|  Beyond Pluto: 2nd Target Chosen for New Horizons Probe  | NASA's New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto last month, now has a second target to aim for. The New Horizons team has selected an object named 2014 MU69, which lies roughly 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, as the next target for up-close study by the spacecraft, NASA announced today (Aug. 28). However, the space agency still must officially approve a New Horizons mission extension for the second flyby to take place in 2019.
| Read More » The FDA's New Serving Sizes May Backfire — Here's Why In a new study, just about 20 percent of people answered this question correctly, saying that serving size is how much people typically eat in one sitting. Most people incorrectly said that serving size is a recommendation of how much they could or should consume in one sitting. This lack of understanding could be a problem for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the researchers said. The FDA is planning to change the serving sizes that are listed on nutrition labels because people typically eat larger portions now than they did when the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) was passed, in 1990. Read More » Venus Displays Its Brilliant Morning Finery for the Fall  | All through the spring and early summer, the planet Venus dominated the western evening sky. Now, as summer turns into fall, Venus will dominate the eastern sky before sunrise. Venus has erupted into view in the eastern morning sky for the past couple of weeks.
| Read More » Full Moon Tonight Offers Sneak Preview of September Lunar Eclipse  | A full moon will grace the sky tonight (Aug. 29), but it is only a dress rehearsal for next month, when the full moon will undergo a total lunar eclipse. Some Native American fishing tribes referred to the full moon of August as the "Sturgeon Moon," since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the "Full Red Moon" because, as the moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze.
| Read More » Panda Bros: Twin Cubs Were Fraternal Brothers, Tests Show  | Twin pandas born at the Smithsonian's National Zoo would have been fraternal brothers, if the firstborn cub hadn't died just five days after making its debut on Earth. Tests on the pandas' DNA showed that both cubs were male, according to researchers at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's (SCBI) Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics. Furthermore, a paternity analysis showed that Tian Tian (t-YEN t-YEN) fathered the twins, the zoo said.
| Read More » Hurricane Katrina's Stark Changes Endure in Images from Space  | Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall along the Louisiana-Mississippi border as a Category 3 storm on Aug. 29, 2005, transformed the marshes that buffer New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico by ripping apart and moving mats of dead grass. The storm stirred up and distributed soft underlying sediments, digging several new channels and depositing sediment and debris in new places, according to NASA. The false-color image was taken earlier this month, on Aug. 2, by the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite.
| Read More » Psychedelic Swirls Show Algae Bloom from Space  | Psychedelic swirls decorate the Baltic Sea in a stunning new satellite image. The Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite snapped the image on Aug. 11, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, when land-based observers reported massive blooms of cyanobacteria. The summer Baltic is prime cyanobacteria territory, according to NASA: Sunlight is abundant, and the waters are nutrient rich.
| Read More » 'Science of Mom': Author Sifts Through Childrearing Facts & Fictions Some new moms might feel as if they need to be scientists to understand what's best for their babies: Vaccinate on schedule or not? Sink $20 into one of those CDs promising to turn my baby into a genius? Alice Callahan, who earned a Ph.D. in nutritional biology and went to do research on fetal physiology before she had her first child in 2010, decided to tackle motherhood in a way that was most natural to her: as a scientist. Read More » Lucy Liu Welcomes a Baby: 4 Reasons Why Couples Use Surrogates Actress Lucy Liu has announced the arrival of her baby boy, which she had through the help of a surrogate. Although surrogacy is not very common, there are many reasons why women and couples may chose surrogates to be part of their fertility treatment. The 46-year old Liu made the announcement through Instagram, where she posted a photo of herself holding her son. Read More » 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina: Have Weather Forecasts Improved?  | The fierce Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast, taking more than 1,800 lives, made landfall 10 years ago. Overall, meteorologists have a much better sense of where hurricanes will go and how strong they will be than they did before Hurricane Katrina, said Chris Davis, the associate director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. That's because of a host of factors, from more powerful computers, to improved global weather models, to better atmospheric data from satellites, Davis said.
| Read More » | |
