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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Moon Meets Beautiful Hyades Star Cluster Sunday Morning A pre-dawn celestial pageant well worth getting up early to see will take place Sunday morning (July 12), with a lovely crescent moon in close proximity to one of the most beautiful star clusters. The constellation of Taurus, the Bull, will be coming up over the east-northeast horizon at around 3:30 a.m. local daylight time. Read More » What Pluto Can Teach Scientists About 'Star Wars' Planet Tatooine Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, orbit each other in a way that is similar to binary star systems, or two stars that orbit close together. "In terms of the dynamics of how planets form around binary star systems, Pluto is the closest example we have," Scott Kenyon, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), told Space.com. When young Luke Skywalker looked longingly at that beautiful skyscape, he seemed to be wondering whether he would ever leave his desert home and find adventure. Read More » Weird Reason Plutonium Doesn't Act Like Other Metals Plutonium is a metal, but it won't stick to a magnet, puzzling scientists for decades. Electrons that surround every atom of plutonium, finds the group, led by Marc Janoschek of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Each orbital has a certain maximum number of electrons it can hold. Read More » Giant Redheaded Centipede Photo Goes Viral, Horrifies the Internet Last week, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) posted a picture of a giant redheaded centipede to its social media pages that met all of the above criteria. However, giant redheaded centipedes (Scolopendra heros) — which can be found in certain regions of the southern United States and northern Mexico — do take people by surprise fairly often, said Ben Hutchins, an invertebrate biologist with the TPWD. Read More » Ice Lab Plays It Cool for Pluto Flyby Researchers in an Arizona ice lab spend long hours making crystal-clear ice from mixes of methane, nitrogen and even carbon monoxide — and now, with data from the New Horizons mission to Pluto arriving soon, the lab's time has come. The surface of Pluto is likely covered in a coarse mixture of ices that don't resemble anything found naturally on Earth. The bitter cold on icy dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, discovered in 2005, crystallizes blends of substances that on Earth occur more commonly as gases: mainly nitrogen, with a heaping dose of methane and a smattering of other molecules mixing things up. Read More » Pluto Flyby: How NASA Space Probes Will Track Epic Encounter While New Horizons will be all by its lonesome as it speeds past Pluto July 14, a fleet of spacecraft closer to home will also be watching the dwarf planet. Between Earth and Saturn, NASA machines will turn their eyes to the outer solar system.. At Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft plans to take an image of Pluto (just a tiny dot in its viewfinder) on the same day New Horizons makes its closest approach. Read More » Eye Color Linked to Alcoholism Risk People with light-colored eyes may have a higher risk of alcoholism than people with dark-brown eyes, new research suggests. In the study, researchers looked at 1,263 Americans of European ancestry, including 992 people who were diagnosed with alcohol dependence and 271 people who were not diagnosed with alcohol dependence. "This suggests an intriguing possibility — that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis," study co-author Arvis Sulovari, a graduate student in cellular, molecular and biological science at the University of Vermont, said in a statement. Read More » Severe Burns May Let 'Bad Bacteria' Take Over the Gut People who have gotten severe burns are known to be at risk for a host of complications, but there may be other consequences lurking deeper within the body: A new study finds that a burn may change the community of bacteria within a person's gut, and possibly lead to an increased risk of infection. In the study, researchers analyzed fecal bacteria from four patients with severe burns over at least 30 percent of their body, and compared these bacteria with fecal bacteria of people with minor burns. In fact, Enterobacteriaceae made up 31.9 percent of the gut bacteria in the people with severe burns, compared with just 0.5 percent in those with minor burns, according to the study, published today (July 8) in the journal PLOS ONE. Read More » 'Hacking' Gut Bacteria Could Spur New Medical Treatments Faintly glowing mouse droppings are now evidence that one of the most common microbes in the human gut can be easily "hacked," or genetically modified, researchers say. The finding means that the microbe could one day be used in making medicines or detecting diseases, the researchers said. The microbe only makes up about 0.1 percent of human intestinal bacteria. Read More » Most Americans Still Don't Eat Their Fruits & Veggies Didn't eat enough fruits and vegetables today? Join the club — 87 percent of Americans don't meet recommendations for fruit consumption, and 91 percent don't meet recommendations for vegetable consumption, according to a new U.S. report. Researchers analyzed a 2013 survey of more than 373,000 American adults in all 50 states who answered questions about how much fruit and vegetables they eat. Read More » Pluto's Complex Surface Coming into Focus (Photo) Pluto's frigid surface abounds with mysterious and complex features, the latest photo by NASA's approaching New Horizons spacecraft shows. "After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the same statement. Read More »
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