|  Japan cargo ship embarks on International Space Center supply mission By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - After three botched missions to resupply the International Space Center since October, an unmanned cargo ship blasted off from southern Japan on Wednesday with food, water and gear needed to keep the research station and its crew functioning. A 19-story H-2B rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center at 1150 GMT and put the HTV capsule into orbit 15 minutes later, a NASA Television broadcast showed. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, who arrived at the outpost last month, will use the station's robot arm on Monday to pluck the capsule from orbit and anchor it to the Harmony module. Read More » Epic Trailer for 'The Martian' Questions the Value of a Human Life in Space  | An epic new trailer for the movie "The Martian" looks even more intense than the last one, and it raises some intriguing questions about the value of human life in space exploration. Set to the howling Jimi Hendrix song "All Along the Watchtower," the new trailer for "The Martian," directed by Ridley Scott, features some thrilling (and stressful) clips of astronauts braving Martian storms, rocket launchethes and other near-death experiences. The film focuses on astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon), who is mistakenly presumed dead by his fellow Mars explorers and is left behind on the Red Planet.
| Read More » Scientists call for new review of herbicide, cite 'flawed' U.S. regulations U.S. regulators have relied on flawed and outdated research to allow expanded use of an herbicide linked to cancer, and new assessments should be urgently conducted, according to a column published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. There are two key factors that necessitate regulatory action to protect human health, according to the column: a sharp increase in herbicide applied to widely planted genetically modified (GMO) crops used in food, and a recent World Health Organization (WHO) determination that the most commonly used herbicide, known as glyphosate, is probably a human carcinogen. The opinion piece was written by Dr. Philip Landrigan, a Harvard-educated paediatrician and epidemiologist who is Dean for Global Health at the Mount Sinai Medical Centre in New York, and Chuck Benbrook, an adjunct professor at Washington State University's crops and soil science department. Read More » Scientists call for new review of herbicide, cite 'flawed' U.S. regulations U.S. regulators have relied on flawed and outdated research to allow expanded use of an herbicide linked to cancer, and new assessments should be urgently conducted, according to a column published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. There are two key factors that necessitate regulatory action to protect human health, according to the column: a sharp increase in herbicide applied to widely planted genetically modified (GMO) crops used in food, and a recent World Health Organization (WHO) determination that the most commonly used herbicide, known as glyphosate, is probably a human carcinogen. The opinion piece was written by Dr. Philip Landrigan, a Harvard-educated pediatrician and epidemiologist who is Dean for Global Health at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, and Chuck Benbrook, an adjunct professor at Washington State University's crops and soil science department. Read More » No Asteroid Is Threatening to Hit Earth Next Month, NASA Says  | There's no reason to fear a devastating asteroid strike next month, NASA experts say. For the last few months, rumors have circulated on the Internet that a big asteroid will slam into Earth near Puerto Rico between Sept. 15 and Sept. 28, wreaking widespread destruction throughout coastal regions of the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America. "There is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
| Read More » 'Smart Drug' Modafinil Actually Works, Study Shows The "smart drug" modafinil actually does work for some people, improving their performance on long and complex tasks, also enhancing decision-making and planning skills, a new review of studies finds. Modafinil, also known by its brand name Provigil, is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat people with sleep disorders such as narcolepsy. "This is the first overview of modafinil's actions in non-sleep-deprived individuals since 2008, and so we were able to include a lot of recent data," Ruairidh McLennan Battleday, a co-author of the new review and a lecturer at the University of Oxford in England, said in a statement. Read More » New GMO Controversy: Are the Herbicides Dangerous? Although genetically modified organisms (GMOs) don't appear by themselves to have ill effects on human health, the herbicides used on these crops could be an overlooked health threat, some researchers say in a controversial new opinion piece. People have been manipulating genes in plants for centuries, but arguing that this means GMOs are safe "misses the point that GM crops are now the agricultural products most heavily treated with herbicides, and that two of these herbicides may pose risks of cancer," Dr. Philip Landrigan, a professor of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and Charles Benbrook, a crop and soil scientist at Washington State University, wrote in an opinion article published in the Aug. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Read More » Vomit Machine Proves Viruses Can Go Flying Bad news: You know that last stomach bug you picked up, the one that gave you stomach cramps, diarrhea and nausea? "Even though it's a small percentage [of the virus particles] that makes it into the bio-aerosolized form, and the majority is in the liquid form, when you convert these small percentages to absolute numbers, the numbers are large enough that they're above the infectious dose of the norovirus," study researcher Francis de los Reyes III, an environmental engineer at North Carolina State University, told Live Science. Read More » Why the 'Prime Meridian of the World' Shifted Hundreds of Feet  | Once called the Prime Meridian of the World, the invisible line running north to south that divides the world into Eastern and Western hemispheres passed through the Airy Transit Circle — a 19th-century telescopic instrument at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. A change in finding out which way is down — from using a basin of liquid mercury to relying on satellites around Earth, researchers have found. Nowadays, any point on Earth's surface can be described by its latitude and longitude — lines of latitude run from east to west, while lines of longitude run from north to south.
| Read More » 'Base Jumping' Spider Soars from Rainforest Treetops  | In addition to these arachnids, lots of small insects (including many species of ants and bristletails) are known to engage in similar behavior — leaping from the tippy tops of trees with total confidence, even though they don't have wings to help them along, said Stephen Yanoviak, an associate professor of biology at the University of Louisville and lead author of the new study. Selenops, often called "flatties" because of their exceedingly thin bodies, blend in well in tropical forest environments, the researchers said. Then, they took the spiders high up into the forest canopy and turned the cups upside down.
| Read More » Long Misunderstood, Hummingbird Tongue Works Like Micropump  | The slender hummingbird tongue has been misunderstood for more than 180 years, a new study finds. Since 1833, scientists thought that hummingbird tongues used capillary action — a phenomenon in which liquid flows through narrow areas, even working against gravity — to slurp up floral nectar. Researchers got this intriguing (but wrong) idea because the birds have long groves on their tongues that look like open cylinders, said Alejandro Rico-Guevara, lead researcher of the new study and a research associate of functional morphology at the University of Connecticut.
| Read More » Fire blazes at Paris science museum; 2 firefighters injured  | PARIS (AP) — A fire damaged multiple levels of the main science museum in Paris on Thursday, and two firefighters suffered injuries fighting the flames.
| Read More » To Pluto and Beyond: Planetarium Show Wows Space Fans  | The first-ever flyby of Pluto left scientists and the public wide-eyed, and the surprises will likely keep on coming. At the American Museum of Natural History here, Emily Rice, an astrophysicist at the College of Staten Island, and Jackie Faherty, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institute, took an audience on a journey with New Horizons last week to highlight the science.
| Read More » Curiosity Rover Snaps Awesome Selfies on Mars During Mountain Trek  | NASA's Curiosity rover captured a glorious selfie on Mars this month, shortly before resuming its trek up a huge Red Planet mountain.
| Read More » Detecting Ripples in Space-Time, with a Little Help from Einstein  | Marco Cavaglia is an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Mississippi and a member of the LIGO team. "Since Newton's first law of motion associates change of speed and direction to a force, the planet's response to the space-time curvature produced by the sun may be interpreted by an observer as a force: gravity.
| Read More » Denver's 'Corpse Flower' Really Does Smell Like Rotting Meat  | From the front of the 3-hour line where thousands of people wait to sniff the first bloom of a giant corpse flower in Colorado, the stench is more like a whiff. This is the smell used by the corpse flower, or titan arum, to lure flies and beetles to its blossom. Around the back of the greenhouse here at the Denver Botanic Gardens, the smell is stronger, drawn out by the fans that circulate air through the building.
| Read More » Skin Cancer More Aggressive with Fewer Moles Present  | People who have fewer moles may be at higher risk for aggressive melanoma than those with more numerous moles, according to a new study. Researchers reviewed the charts of 281 patients with the skin cancer melanoma who visited a Boston hospital in 2013 and 2014. Of all the patients, 89 had 50 or more moles, whereas the remaining 192 had fewer than 50 moles.
| Read More » Post-Workout Ice Baths May Weaken Muscles Taking a post-workout ice bath — a technique promoted for relieving muscle soreness — may actually reduce gains in muscle mass and strength, a small new study suggests. The other half cooled down actively, by riding exercise bikes after each workout. The researchers found that, at the end of the study, muscle strength and mass increased more in the men who cooled down on exercise bikes than in those who took ice baths. Read More » Giant 'Battle Bot' Could Get Makeover Ahead of Epic Duel  | Finally, there's a crowdfunding campaign for people who want to watch giant robots fight to the death. MegaBots Inc. — a Boston-based company that builds huge, human-operated, fighting robots — launched a Kickstarter campaign today (Aug. 19) to raise money to develop a huge, gun-toting robot, in preparation for an upcoming "duel" with a similar "battle bot" from Japan. In June, the MegaBots team took to YouTube to challenge its one and only competitor, Suidobashi Heavy Industry of Japan, to a robot duel.
| Read More » Land Vanishes Under Monsoon Floods in New Satellite Image  | A river in Myanmar appears swollen with monsoon rain in a new photo taken from space. The overflowing Irrawaddy River — the longest river in the country — is emblematic of the worst floods to hit the Southeast Asian nation in decades. The torrential rains have displaced thousands of people and caused over 70 deaths, according to local coverage in The Star Online.
| Read More » You Can Send Your Name to Mars Aboard NASA's InSight Lander  | Your name could land on Mars a year from now aboard NASA's next Red Planet mission. The space agency is inviting people around the world to submit their names to be etched on a silicon chip that will be affixed to the InSight Mars lander, which is scheduled to blast off in February 2016 and touch down on the Red Planet seven months later. "Our next step in the journey to Mars is another fantastic mission to the surface," Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.
| Read More » Where Are All the Dark Energy and Dark Matter?  | Two experiments on Earth are helping to shine light on the hidden characteristics of dark energy and dark matter — elusive phenomena that make up nearly 95 percent of the universe but remain hidden from direct detection. The new dark matter and dark energy experiments narrowed the realm where the mysterious material can lie, thus helping scientists to better understand the strange stuff that, together, constitutes the majority of the universe. In search of the mysterious "chameleon particle" — a potential source of dark energy — a team of scientists, led by Paul Hamilton, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, measured the forces acting on a falling cesium atom.
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