|  The Great American Total Solar Eclipse Is Coming 2 Years from Today  | This total solar eclipse of 2017 will be the first time in nearly four decades that such an event will be visible so close to home. Contrary to popular belief, totalsolar eclipses are not particularly rare. In recent years, for instance, assiduous eclipse chasers had to travel to remote locations such as Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada (2008), Easter Island (2010) or the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (2015).
| Read More » Jimmy Carter Gets New Melanoma Treatment: Here's How It Works To treat Jimmy Carter's cancer, doctors will use one of the newest advances in cancer therapy — a class of drugs that mobilizes a patient's own immune system against their cancer. On Thursday (Aug. 20), the former president announced that he has advanced melanoma, a type of skin cancer, and that it has spread to his liver and brain. Doctors have already removed a small tumor from his liver, and he will start a course of radiation therapy to treat the tumors in his brain, Carter said at a news conference. Read More » German scientists find rare dinosaur tracks By Josie Le Blond BERLIN (Reuters) - German scientists have found an unusually long trail of footprints from a 30-tonne dinosaur in an abandoned quarry in Lower Saxony, a discovery they think could be around 145 million years old. "It's very unusual how long the trail is and what great condition it's in," excavation leader Benjamin Englich told Reuters at the site, referring to 90 uninterrupted footprints stretching over 50 meters. Englich said the elephant-like tracks were stomped into the ground sometime between 135 and 145 million years ago by a sauropod - a class of heavy dinosaurs with long necks and tails. Read More » Booze Sent to Space to Explore 'Mellow' Mechanism  | Tokyo-based Suntory Global Innovation Center, which has a division called Suntory Whiskey, launched a set of alcoholic beverages toward the International Space Station on Wednesday (Aug. 19) aboard Japan's fifth H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-5). The booze includes five different types of distilled spirits, Suntory representatives said.
| Read More » Digital Calendar Shows Best Images from NASA Space Telescope  | A NASA telescope celebrates 12 years in space over the weekend, and the agency has released a free digital calendar packed with gorgeous images to mark the occasion. The new calendar features a dozen of the best pictures captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which blasted off on Aug. 23, 2003, and continues to observe the heavens today. "You can't fully represent Spitzer's scientific bounty in only 12 images," Spitzer project scientist Michael Werner, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
| Read More » Human Ancestors May Have Butchered Animals 3.4 Million Years Ago  | Cut marks on two 3.4-million-year-old animal bones from Ethiopia were thought to be evidence that the beasts had been trampled by other animals long ago, but new research suggests that's not the case. The new results debunk one theory for how the bones got their marks, and support — but do not, on their own, definitively prove — the alternative hypothesis that ancient human ancestors cut the bones. Combined with recent evidence that human predecessors used stone tools about 3.3 million years ago, the new study could help change the picture of human ancestors of the genus Australopithecus, whose members include the famous "Lucy" skeleton.
| Read More » California Sinking Faster Than Thought, Aquifers Could Permanently Shrink  | California is sinking even faster than scientists had thought, new NASA satellite imagery shows. "Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows — up to 100 feet (30 meters) lower than previous records," Mark Cowin, director of California's Department of Water Resources, said in a statement.
| Read More » Gruesome Meal: Seagulls Snack on Baby Seals' Eyeballs  | Hungry seagulls on the coast of Namibia have a gruesome way of snacking: they peck out and consume the eyeballs of baby seals, according to a new study. In 1998, Rowntree and several of her colleagues published their observations of the gulls' morbid feeding behavior in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
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