|  Gorgeous NASA Photo Captures Earth from 1 Million Miles Away  | NASA released today (July 20) the first image of the sunlit side of Earth taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft from its final science orbit, and the beautiful photo has already made quite an impact. "Just got this new blue marble photo from ?@NASA. A beautiful reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have," President Barack Obama said today via his official Twitter account, @POTUS.
| Read More » Bad strut likely doomed SpaceX Falcon rocket, Musk says By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A flawed steel strut holding a helium pressurization bottle likely gave way, dooming a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last month, company chief Elon Musk said on Monday. The June 28 accident destroyed an unmanned Dragon cargo ship about two minutes after it lifted off from Florida for the International Space Station. SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Musk said flights will not resume until September at the earliest. Read More » Is E.T. Calling? Massive Search Will Scour Cosmos for Intelligent Aliens  | The most far-reaching search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is now underway: A new $100 million initiative invites the world's top minds to scour the universe for signals from distant planets, scientists announced today (July 20). Yuri Milner, a billionaire particle physicist and investor, announced the 10-year "Breakthrough" initiatives at the Royal Society in London with other top scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking and SETI pioneer Frank Drake. "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean," said Hawking, according to Space.com, a sister site to Live Science.
| Read More » No Humans Allowed! Test 'City' for Driverless Cars Opens  | Welcome to Mcity, a fake "town" built by researchers who are testing out the driverless cars of the future. The controlled test environment, which opened today (July 20) at the University of Michigan (U-M) in Ann Arbor, covers 32 acres (the size of about 24 football fields) and contains all the trappings of a real suburb or small city. There is an entire network of roads lined with sidewalks, streetlights, stop signs and traffic signals.
| Read More » SpaceX Rocket Explosion Likely Caused by Faulty Strut, Elon Musk Says  | The disintegration of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket shortly after it launched on a space station resupply mission for NASA last month was most likely caused by a faulty strut inside the booster's upper stage, company CEO and founder Elon Musk said Monday (July 20). This failure allowed the bottle to shoot to the top of the booster's upper-stage liquid-oxygen tank at high speed, causing a rapid "overpressure event" that destroyed the rocket, Musk told reporters during a teleconference. Every Falcon 9 launches with hundreds of such struts aboard, Musk said.
| Read More » Faulty metal brace likely doomed SpaceX Falcon rocket, Musk says  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A faulty metal brace in an unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket likely triggered the explosion that destroyed the booster minutes after liftoff from Florida last month, company chief Elon Musk said on Monday. The June 28 accident, which destroyed a load of cargo destined for the International Space Station, was the third botched resupply run within eight months. An Orbital ATK rocket explosion claimed a Cygnus cargo ship in October and a Russian Progress freighter failed to reach orbit in April.
| Read More » Why Atticus Finch's Racist Shift in 'Watchman' Could Be an Anomaly  | The character Atticus Finch, long revered by many as a paragon of justice, has transformed into an unapologetic racist in Harper Lee's new novel, "Go Set a Watchman" (Harper, 2015). Atticus' reversal of attitude, discovered by his grown-up daughter, Scout, during an annual visit home, shows that Atticus, always somewhat of an eccentric, is still an anomaly. "To be a progressive who champions civil rights and do a 180 makes one very much an outlier," said Charles Gallagher, a professor of sociology at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
| Read More » Accidental Find: Scientists Stumble on Centuries-Old Shipwreck  | While searching for a mooring from a previous trip, researchers off the coast of North Carolina discovered a well-preserved shipwreck and artifacts that may date to the American Revolution. "Our accidental find illustrates the rewards — and the challenge and uncertainty — of working in the deep ocean," expedition leader Cindy Van Dover, director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory, said in a statement. The ship is resting in the Atlantic Ocean along the Gulf Stream, a warm current known by mariners who have used the route for centuries to travel to North American ports, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and South America, according to Duke University. As such, several shipwrecks have been found along the route.
| Read More » Charred Remains of 1,500-Year-Old Hebrew Scroll Deciphered  | A burned 1,500-year-old Hebrew scroll found on the shore of the Dead Sea was recently deciphered, 45 years after archaeologists discovered it, researchers in Israel have announced. "The deciphering of the scroll, which was a puzzle for us for 45 years, is very exciting," Sefi Porath, the archaeologist who discovered the scroll in 1970 in Ein Gedi, Israel, said in a statement fromThe Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Only with advanced technology did the scroll reveal the opening verses of the book of Leviticus, the third book of the Hebrew Bible.
| Read More » High-Flying Photography: Drones Snap Spectacular, Contest-Winning Images  | Whether they're capturing panoramic views of tulip fields or snapping thrilling images of cliff divers plunging into the sea, one thing is for certain: Drones can take awesome pictures. A recent photo contest hosted by Dronestagram — a mobile app that lets users share pictures they take with their flying robots — sought to find the greatest drone-captured image of them all. Both amateur drone enthusiasts and professional photographers sent their pictures to be judged by a discerning panel of critics that included Dronestagram's CEO and founder Eric Dupin, National Geographic Deputy Director of Photography Ken Geiger and National Geographic France Editor-in-Chief Jean-Pierre Vrignaud.
| Read More » Weird Horse-Cows and 6-Legged Sheep Found in Iron Age Burials  | Weird, "hybridized" animal skeletons, including a cow-horse and a six-legged sheep litter the bottom of storage pits in an Iron Age site in England, archaeologists have found. The unusual remains belong to an ancient people who lived in southern England from about 400 B.C. until just before the Roman invasion, in A.D. 43, said dig co-director Paul Cheetham, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.
| Read More » Stephen Hawking: Intelligent Aliens Could Destroy Humanity, But Let's Search Anyway  | Since at least 2010, Hawking has spoken publicly about his fears that an advanced alien civilization would have no problem wiping out the human race the way a human might wipe out a colony of ants. "It's time […] to search for life beyond Earth.
| Read More » Alzheimer's Risk: Women with Memory Problems Decline Faster Than Men Elderly women are more likely than elderly men to develop Alzheimer's disease, even when they are exposed to some of the same risk factors, two new studies find. Senior women who have mild cognitive problems, such as memory impairment and difficulties with language or thinking skills, decline in cognitive ability twice as fast as men who also have mild cognitive impairment, according to one study. A separate study found that women declined more dramatically than men in measures of cognition, function and brain size after they underwent surgery and general anesthesia. Read More » Many People Seek Alternative Pain Therapies, But Don't Tell Doctors Many people with chronic pain aren't telling their primary doctors about their use of alternative therapies such as acupuncture and chiropractic work, a new study suggests. Chronic pain conditions can include back pain, arthritis, muscle pain, headache and fibromyalgia. "The study shows that a substantial percent of patients with chronic pain don't tell their primary doctors about their use of complementary and alternative medicine," said Dr. Charles Elder, the study's lead author and an investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Oregon. Read More » Mysterious 'Population Y' May Have Bred with Amazonia Peoples  | A number of natives of the Amazon rainforest may partly descend from peoples in the Pacific, researchers say. It remains a mystery as to when and how this genetic signature from an Australasia group in the Pacific they call "Population Y" made its way to the Amazon, scientists added. Most genetic studies have suggested that all Native Americans analyzed to date can trace much or all of their ancestry to a single common origin — a population from Eurasia that probably migrated to the Americas more than 15,000 years ago, back when lower sea levels exposed the Bering land bridge known as Beringia that connected the continents.
| Read More » NASA's Pluto Flyby Gets Funky in This Awesome Music Video  | NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto just got funky (with awesome results) in this music video, which blends a healthy dose of science with the tune "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson, featuring Bruno Mars.
| Read More » New Photos of Pluto Moons Nix and Hydra Show Best Views Yet  | Two of Pluto's small satellites are getting their moment in the sun. Newly released photos captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14 reveal intriguing new details about Nix and Hydra, two of the dwarf planet's five satellites. It will tell us why this region is redder than its surroundings," New Horizons mission scientist Carly Howett, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement today (July 21).
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