|  Pluto Unveiled: NASA Photos Reveal Ice Mountains and Active Moon  | After 85 years as a mystery, the surface of Pluto is finally coming into focus, with a new NASA photo revealing towering ice mountains rising from its surprisingly youthful face. NASA today unveiled the first close-up photos of Pluto and two of its five moons as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft, which buzzed the dwarf planet Tuesday (July 14) during a historic flyby. One photo revealed a mountain range rising 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) into Pluto's sky, along with a surface just 100 million years old at the most.
| Read More » Tiny Pluto sports big mountains, New Horizons finds  | The results are the first since the piano-sized spacecraft capped a 3 billion mile (4.82 billion km), 9-1/2-year-long journey to pass within 7,800 miles (12,550 km) of Pluto on Tuesday. New Horizons is now heading deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a region of the solar system beyond Neptune that is filled with thousands of Pluto-like ice-and-rock worlds believed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists do not know how Pluto formed such big mountains, the tallest of which juts almost 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) off the ground, nearly as high as the Canadian Rockies.
| Read More » Genetically modified diamondback moth offers pest control hope Scientists in Britain say they have developed a way of genetically modifying and controlling an invasive species of moth that causes serious pest damage to cabbages, kale, canola and other similar crops worldwide. In what they said could be a pesticide-free and environmentally-friendly way to control insect pests, the scientists, from the Oxford University spinout company Oxitec, developed diamondback moths with a "self-limiting gene" which dramatically reduced populations in greenhouse trials. "This research is opening new doors for the future of farming with pest control methods that are non-toxic and pesticide-free," said Neil Morrison, an Oxitec research scientist who led the study. Read More » New Pluto Photos Contain Multitude of Mysteries  | Scientists are stunned at the incredible new images of the surface of Pluto, its largest moon Charon and its farthest-flung moon Hydra, which are just the tip of the scientific iceberg that will be sent back by NASA's New Horizons probe in the wake of its epic flyby. New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto at 7:49 a.m. (1149 GMT) Tuesday morning (July 14), but it took almost 24 hours for scientists to get a sneak peek at the treasure trove of data that the probe picked up. It will take 16 months for the spacecraft to beam home the entire volume of information it collected during its historic Pluto encounter.
| 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 » Why Beached Great White Shark Was Such a Rare Sight  | A young, great white shark had a near-death experience when the retreating tide left it stranded on a beach in Cape Cod on Monday afternoon (July 13). It was a rare event, and not just because people saved the life of a vilified marine creature, shark experts told Live Science. Great whites rarely wash up on beaches because they typically live in the open water, far away from the coast, said George Burgess, a shark expert at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
| Read More » Wild Milky Way Map Reveals Hidden Loops of Multicolored Microwaves  | Currents of bold color swirling in the image above look like an impressionist's painting, but are actually a map of microwaves emanating from the Milky Way galaxy. The low-energy light waves also reveal the presence of a ring of dust that cordons off a third of the sky. This new microwave map of the galaxy comes from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which launched in 2009 to measure the microwave light left over from the Big Bang.
| Read More » NASA Funds Titan Submarine, Other Far-Out Space Exploration Ideas  | NASA has just funded seven far-out space-exploration concepts, including a submarine that would explore the hydrocarbon seas of Saturn's huge moon Titan, an origami energy reflector and rapid space transit with an electric sail.
| Read More » Bill Cosby Deposition: What Is Somnophilia? Allegations that comedian Bill Cosby drugged and raped multiple women since the 1970s have brought a controversial psychological term to the surface: somnophilia, a fetish for sex with a sleeping person. In fact, sexual fetishes, or paraphilias are a hot-button topic in the psychological community. "Paraphilias and things like sexual sadism are not really used by psychologists and therapists," said Anna Randall, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist who practices in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Read More » Big Daddy of Primates: Lemur Has Giant Testes  | A recently discovered lemur from Madagascar has the largest testes per body weight of any primate, new research finds. If the northern giant mouse lemur were the size of a human, its testes would be as big as grapefruits, said Christoph Schwitzer, the director of conservation at the Bristol Zoological Society in the U.K. The lemur (Mirza zaza) was first named by science in 2005, and researchers knew nothing about its diet and lifestyle — though the animal is already listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
| Read More » Designers build spiral staircase to the treetops By Matthew Stock People of all ages could soon be able to climb to the tops of trees thanks to two design graduates from London's Royal College of Art (RCA). Designers Robert McIntyre and Thor ter Kulve came up with the idea for CanopyStair as a final year project at the RCA for their Design Products postgraduate program. McIntyre said that the more they developed the concept the more they realized its potential for unlocking a largely undiscovered wilderness that everyone could enjoy. Read More » Velociraptor's Cousin Flaunted Fabulous Feathers, Tiny Arms  | A flamboyant cousin of the fearsome Velociraptor, covered in layers of showy feathers from head to tail, once stalked meaty prey in the forests of what is now northeastern China. A farmer found the fossil in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, an area famous for its feathered dinosaur fossils. Researchers reported on the first known dinosaur fossil with preserved feathers (Sinosauropteryx) from the province in 1996, and "now we have thousands of different dinosaur fossils covered in feathers," said co-researcher Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.
| Read More » New Photos of Pluto and Moon Surprise, Puzzle Scientists  | The first up-close images of Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, are making scientists rethink the inner workings of these and other icy, far-flung worlds. The new Pluto photos, which were captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic flyby on Tuesday (July 14), show that both the dwarf planet and Charon have been geologically active in the recent past.
| Read More » Too Much Sitting Linked to Women's Cancer Risk Sitting for a long time is linked with a variety of diseases, including an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Now, a new study finds that sitting may be particularly harmful for women by raising their risk of developing several cancers. Women in the study who sat more than 6 hours a day were at a higher risk of developing breast cancer, ovarian cancer and the blood cancer multiple myeloma compared with women who sat less than 3 hours a day. Read More » Most Women Who Have Abortions Don't Regret Them The idea that women may regret having an abortion has been used to support restrictions against the procedure. "Claims that women suffer from psychological harm from their abortions, and that large proportions of women come to regret their abortions over time, at least in these data, are simply not true," said study researcher Corinne Rocca, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. The notion of abortion regret is often cited in legislation requiring that women undergo mandatory ultrasounds or waiting periods before an abortion. Read More » Douching May Expose Women to Harmful Chemicals Women who use vaginal douches — a type of feminine care product — may be at a risk of increased exposure to chemicals called phthalates, which have been tied to negative effects on health, according to a new study. Read More » Aiyeeeee! Human screams jolt brain's fear-response center Researchers who explored how the brain handles a scream said on Thursday the loud, high-pitched sound targets a deep brain structure called the amygdala that plays a major role in danger processing and fear learning. "We knew pretty well what frequencies are used by speech signals and the brain regions involved in speech processing: the auditory cortex and higher order regions such as Broca's area, for instance," said University of Geneva neuroscientist Luc Arnal, whose research appears in the journal Current Biology. Read More » No solace for food-deprived polar bears as sea ice wanes  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Polar bears are the kings of the ice surface covering the top of the globe, but the ongoing loss of the Arctic sea ice on which they hunt seals is causing summer food deprivation that threatens these imposing white-furred predators. Researchers who monitored the body temperature, activity levels and movements of 30 bears found they limited their summer energy expenditure a bit, but not enough to compensate for the food deprivation they face. The findings indicate polar bears cannot use reduced metabolic rates to extend their reliance on stored body fat when food becomes scarce.
| Read More » New dinosaur called 'fluffy feathered poodle from hell'  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have unearthed a spectacularly preserved, nearly complete fossil in northeastern China of a feathered dinosaur with wings like those of a bird, although they doubt the strange creature could fly. Considering its mouth full of sharp teeth and its overall oddness, University of Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte dubbed the dinosaur, named Zhenyuanlong suni, a "fluffy feathered poodle from hell." A member of a group of dinosaurs called raptors closely related to birds, it was a cousin of Velociraptor, although that dinosaur, featured inaccurately in the "Jurassic Park" films as much bigger than it was, lived about 40-50 million years later.
| Read More » Pluto's Big Moon Charon Has a Bizarre Mountain in a Moat (Photo)  | A newly released Charon photo, which was taken by NASA's New Horizons probe during its epic Pluto flyby Tuesday (July 14), reveals a mountain rising out of a big hole on the 750-mile-wide (1,200 kilometers) moon's surface. The feature, which is visible at the bottom left-hand corner of the inset, is "a large mountain sitting in a moat," Jeff Moore, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said in a statement.
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