|  Pluto Flyby Road Trip: My Path to New Horizons  | On Tuesday, July 14, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will make history when it becomes the first probe ever to visit Pluto. This epic Pluto flyby will came a voyage of more than nine years for New Horizons. You can see our full coverage here: New Horizons Probe's July 14 Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage
| Read More » Pluto Flyby May Reveal Secrets of Saturn's Moon Titan  | The data NASA's New Horizons spacecraft collects during its historic flyby of Pluto today (July 14) may reveal insights into not only the dwarf planet, but also Saturn's huge moon Titan, scientists say. With its nitrogen and methane atmosphere, Pluto bears a strong resemblance to Titan — one of the most potentially habitable bodies in the solar system — or at least how Titan may have been in the past. "New Horizons will help us confirm our photochemical understanding [of] Pluto.
| Read More » Science Meets Superstition as Nervous Pluto Team Waits  | As NASA's New Horizons team members wait in anticipation for the spacecraft to check in with them tonight (July 14) after its historic flyby of Pluto, they'll be making sure not to jinx the mission. "It is science, but we are superstitious," New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, said during a news conference Sunday (July 12). About a year after New Horizons' January 2006 launch, Bowman made such a comment and then said, "Knock on wood," said mission principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado.
| Read More » Pluto, Big Moon Charon Blaze in New Technicolor Images  | Flamboyant yellows, purples, blues and greens cover the surfaces of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in new images from NASA's New Horizons space probe. The flamboyant new photos were captured using three color filters on New Horizons' Ralph imaging instrument.
| Read More » Festive Pluto Flyby Brings Cheers, Tears, Kids and (Maybe) Some Drama  | It feels like the ultimate space party, NASA style. When the New Horizons spacecraft made its historic Pluto flyby today (July 14) after more than nine years in transit, the moment came with the obligatory NASA countdown. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission, led a crowd of nearly 1,200 people in a countdown to 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) — the time of closest approach, when New Horizons zoomed within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto's surface.
| Read More » Pluto probe survives encounter, phones home  | By Irene Klotz LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - A U.S. spacecraft sailed past the tiny planet Pluto in the 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 survey the solar system that the space agency embarked upon more than 50 years ago. About 13 hours after its closest approach to Pluto, the last major unexplored body in the solar system, New Horizons phoned home, signaling that it had survived its 31,000 miles per hour(49,000 km per hour) blitz through the Pluto system.
| Read More » Pluto Flyby Success! NASA Probe Phones Home After Epic Encounter  | The first-ever flyby of Pluto was a big success. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent a status update home to its handlers here on Earth, indicating that the probe survived its historic encounter with Pluto this morning (July 14) — and that reams of amazing data should be on the way soon. The message came in to mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, at 8:53 p.m. EDT today (0053 GMT Wednesday), 4.5 hours after New Horizons sent it.
| Read More » Chimaera device paves way for wireless pain relief By Matthew Stock A prototype surgical tool that combines preoperative CT data with state-of-the-art sensing technology could put the ability to carry out complex operations in the hands of many more doctors, according to its developers. The hand-held device, called Chimaera, could revolutionize the delivery of miniaturized neurostimulators to specific nerves, and give many more patients access to pioneering new pain management technology. Neurostimulation involves applying an electric impulses to nerves to alter brain activity in a specific area. Read More » Oldest Animal Sperm Lasted 50 Million Years in Antarctica  | It's time to call Guinness World Records: Researchers on an Antarctic expedition have uncovered sperm cells dating to a whopping 50 million years ago, making these the oldest known animal sperm cells, a new study finds. Just as amber can entrap and preserve insects, the cocoon preserved the sperm cells while fossilizing over millions of years, the researchers said. "Because sperm cells are so short-lived and fragile, they are vanishingly rare in the fossil record," said lead author Benjamin Bomfleur, a paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
| Read More » Surprise! Infrared Camera Reveals Black Leopard's Hidden Spots  | The black leopards of the Malaysian Peninsula may look like they have uniform dark coats, but hidden cameras with infrared light have revealed a surprise: The black cats sport the characteristic leopard spots within their dark-hued coats. "Understanding how leopards are faring in an increasingly human-dominated world is vital," lead author Laurie Hedges, a zoology graduate at the University of Nottingham in England, said in a statement. Most have a distinctive and immediately recognizable spotting pattern, and for decades, the ubiquitous "leopard print" has shown up on bathing suits, fur coats and countless tacky 1970s-era bedspreads.
| Read More » It's Raining Spiders! Weirdest Effects of California Drought  | Brown lawns, fallow fields and higher water bills are all the predictable outcomes of the California drought. The Golden State is in the midst of its driest period on record. From pipe-eating poop to more roadkill, here are some of the strangest results of the California drought.
| Read More » Solar-powered plane grounded nine months in Hawaii by battery damage  | A solar-powered plane halfway through an attempt to circle the globe will be grounded in Hawaii for at least nine months because of battery damage sustained during its record 118-hour flight to Oahu from Japan, the project team said on Wednesday. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft dubbed Solar Impulse is not expected to take off on the next leg of its journey - a planned four-day, four-night flight to Phoenix, Arizona - until late April or early May 2016, the team said. Additional time is needed to repair the plane's four batteries, which store energy from the sun during daylight hours to keep the aircraft powered overnight, allowing it to remain aloft around the clock on extreme long-distance flights.
| Read More » Amazing Pluto Flyby Images to Be Unveiled Today  | The world will get its first up-close looks at Pluto today (July 15). Early this morning, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will beam home the first haul of photos and other data it collected during Tuesday morning's (July 14) historic Pluto flyby. "Included in that dataset will be new imagery at 10 times higher resolution than the spectacular imagery that debuted this morning," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said during a press briefing Tuesday night, referring to a gorgeous photo featuring Pluto's huge heart-shaped feature that went viral Tuesday.
| Read More » 5th-Century Mosaic Adorned with Elephants and Cupids  | Stunning mosaics have turned up during an archaeological dig of a fifth-century synagogue in northern Israel. "The images in these mosaics — as well as their high level of artistic quality — and the columns painted with vegetal motifs have never been found in any other synagogue," Jodi Magness, the director of the excavation project and professor of early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement. The site is located in Huqoq, in the Galilee region of Israel.
| Read More » See Pluto Live Via Telescope Today in Slooh Webcast  | The online Slooh Community Observatory will discuss the latest close-up images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons probe, along with live observations of the dwarf planet by ground-based telescopes, in a live webcast today (July 15), and you can watch it live online. The free webcast will air at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT) on the the Slooh website (http://www.slooh.com), and feature analysis of the newest Pluto images from New Horizons. It will also include live views of Pluto taken through Slooh's remotely operated observatory in the Canary Islands, Spain.
| Read More » 'Chasing Pluto': PBS Documentary on Epic New Horizons Flyby Airs Tonight  | Anyone wishing to relive the excitement of the New Horizons spacecraft's epic Tuesday (July 14) flyby of Pluto is in luck: A documentary that chronicles the historic event premieres tonight (July 15) on PBS. "Chasing Pluto," a production of PBS' NOVA science series, airs tonight at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT. The documentary provides an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the New Horizons mission, brings viewers up to speed on some of the newest developments in planetary science and investigates why people care so much about Pluto, producers said.
| Read More » Children with Severe Allergies Susceptible to Rebound Reactions It's fairly common for children who have a severe allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis to be in danger of having a second, delayed allergic reaction within hours of the first one, a new study suggests. Researchers in Canada found that about 15 percent of children who came to the emergency room for anaphylaxis had a second serious allergic reaction hours after the initial reaction. The study also found that about 75 percent of these second anaphylactic reactions, known as biphasic reactions, occurred within 6 hours of their first anaphylaxis symptoms, and in most cases, the children were still at the ER because of their first reaction. Read More » Hope and Resilience: How Parents Cope with a Child's Cancer Around the time she was celebrating her first Mother's Day, in May 2009, Merri Hackett and her husband received the news no parents want to hear. Hackett was 23 at the time, married for more than a year to her childhood sweetheart, living in Memphis, Tennessee and trying to get the hang of being a new mother. As a precautionary measure, the pediatrician recommended that Josiah get an ultrasound. Read More » Homeopathic Treatments: Do They Help or Harm? Although some people say homeopathy, a type of alternative medicine, is safe and leads to better outcomes when used along with conventional medicine, others say it can be harmful, and it is unethical for doctors to recommend it. In fact, Peter Fisher, director of research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, argues that homeopathic treatments can improve patient outcomes. Read More » Human Hands Are Primitive, New Study Finds  | Human hands may be more primitive than those of chimpanzees, more closely resembling the hands of the last common ancestor of humans and chimps, researchers say. These results suggest that since the overall hand proportions of humans are largely primitive, when the first members of the human lineage started to use and produce complex stone tools in a systematic way, "their hands were already pretty much like ours today," said study lead author Sergio Almécija, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. This ability depends not only on the extraordinarily powerful human brain, but also the dexterity of the human hand.
| Read More » Elusive New Pentaquark Particle Discovered After 50-Year Hunt  | Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest atom smasher, have found proof of the existence of the pentaquark, an elusive subatomic particle that was first proposed to exist more than 50 years ago. "The pentaquark is not just any new particle," Guy Wilkinson, a spokesperson for the LHC experiment that discovered the pentaquark, said in a statement. "It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over 50 years of experimental searches.
| Read More » Scientists use 'therapeutic cloning' to fix mitochondrial genes By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have used a controversial cloning technique to make new, healthy, perfectly matched stem cells from the skin of patients with mitochondrial diseases in a first step toward treatment for these incurable, life-threatening conditions. A study on the technique, published in the journal Nature, showcases the latest advance in the use of somatic-cell nuclear transfer to make patient-specific stem cells that could be used to treat genetic diseases. "This work enables the generation of an unlimited – and mutation-free – supply of replacement cells for patients with mitochondrial disease," said Dr. Robert Lanza, Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, who was not involved in the research. Read More » Scientists use "therapeutic cloning" to fix mitochondrial genes  | By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have used a controversial cloning technique to make new, healthy, perfectly matched stem cells from the skin of patients with mitochondrial diseases in a first step toward treatment for these incurable, life-threatening conditions. A study on the technique, published in the journal Nature, showcases the latest advance in the use of somatic-cell nuclear transfer to make patient-specific stem cells that could be used to treat genetic diseases. "This work enables the generation of an unlimited – and mutation-free – supply of replacement cells for patients with mitochondrial disease," said Dr. Robert Lanza, Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, who was not involved in the research.
| Read More » Huge Brain Scan Database is Revealing Secrets of the Mind  | Karen Lazo, multimedia intern at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Researchers are using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans to watch how blood flows through active areas of the brain in real time. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, cognitive neuroscientist Russell Poldrack and a team at Stanford University launched new infrastructure to enable sharing.
| Read More » Dust Clouds the Future of the South Asian Monsoon (Op-Ed) The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned for more than a decade that rising air pollution levels pose a serious threat to human health worldwide, especially in developing countries, and high levels of pollution in the urban centers of China and India are now responsible for the premature deaths of more than 2 million people every year. As if this news were not bad enough, my colleagues and I have found that pollution and dust particles blanketing that region are responsible for a 20-percent decline in South Asian monsoon rainfall over the past century — findings published June 16 in the journal Nature Communications. The South Asian summer monsoon is a dramatic phenomenon that has inspired prose and poetry for millennia. Read More » Justified Evil: How Wrongdoers Excuse Amoral Acts  | Scott Hawkins is an author and computer programmer, and recently published his first novel, "The Library at Mount Char" (Crown, 2015). The American Psychiatric Association, in its DSM-IV-TR, estimated that 3 percent of males and 1 percent of females in the general population are psychopaths. In writing "The Library at Mount Char," I wanted to explore how people with normal emotional equipment, and at least some sense of morality, for one reason or another chose to commit amoral acts.
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