|  Chain of Underwater Volcanoes Discovered During Lobster Hunt  | During a recent marine excursion, researchers searching for lobster larva unexpectedly discovered a geologic wonder: a 50-million-year-old cluster of extinct volcanoes submerged in the water off eastern Australia. The four volcanoes are located about 155 miles (250 kilometers) off the coast of Sydney, the researchers found during the mission, which lasted from June 3 to 18. The scientists immediately recognized them as calderas, a cauldronlike structure that forms after a volcano erupts and collapses into itself, creating a crater.
| Read More » Watch the Pluto Flyby: How to See NASA Make History Online  | On Tuesday (July 14), NASA will give Pluto its first close-up since the dwarf planet's discovery 85 years ago, and you can follow it all online. At 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) on Tuesday, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto in what is arguably the planetary event of the year, if not the decade. For the first time since NASA's Voyager mission in 1989, a spacecraft will fly by an unexplored planet.
| Read More » Testicular Cancer & Cycling: Is There a Link? Cyclist Ivan Basso's announcement today that he has testicular cancer comes decades after Lance Armstrong famously battled the disease. Could two cases of testicular cancer in the world's top cyclists be a coincidence, or does something about competitive cycling increase men's risk of the disease? Basso said at a news conference today (July 13) that he is withdrawing from the Tour de France after being diagnosed with testicular cancer during the race, according to BBC News. Read More » Mushroom Poisoning Caused Woman's Liver to Fail Eating wild mushrooms is dangerous, as a new report highlights: A woman in Canada recently suffered liver failure and needed a liver transplant after consuming poisonous mushrooms she found in a park. The woman was able to get the transplant at short notice, but if she had not, the outcome of her case could have been much worse, said Dr. Corey M. Stein, of the University of Toronto, who treated the woman and co-authored the new report of her case. "Mushroom poisoning can be fatal," Stein said. Read More » Australian tracking station to get first new images of Pluto  | By Pauline Askin SYDNEY (Reuters) - A space tracking station surrounded by cows in an Australian valley will on Tuesday become the first place in the world to get close-up images of Pluto, the most distant planetary body ever explored. After nine-and-half years of traveling 5.3 billion km (3.3 billion miles), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s spacecraft New Horizons will get within 12,500 km (7,800 miles) of Pluto on Tuesday evening. The spacecraft has been sent specifically to take pictures of Pluto, a part of the solar system that has been in deep freeze for billions of years.
| Read More » Google Doodle Celebrates Pluto Flyby by NASA's New Horizons  | LAUREL, Md. -- Today, July 14, 2015, NASA will make history when its New Horizons spacecraft becomes the first mission ever to fly by Pluto, and the folks at Google are celebrating with an appropriately celebratory Google doodle.
| Read More » Pluto Flyby Occurs 50 Years After 1st Mars Encounter  | NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is winging past Pluto this morning (July 14) exactly 50 years after the first robotic visit to Mars. On July 14, 1965, NASA's Mariner 4 probe flew by the Red Planet, becoming the first spacecraft ever to capture up-close looks at another planet. "You couldn't have written a script that was better," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com.
| Read More » CERN scientists claim discovery of new particles BERLIN (AP) — Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher say they have discovered a new kind of particle called "pentaquarks." Read More » After 50-year hunt, science finds pentaquarks By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva appears to have proved the existence of particles made of five quarks, solving a 50-year-old puzzle about the building blocks of matter, scientists said on Tuesday. Quarks are the tiny ingredients of sub-atomic particles such as protons and neutrons, which are made of three quarks. A five-quark version, or "pentaquark", has been sought, but never found, ever since Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig theorized the existence of such sub-atomic particles in 1964. Read More » All Aboard! Slug Poop Carries Worms to Destinations  | Tiny nematode worms have an unusual way of getting from point A to point B: They travel on the slug poop express. Nematodes are worms that eat the bacteria growing on rotting vegetation. "Our study reveals a previously unknown nematode lifestyle within the guts of slugs," Hinrich Schulenburg, a zoologist at Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, Germany, said in a statement.
| Read More » Hello, Pluto! NASA Spacecraft Makes Historic Dwarf Planet Flyby  | The first age of solar system exploration is in the books. NASA's New Horizons probe flew by Pluto this morning (July 14), capturing history's first up-close looks at the far-flung world — if all went according to plan. To celebrate, NASA unveiled the latest photo of Pluto, showing a reddish world with a stunning heart-shaped feature on its face.
| Read More » New Horizons: 5 Things Pluto Flyby Could Reveal About Planet Earth  | Nine and a half years after it launched into space, a NASA probe is set to become the first spacecraft to fly by the dwarf planet Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft is expected to make its closest approach tomorrow (July 14) at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT), coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto's surface. This is because studying other objects in the solar system can provide clues about Earth's history.
| Read More » U.S. spacecraft flies by Pluto after nine-year, 3 billon mile trip  | By Irene Klotz LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - More than nine years after its launch, a U.S. spacecraft sailed past Pluto on Tuesday, capping a 3 billion mile (4.88 billion km) journey to the solar system's farthest reaches, NASA said. The craft flew by the distant "dwarf" planet at 7:49 a.m. after reaching a region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt that was discovered in 1992. The achievement is the culmination of a 50-year effort to explore the solar system.
| Read More » Funeral Directors May Be at Increased Risk for ALS People who work as funeral directors may be at a higher risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, new research finds. ALS is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that kills the nerve cells that control voluntary movements. Typically, the diagnosis is followed by death within three to five years, according to the ALS Association. Read More » Painter with Parkinson's Switches Hands, Mystifying Doctors  | In a case that has mystified doctors, a professional artist who developed Parkinson's disease and then suffered a debilitating arm injury managed to continue to paint with his other arm — just as well as he had painted with his good arm, according to a new report. Doctors diagnosed Juan Mallol Pibernat, a Spanish artist, with Parkinson's disease when he was in his early 70s. One day, Mallol Pibernat lost his balance while carrying one of his works.
| Read More » Obamacare, Nixoncare: Health Care Debates Are All About Politics Once upon a time, two health care plans that were far more liberal than "Obamacare" were debated in the halls of Congress. The plans were introduced by none other than President Richard Nixon, a Republican and conservative stalwart. First came Nixon's National Health Strategy in 1971, which the Democrats ridiculed and fought tooth and nail, warning it would hurt the middle class. Read More » This Amazing Photo of Pluto Is Just the Beginning, NASA Says  | The new image was the last snapshot taken before New Horizons went quiet in anticipation of its close flyby of Pluto, which was scheduled to take place early this morning (July 14). The photo shows two major features on Pluto's surface that have been coming into view over the last few weeks: a large, bright, heart-shaped feature and the head of a darker region that is unofficially being called "the whale" (lower left). The image was taken on Monday (July 13), when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was only 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from the surface of Pluto.
| Read More » New Inhaled Ebola Vaccine Works in Monkeys A new Ebola vaccine that is designed to be inhaled works to protect monkeys from the virus's deadly effects, according to new research. Although this Ebola vaccine still has to clear many hurdles before it could be used in large numbers of people, it could have advantages over other vaccines in development, said Alexander Bukreyev, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and co-author of the study published today (July 13) in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. One key advantage is that because the vaccine could ultimately be delivered through a breathing device, the "administration of such a vaccine will not require trained medical personnel," Bukreyev told Live Science. Read More » New, Ultra-Precise Measure Could Help Redefine the Kilogram  | A new, extremely precise measure of Avogadro's number, a fundamental constant, could ensure solid footing for a new definition of the kilogram that does not rely on a single hunk of metal sitting in France. Every junior high school chemistry student learned Avogadro's number, or 6.022 X 10 ^23, a huge value that dwarfs the number of stars in the universe. Because Avogadro's number defines how many atoms or molecules are in a mole of matter, each mole of a substance weighs a different amount depending on the substance in question.
| Read More » 'Cursed' Artifacts Returned — 20 Years Later  | Two decades after stealing antiquities from a first-century Jewish city in the Golan Heights, on the borders of Israel and Syria, a robber returned the loot to a museum's courtyard, Israeli authorities announced. The returned artifacts included two 2,000-year-old sling stones, also called ballista balls, which would've been used as weapons, and an anonymous typed noted saying, "These are two Roman ballista balls from Gamla, from a residential quarter at the foot of the summit. Although archaeologists "attempted to stow away all the ballista balls as best we could," on site, after wrapping up initial excavations in 1989, "the theft occurred in 1995 when there was no one at the site," Danny Syon an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said in a statement.
| Read More » U.S. spacecraft sails by Pluto, capping 9-year journey  | By Irene Klotz LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - A U.S. spacecraft sailed past the tiny planet Pluto in the most distant reaches of the solar system on Tuesday, capping a journey of 3 billion miles (4.88 billion km) that began nine and a half years ago. The event culminated an initiative to explore the solar system that the space agency embarked upon more than 50 years ago. "It's truly a mark in human history," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, said from the mission control center at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside Baltimore.
| Read More » After Pluto Flyby, NASA Plays the Waiting Game  | Although NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto this morning (July 14), mission operators won't hear from the probe until tonight, and images of the pass-by won't be released until tomorrow (July 15). The probe's handlers don't expect to hear from New Horizons until 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT Wednesday) or so tonight.
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