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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Human bones in Pennsylvania thought to be from 1918 flu pandemic By David DeKok SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, Pa. (Reuters) - Forensic archaeologists on Friday began excavating a highway embankment in eastern Pennsylvania, looking for more bones believed to be from impoverished victims of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. The state highway department, known as PennDOT, received reports of bones in what appeared to be an impromptu burial site beneath a broad meadow that had once been the site of a poorhouse, said Bob Rescorla, a PennDOT inspector at the site. Historians say the Spanish flu pandemic touched all parts of the world and claimed tens of millions of lives. Read More » Hiking in Bear Country? How to Prevent an Attack News of a grizzly bear attacking a 63-year-old man, who was a skilled hiker, in Yellowstone on Friday (Aug. 7), may have even avid adventurers wondering what's the best way to escape the long and curved claws of such a wild animal. It's unclear how Lance Crosby, who had worked five seasons with Medcor, a company that runs three urgent-care clinics in the park, died. "But the preliminary results show that he was attacked by at least one grizzly bear," according to a National Park Service (NPS) statement. Read More » Medieval Earthquake Moved River 12 Miles An earthquake in 1570 changed the course of the Po River in Italy, new research finds. The Po, the longest river in Italy, has shifted northward about 12 miles (20 kilometers) between the towns of Guastella and Ficarolo over the past 2,800 years, researchers reported July 20 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The 1570 temblor caused a 4- to 6-inch (10 to 15 centimeters) uplift of the right flank of the river and resulted in a major one-time shift of the final portion of the waterway, according to geoscientists Livio Sirovich and Franco Pettenati of the National Institute for Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS) in Trieste. Read More » Megacity: Beijing Quadrupled in Size in 10 Years Beijing has seen explosive growth in recent years, with the physical size of the city quadrupling in just a decade, a new study reveals. Researchers used satellite data to see how much the Chinese capital has expanded, and calculated changes in the urban environment as well. Using NASA's QuikScat satellite, researchers at NASA and Stanford University looked at new roads and buildings that had been constructed in Beijing between 2000 and 2009. Read More » Why Your Eyes Dart Around When Dreaming The vivid, bizarre images that infuse dreams are formed when people make the darting, rapid eye movements characteristic of a certain stage of sleep, new research suggests. The findings confirm a long-held scientific hypothesis that such rapid eye movements during sleep reflect a person viewing their dream-world in the same way that they would take in a scene when awake. "There was this idea that we scan the dream image, or the mental image when we dream," said study co-author Yuval Nir, a sleep researcher and neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Read More » Spacecraft Makes Final Close Flyby of Saturn Moon Dione Today The Cassini spacecraft will make one last close flyby of Saturn's pockmarked moon Dione today (Aug. 17), in search of direct evidence that the moon is geologically alive and active. Cassini, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, has been studying the Saturn system since 2004, and its grand mission will come to a close in 2017, after the spacecraft makes a series of dives through the space between the planet and its rings. On Monday, Cassini will make its fifth close flyby of Dione, coming to within 295 miles (474 kilometers) of the moon's surface, at approximately 2:33 p.m. EDT (6:33 GMT). Read More » Why Do Breakups Hurt More for Women? Blame Evolution Women tend to feel the emotional pain associated with a breakup more acutely than men, but men take longer to "get over" their former lover, according to researchers from Binghamton University and University College London, both in the United Kingdom. For the study, the researchers asked 5,705 people in 96 countries to rate the physical and emotional pain they felt after a breakup on a scale from 1 (no pain) to 10 (unbearable pain). On average, women ranked their emotional pain — including feelings like sadness and depression, as well as anxiety, fear and loss of focus — as being slightly higher than those of their male counterparts (a score of 6.84 versus 6.58). Read More » Hatfields & McCoys Gather (Peacefully) to Unearth Relics at Last Battle Site Those doing the excavating in Pike County, Kentucky, are the Hatfields and McCoys — two families that are infamous in the United States for their epic feud, which began around the time of the Civil War and ended in 1891 after several decades of violence that claimed at least a dozen lives. In 2012, the Hatfields and McCoys were featured on National Geographic Channel's "Diggers," a show that follows two amateur relic hunters around the U.S. as they search for historical objects buried in the dirt. The feud between the Hatfields and McCoys came to a head on New Year's night 1888, when members of the Hatfield clan set fire to Randolph McCoy's home, resulting in the death of two McCoys. Read More » Astronomical Sleuths Investigate Famous Times Square Kissers An unlikely group of scientists, including physicists and astronomers, is helping solve one of history's most romantic mysteries: Who are the sailor and the woman in white seen kissing in the iconic "V-J Day in Times Square" photo? Taken 70 years ago today, on Aug. 14, 1945, and published later in Life magazine, the photo is synonymous with the end of World War II and Victory over Japan Day, or V-J Day. In the United States, V-J Day is celebrated on Sept. 2, the day Japan signed the official surrender documents. Read More » Asia's Rapidly Shrinking Glaciers Could Have Ripple Effect The glaciers in Asia's Tian Shan mountains have lost more than a quarter of their total mass over the past 50 years — a rate of loss about four times greater than the global average during that time, new research shows. By 2050, half of the remaining ice in the Tian Shan (also spelled Tien Shan) glaciers could be lost, and these shrinking glaciers could reduce valuable water supplies in central Asia and lead to fuel conflicts there, the study found. "If water resources really will decline there in the future, there is a big potential for conflicts," said the study's lead author, Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at the German Research Center for Geosciences and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. Read More » How a Tick Bite Can Lead to Limb Amputations A woman in Oklahoma who contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever from a tick bite recently needed to have all four of her limbs amputated as a result of her infection. The woman, 40-year-old Jo Rogers, may have been bitten by a tick while on vacation in Grand Lake, Oklahoma, in early July. Doctors tested her for West Nile virus, meningitis and other infections before finally diagnosing her with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is caused by the bacteria Rickettsia rickettsia and transmitted by ticks. Read More » Smart People Live Longer — Here's Why Smarter people tend to live longer than those with less luck in the intelligence department. About 95 percent of the relationship between intelligence and longevity is explained by genetic influences on both traits, researchers reported July 26 in the International Journal of Epidemiology. The study was somewhat limited in that most of the participants took intelligence tests during middle age, rather than in their youth. Read More » New Temperature Record Is Huge Achievement for Superconducting A new record-high temperature has been achieved for superconductors — extraordinary materials that conduct electricity without dissipating energy. The advance may be an important step in the long-standing quest to achieve a room-temperature superconductor, which could cities build vastly more efficient power grids, researchers say. Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance below a certain temperature. Read More » My Planet from Space: UN Photo Exhibit Showcases Earth's Stunning Beauty While wandering through a maze of vividly detailed depictions of Earth's surface currently on display here at the United Nations Headquarters Visitors' Lobby, a viewer might mistake the images for abstract art. But they are real photographs, and crouched at the center of the exhibit like a spider is a 1:10 scale model of the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1A satellite — one of the sources of these incredible images. All of the images at the "My Planet from Space: Fragility and Beauty" exhibit, which runs until Sept. 9, are scientific images of Earth taken by satellites. Read More » NASA Extracting Tanks from Retired Shuttle Endeavour for Use on Space Station NASA's space shuttle Endeavour, retired and on exhibit in Los Angeles for the past three years, has been called back into service — or rather, parts of it have — for the benefit of the International Space Station. A NASA team working this week at the California Science Center will remove four tanks from deep inside the winged orbiter to comprise a water storage system for the space station. "The ISS [International Space Station] program has been steadily increasing the amount of crew time dedicated to science and technology development [onboard the station] through initiatives like the water storage system," NASA told Endeavour's curators at the California Science Center, according to information shared exclusively with collectSPACE.com. Read More »
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