|  Is That Really Alien Life? Scientists Worry Over False-Positive Signs  | The search for life elsewhere in the universe is on the cusp of a new era: When scientists will have the opportunity to study the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets with future, technologically advanced telescopes. As such, it is considered a so-called "biosignature." Plants create oxygen, of course, but the bulk is thought to have come from certain types of bacteria that have lived on the planet for more than 2 billion years.
| Read More » Alien of the Deep Has Needle-Sharp Teeth & a Shiny Head Lure  | Lurking in the dark depths of the sea, a new species that looks more like an alien than a fish has been discovered, a creature with needlelike teeth and a glowing fishing pole of sorts atop its head. Scientists spotted three females of the new species of anglerfish between 3,280 feet and nearly 5,000 feet (1,000 and 1,500 meters) beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Now called Lasiognathus dinema, the anglerfish stood out from other species in its genus by the curved appendages jutting out from its so-called esca, or the organ at the tip of the "fishing rod" that contains light-producing bacteria.
| Read More » Why 10,000-Year-Old Gravity-Defying Rocks Haven't Toppled  | The delicately balanced rocks do not topple, despite being near active faults, which likely indicates that earthquake tremors generated by the San Andreas Fault — the 800-mile-long (1,287 kilometers) fault that cuts through California and marks the boundary between the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate — are able to transfer to the neighboring San Jacinto Fault, weakening overall shaking in the areas where the rocks sit, the researchers said. As the rock rises, wind, water and other natural processes erode bits and pieces of it away, eventually chiseling out the remaining delicately balanced rocks, said study co-author Julian Lozos, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
| Read More » Space Station Cosmonauts Taking Spacewalk Today: Watch It Live  | Two Russian cosmonauts will venture outside the International Space Station today (Aug. 10) in a spacewalk to install equipment, pick up an experiment and take pictures of the station. Expedition 44 commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko are expected to exit the Russian Pirs airlock at 10:14 a.m. EDT (1414 GMT). You can watch the spacewalk live online beginning at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT), courtesy of NASA TV.
| Read More » 'Fantastic Four' Jettisons Space-Age Origins of Marvel's First Family  | In the new "Fantastic Four" movie from 20th Century Fox, the classic rocket-based origin of Marvel's First Family is dropped for one with interdimensional teleportation and mystic energy. The Fantastic Four, in their first appearance in 1961, get their superpowers by way of cosmic rays. Spoiler Alert: In the new movie "Fantastic Four", on the other hand, the four are teleported to an alternate universe (to what looks like a rocky, barren planet) where their bodies are exposed to an unknown, mystical energy.
| Read More » Woman Loses Vision After Mosquito Bites A woman who caught chikungunya fever while vacationing in the Caribbean wound up losing some of the vision in her right eye permanently, according to a new report of her case. The findings suggest that vision problems may be an underreported effect of the mosquito-transmitted virus, which has spread in recent years from Africa and Asia to the Caribbean, Latin America and parts of the United States, the report's authors said. "Sight-threatening visual loss can be a late complication of infection with chikungunya," said Dr. Abhijit Mohite, who treated the woman and co-authored the report of her case. Read More » Want 1, 2 or 3 Kids? Study Estimates When to Start Building Your Family More and more couples are postponing having children as they try to balance their careers and other life goals with their desire to have kids. Researchers estimated the maximum age at which a woman should start trying to become pregnant, depending on how many children she wants to have and whether she is open to using in vitro fertilization (IVF), given that fertility declines progressively with a woman's age. For example, the results showed that couples who want a 90 percent chance of having at least one child and who don't want to use IVF should start trying to get pregnant no later than when the woman is 32. Read More » Ancient Mayan Tablet with Hieroglyphics Honors Lowly King  | A 1,600-year-old Mayan stone tablet describing the rule of an ancient king has been unearthed in the ruins of a temple in Guatemala. The broken tablet, or stela, depicts the king's head, adorned with a feathered headdress, along with some of his neck and shoulders. The stone tablet, found in the jungle temple, may shed light on a mysterious period when one empire in the region was collapsing and another was on the rise, said the lead excavator at the site, Marcello Canuto, an anthropologist at Tulane University in Louisiana.
| Read More » 5 Ways Cecil the Lion Helped Scientists Understand Big Cats When an American big-game hunter shot and killed a famous lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe last month, he did more than kill an animal — he killed an important research subject. Cecil, a 13-year-old male Southwest African lion, had been part of an ecological study in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park since 2008. The initiative was developed by researchers at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and is one of several conservation projects managed by the university's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). Read More » Nepal Quake Could Have Been Much Deadlier, Scientists Say  | A magnitude-7.8 earthquake that shook Nepal in April killed some 9,000 people and injured 23,000 more, but the death toll in the valley of Kathmandu could have been much worse, researchers say. The shaking outside the Kathmandu valley, where the city itself lies, was at about one wave per second, or 1 Hertz, which caused the ground inside the valley to move in resonance at a lower frequency that did more damage to taller buildings. The frequency of shaking, measured in Hertz, that will damage a tall building can be roughly calculated by dividing the number of stories in the building by 10, said study co-author Jean-Philippe Avouac, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
| Read More » US House panel asks NASA why it isn't probing SpaceX blast  | By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. House panel this week asked NASA to explain why it hasn't launched an independent review of the explosion on June 28 of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as it did after the earlier explosion of Orbital ATK Inc's Antares rocket on Oct. 28. Both launches were paid for by NASA under separate contracts worth well more than $1 billion each, and destroyed unmanned rockets carrying cargo to the International Space Station. The accidents have raised questions about the U.S. government's increasing reliance on commercial launch contracts and its oversight of accident investigations.
| Read More » Cosmonauts embark on six-hour spacewalk outside ISS  | A pair of Russian cosmonauts began their working week on Monday by cleaning the windows of the International Space Station (ISS), floating more than 200 miles (320 km) above the earth's surface. Station commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko left the station's Pirs module at 1420 GMT, embarking on a six-hour space walk to install new equipment and carry out maintenance tasks. The cosmonauts quickly completed their first task, installing equipment to help crew members manoeuvre outside the ISS, before cleaning a porthole window to remove years of dirt left by exhaust fumes from visiting ships.
| Read More » Tesla Unveils Snakelike Robot Charger for Electric Cars  | Plugging your electric car into its charger with your own two hands is so 2013. Last week, the company released a video on its YouTube channel that shows a snakelike robot slithering toward the charging port of Tesla's Model S electric car. Tesla hasn't released any additional information about this helpful piece of machinery, but the company's CEO, Elon Musk, hinted back in Dec. 2014 that something like it might be in the works.
| Read More » Astronauts Snack on Space-Grown Lettuce for First Time  | For the first time, at least officially, the NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station have tasted the product, or more specifically, the produce, of their work. Expedition 44 crewmembers Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren of NASA, together with Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Monday (Aug. 10) happily chomped on "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce, which they freshly harvested from the orbiting lab's Veggie plant growth system. "That's awesome," remarked Lindgren on his first bite.
| Read More » New tadpole disease affecting frogs across globe, scientists find Tadpoles are contracting a new, highly infectious disease that may be threatening frog populations worldwide, British scientists have found. A parasitic disease caused by single-celled microbes known as "protists" was found in the livers of tadpole samples taken from six countries across three continents, the scientists said in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal on Monday. "Global frog populations are suffering serious declines and infectious disease has been shown to be a significant factor," said Thomas Richards of Exeter University, who co-led the study. Read More » New tadpole disease affecting frogs across globe, scientists find  | Tadpoles are contracting a new, highly infectious disease that may be threatening frog populations worldwide, British scientists have found. A parasitic disease caused by single-celled microbes known as "protists" was found in the livers of tadpole samples taken from six countries across three continents, the scientists said in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal on Monday. "Global frog populations are suffering serious declines and infectious disease has been shown to be a significant factor," said Thomas Richards of Exeter University, who co-led the study.
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