the faraway world.
| Read More » Powerful Space Telescope Would Scan Alien Planets for Signs of Life  | The proposed High Definition Space Telescope, or HDST, would have 25 times the resolution of Hubble and would serve as a "flagship observatory" for the global astronomical community. A new report released Monday (July 6) outlines a broad plan for the telescope. To publicize the report, a panel of scientists involved with the project spoke to the public about the HDST at an event at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), here in New York.
| Read More » Despite blast, Spacex has time to show readiness for missions: USAF  | By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Falcon 9 rocket accident last month should not eliminate SpaceX from the competition to launch a new GPS satellite, U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah James said on Wednesday, since there would be "plenty of time" to test the rocket before any future launch. James told Reuters in an interview that SpaceX remained certified to participate in the competition, expected to kick off in coming weeks. "If SpaceX were to win, it would be two years before the launch, more or less, and there would be plenty of time to make sure they would be mission ready," James said.
| Read More » New Squirrel Virus Strain Suspected in Deaths of 3 in Germany Three people in Germany who worked as squirrel breeders and who all died from brain inflammation may have contracted a new strain of virus from their squirrels, according to a new report of the cases. Follow Rachael Rettner @RachaelRettner. Read More » 'Safer' Plastics Linked to Health Problems in Kids Two chemicals commonly used in products such as plastic wrap are linked to an increased risk of high blood pressure and other health problems in children and teens, according to new research. The two chemicals — diisononyl phthalate (DINP) and diisodecyl phthalate (DIDP) — were introduced into consumer products as replacements for another similar chemical that had been shown to have detrimental effects on people's health. The two "safer" chemicals are currently used in the manufacturing of plastic wrap, soap, cosmetics and food containers, the researchers said. Read More » Yosemite's Half Dome Rock Just Got Harder to Climb  | A towering icon of Yosemite National Park just got a face-lift, as a huge slab of rock recently peeled off Half Dome, possibly changing the route up to the top for climbers. "Our climbing rangers are still assessing the new situation up there, but it does seem like some relatively easy climbing has now been replaced with a blank face of rock," said Greg Stock, a Yosemite National Park geologist and climber.
| Read More » 'Proof' of Little-Known Mass Extinction Found  | A little-known mass extinction may have killed up to about 80 percent of all vertebrates on land about 260 million years ago, researchers say. This catastrophic die-off coincided with the onset of volcanism in what is now southern China, which suggests a cause for this calamity, the scientists added. The history of life on Earth is ominously interrupted by mass extinctions.
| Read More » Short Trip? More People 'Microdosing' on Psychedelic Drugs For Martijn Schirp, it's a way to make an ordinary day just a little bit better. A former poker player and recent graduate in interdisciplinary science in Amsterdam, Schirp has been experimenting with a new way to take psychedelic drugs: Called microdosing, it involves routinely taking a small fraction of a normal dose of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or magic mushrooms (the latter is legal to purchase in coffeeshops in Amsterdam but not the former). Microdosing has gained a cult following amongst a small group of hallucinogen enthusiasts like Schirp, who now writes at HighExistence.com. Proponents report improvements in perception, mood and focus, minus the trippy tangerine trees and marmalade skies normally associated with psychedelics. Read More » Pluto Flyby Begins: NASA Probe Enters Encounter Phase  | NASA's New Horizons probe has officially begun to execute its sequence of Pluto flyby observations as it zooms toward its closest approach to the dwarf planet on July 14. The spacecraft is already collecting data about the Pluto system, and its nine-day flyby sequence will continue through July 16. It's taken more than nine years for the $700 million New Horizons mission to traverse the 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) between Earth and Pluto, but the peak of the spacecraft's journey will last a matter of hours.
| Read More » Space Station Crosses Moon's Face in Stunning New Photo  | An amazing new photograph shows the International Space Station (ISS) crossing in front of the bright and seemingly enormous moon. O'Donnell received an alert for the precise to-the-second timing of the space station's flyover online. "The ISS only passed over the moon for 0.33 seconds as it shoots by quite quickly.
| Read More » Investing in science can be 'the game changer' for development: experts By Magdalena Mis LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Investing up to 3.5 percent of a nation's gross domestic product (GDP) in science, technology and innovation can be "the game changer" for development, leading experts said on Thursday. Science, technology and innovation (STI) can help alleviate poverty, reduce inequalities, increase income and improve health, scientists advising U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on sustainable development said. "If countries wish to break the poverty cycle and achieve post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, they will have to set up ambitious national minimum target investments for STI," the 26-member Scientific Advisory Board said. Read More » Real-Life Mind Meld? Scientists Link Animal Brains  | Recently, neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues developed the first brain-to-brain interfaces, arrays of microscopic wires implanted in the brains of rats that allowed real-time intercontinental transfer of data between pairs of the rodents. One set of rats would learn to solve movement- or touch-based problems, and their brain activity was recorded as patterns of electrical stimulation that were transferred into the brains of another set of rats, helping the recipient animals solve those problems more quickly. Now, Nicolelis and his colleagues have used brain-to-brain interfaces to create what they call brain networks, or brainets, that can work together to complete simple tasks.
| Read More » Smoking Marijuana May Affect Weight Gain Whether smoking marijuana contributes to weight gain may depend on how much pot a person smokes, in addition to other factors such the person's gender, according to a new study. Smoking marijuana often gives people the munchies — a sudden increase in appetite that can make them eat a lot at once — so researchers wanted to examine whether this drive to eat might mean that people who smoke pot put on extra pounds over time. When they reached age 20, the 271 men and 319 women were asked whether they had smoked marijuana in the past year, and if so, how often they smoked. Read More » Organ Transplant Rejections May Not Be Permanent Organ transplants can save lives, but patients sometimes reject their new organs. Now, experiments in mice surprisingly reveal that there may one day be ways to ensure that patients who previously rejected transplants will be able to accept future ones. Organ rejection happens when the immune system sees a transplanted organ as foreign and attacks it. Read More » Apollo Moon Rocket-Styled Ford Mustang to be Auctioned for Youth Aviation  | Ford Motor Company is launching a one-of-a-kind rocket-inspired muscle car to support educating the next generation of aviators. The Saturn V-styled "Apollo Edition Mustang,"donated to the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), is the feature lot being auctioned on July 23 to benefit the not-for-profit organization's youth programs. The black and white (with red trim) pony car will be sold during the EAA's Gathering of Eagles gala, part of AirVenture Oshkosh in Wisconsin.
| Read More » Venus and Jupiter Put on a Celestial Show This Month  | These are the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter. Venus is the brighter of the two, currently magnitude -4.6 on the upside-down brightness scale astronomers use. Jupiter is somewhat fainter at magnitude -1.8, down from a maximum of -2.6 when it was in opposition on Feb. 6.
| Read More » Nobel medal to be auctioned to help train scientists A Nobel Prize Medal for medicine awarded to German Jewish refugee Hans Krebs is to be auctioned by Sotheby's to raise money to train scientists, the auction house said on Thursday. Krebs won the medal in 1953 when the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was divided equally between Krebs, for his discovery of the citric acid cycle, and Fritz Lipmann, for work on enzymes. The proceeds are to be used by The Sir Hans Krebs Trust for its work "to provide grants for the support of refugee scientists and the training of young scientists in the biomedical sciences," Sotheby's said. Read More » NASA Hands Over Historic Shuttle Landing Facility For Commercial Use  | The Florida runway where space shuttles touched down for nearly 30 years has a new mission. NASA on Monday (June 22) formally transferred control of the Shuttle Landing Facility located at the Kennedy Space Center to Space Florida, the state agency responsible for driving aerospace economic development. The agreement assigns the facility's operation and management to Space Florida for the next 30 years.
| Read More » US Teens Win International Rocketry Challenge  | On June 19, seven middle school and high school students from Russellville City Schools in Alabama took home first place in the International Rocketry Challenge at the 2015 Paris Air Show. To succeed time after time, the students had to make the volatile rocket launches as predictable as possible. "About four days before we got ready to leave for Paris, we crashed three rockets in a row, and those were the rockets we were planning on using," Andrew Heath, a rising high school senior and captain of the Russellville team, told Space.com.
| Read More » NASA Assigns 4 Astronauts to Commercial Boeing, SpaceX Test Flights  | HOUSTON — NASA has named its first commercial crew "cadre" — four astronauts who will train to fly on board the first test flights of Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. The agency Thursday (July 9) announced that astronauts Bob Behnken, Eric Boe, Doug Hurley and Sunita ("Suni") Williams will train alongside the companies' own test pilots for the commercial capsules' maiden crewed missions to the International Space Station.
| Read More » Enormous Black Hole Is Too Big for Its Galaxy  | A newfound giant black hole nearly as massive as 7 billion suns is dozens of times larger than astronomers expected given its host galaxy's size, researchers say. This finding may call most current models of galaxy formation into question, scientists added. Astronomers investigated a supermassive black hole known as CID-947, located about 22 billion light-years from Earth, using the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft.
| Read More » Earth Is Losing Its Bumblebees  | Climate change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests. "They just aren't colonizing new areas to track rapid, human-caused climate change," study co-author Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, said at a news conference. But bumblebees are the real superstars of the pollinating world.
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