|  PlanetiQ tests sensor for commercial weather satellites By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL (Reuters) - PlanetiQ, a privately owned company, is beginning a key test intended to pave the way for the first commercial weather satellites. The Bethesda, Maryland-based company is among a handful of startups designing commercial weather satellite networks, similar to what companies like DigitalGlobe, Planet Labs and Google Inc's Skybox Imaging are undertaking in the sister commercial satellite industry of remote sensing. "I think weather is the next big market," PlanetiQ's chief executive and president, Anne Hale Miglarese, said. Read More » 'The Wait' Is Nearly Over: New Video Highlights July 14 Pluto Flyby  | NASA is doing its best to make sure everyone knows that a historic spaceflight event is just around the corner. The space agency has released a video called "The Wait" to call further attention to the New Horizons spacecraft's epic flyby of Pluto on July 14. That wait has been a long one: Pluto was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, and researchers have learned little about the frigid world in the eight and a half decades since.
| Read More » Buzzkill: global warming shrinks range of pollinating bumblebees  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global warming is shrinking the terrain where bumblebees live in North America and Europe, with these vital pollinators departing the southernmost and hottest parts of their ranges while failing to move north into cooler climes, scientists say. The researchers found no evidence pesticide use or habitat destruction were to blame, instead implicating rising temperatures recorded since climate change began accelerating in the 1970s. "This is the 'climate vise,'" said University of Ottawa biologist Jeremy Kerr, with the bumblebees "stuck at the northern edges of ranges while the southern edges are crushed inward and those populations are lost." "Bumblebees are declining incredibly fast and the fingerprints of human-caused climate change are all over these changes," Kerr added.
| Read More » Bear necessities: low metabolism lets pandas survive on bamboo  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Giant pandas eat vegetables even though their bodies are better equipped to eat meat. The critically endangered panda is the only one of the world's eight bear species with a vegetarian diet. The researchers studied three wild pandas at Foping Nature Reserve in Shaanxi province and five captive pandas at the Beijing Zoo.
| Read More » Cause of SpaceX Rocket Explosion Still Unknown, Elon Musk Says  | Elon Musk has been speaking with reporters about the June 28 explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but the company CEO has not been able to offer any insight as to what went wrong. While attending a conference event in Sun Valley, Idaho, Musk told reporters that he and his company did not yet know what caused the June 28 failure of a Falcon 9 rocket, which exploded a few minutes after liftoff. The rocket was carrying a Dragon cargo capsule filled with supplies for the International Space Station.
| Read More » How Hungry Pitcher Plants Get the Poop They Need  | Pitcher plants that "eat" bat poop have come up with a unique way to attract their meal tickets, new research finds: The plants are shaped to stand out against a bat's echolocation cries. The pitcher plant Nepenthes hemsleyana grows in the peat forests of Borneo and is a common roost for bats of the species Kerivoula hardwickii. Researchers had previously found that the bats and the pitcher plants have a mutually beneficial relationship: The plants provide a comfy roost with few parasites and an ideal microclimate, and the bats poop in the plants.
| Read More » Giant Pandas' Lazy Lifestyle Justified by Science  | Giant pandas have an insatiable hankering for bamboo, but scientists have long wondered how the bears survive on such a fibrous and low-nutrient plant. Now, a new study finds that giant pandas have clever ways to conserve energy, including having lazy lifestyles, small organs and special genes. The researchers followed five captive and three wild giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) for about a year.
| Read More » Earth's Groundwater Basins Are Running Out of Water  | One-third of Earth's largest groundwater basins are under threat because humans are draining so much water from them, according to two new studies. What's more, researchers say they lack accurate data about how much water remains in these dwindling reservoirs.
| Read More » Fin Count: Global Shark Census Will Aid Conservation  | The giant shark census, dubbed the Global FinPrint, is expected to last three years and involves surveying more than 400 reef locations around the world. Researchers will use underwater cameras on the ocean floor to capture images of sharks and other animals as they pass by, and the scientists are calling on boaters, sailors and other ocean lovers to help get this equipment into position, according to the Global FinPrint website. While those involved with the project don't expect to count every shark in the ocean, they do hope to get a better sense of shark numbers in certain areas of the world where statistics about these animals are scarce, according to FIU.
| Read More » Distant Pluto finally gets its day in the sun  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is poised to become the first probe to visit distant Pluto, capping a reconnaissance of the solar system that began more than 50 years ago. The 3 billion-mile (5 billion-km) journey to Pluto, an unexpectedly peach-hued world with contrasting dark and light regions across its face, has taken more than nine years. Clipping along at 9 miles per second (14 km per second), New Horizons awoke in January to begin observations of Pluto and its primary moon, Charon, located beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt region, which was discovered in 1992.
| Read More » 'Star Trek: Axanar' Fan Film Kicks Fundraising into Warp Drive  | A crew of "Star Trek" fans is taking the beloved franchise where it's never been before: For a fraction of the cost of a Hollywood film, they plan to create a feature-length production funded by crowdsourcing. The project, called "Star Trek: Axanar", aims to raise $250,000 in 32 days and officially launched Thursday (July 9) on the crowdsourcing website Indiegogo. "For you, the 'Star Trek' fan, Axanar is a return to the type of 'Star Trek' we all grew up on, with a hopeful future where mankind works with other races to explore the stars, via storytelling that is positive and teaches us about ourselves," the new Indiegogo page for the film stated.
| Read More » Ancient Jellies Had Spiny Skeletons, No Tentacles  | Ancient gelatinous animals that resemble Christmas tree ornaments were protected by hard, spiny skeletons and lacked the trademark tentacles of today's jellies, fossils of the long-dead jellyfishlike creatures suggest. This is a startling snapshot of extinct comb jellies, whose modern relatives today are at least 95 percent water and sport soft bodies with no skeletons that are typically trailing tentacles. Soft bodies don't fossilize well, and the geologic evidence for comb jellies and other members of the phylum Ctenophora (true jellyfish belong to the phylum Cnidaria) has been so meager that ancient ctenophores were long suspected to be as soft-bodied as present-day comb jellies.
| Read More » Pluto 'Totally Different' from Big Moon Charon, New Photos Show  | The new images — which were taken late Wednesday (July 8) from a distance of 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) — show that Pluto and Charon are very different bodies, though they circle a common center of gravity and are separated by a mere 12,200 miles (19,640 km), NASA officials said. "These two objects have been together for billions of years, in the same orbit, but they are totally different," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
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