|  Kerry, Obama to raise global warming issues in Alaska  | ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Scientists are "overwhelmingly unified" in concluding that humans are contributing to global climate change, Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday night, and the public is slowly getting the full picture.
| Read More » Earth's Moving Mantle Leads to Earthquakes in Unusual Places  | It has long been a mystery why some earthquakes strike towns in seemingly earthquake-proof regions, but researchers now have a potential explanation for why temblors sometimes rattle where they're not expected. Understanding the underlying source of these quakes could help officials prepare for their associated hazards. Researchers found that intraplate earthquakes — which occur in the middle, instead of at the borders, of tectonic plates — are influenced by convection, or heat-driven movements, of the molten mantle beneath the planet's cold, solid crust.
| Read More » Parents: Talk About Alcohol When Kids Are 9 Parents should start talking to their children about alcohol at age 9, says a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics aimed at preventing binge drinking in young people. As many as 50 percent of high school students currently drink alcohol, and within that group, up to 60 percent binge drink, the authors wrote in the report, published today (Aug. 31) in the journal Pediatrics. The reason to start talking to kids about alcohol before they even reach middle school is that "kids are starting to develop impressions [about alcohol] as early as 9 years," said Dr. Lorena Siqueira, clinical professor of pediatrics at Florida International University and co-author of the new report. Read More » How to Find 'Strange Life' on Alien Planets  | Detecting signs of life very different from that of Earth in the atmospheres of alien planets may be difficult, but it is possible, researchers say. The team, led by Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), did not focus solely on Earth-like life. "What we've been trying to do is move away from that," William Bains, also of MIT, said during the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June.
| Read More » NASA Tech Aims for Precise Landings on Mars (Video)  | Getting a robotic spacecraft to nail a pinpoint landing is still just a dream for engineers, but a new technology could make it easier to reach distant destinations with better precision. The new Mars landing technology, which is being co-developed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and the University of Texas at Austin, compares pictures of the ground below to images already stored in the spacecraft's computer, to figure out how close to get to the landing site. NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, for instance, was targeted to land in a zone that measured 4 miles by 12 miles (7 by 20 kilometers).
| Read More » Should You Stop Counting Calories? To better fight obesity and its related diseases, people should stop counting calories and instead focus on eating nutritious foods, several researchers argue in a new editorial. Similar to quitting smoking, people who change their diet can see rapid improvements in their heart disease risk, the researchers wrote. For example, in a study of 2,000 heart attack survivors, those who were advised to eat fish were less likely to die during the study period than those who were not advised to eat fish, with improvements starting within a few months of the diet change, the editorial says. Read More » Sexual Harassment in the Animal Kingdom? How Female Guppies Escape  | Animal-behavior scientists discovered that female fish who were most bothered by this type of sexual harassment started to swim in a different, more efficient way. Researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Exeter, both in the United Kingdom, tested the effects of this harassment on Poecilia reticulata guppies. "In the wild, especially during the dry season, [guppies] can be trapped together in small pools for months," said study lead author Shaun Killen, a biologist at the University of Glasgow.
| Read More » Sumatran Rhino Goes Extinct in the Wild in Malaysia  | The Sumatran rhino is now considered extinct in the wild in the Southeast Asian country of Malaysia, according to a new study. No wild Sumatran rhinos (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) have been found on the Malaysian peninsula since 2007, and what are thought to be the last two female rhinos in Malaysian Borneo were caught and placed in captive breeding programs in 2011 and 2014. In order to save the Sumatran rhino from extinction, it will be necessary to designate the regions where rhinos breed as protected areas, called intensive management zones (IMZs), and to consolidate other, isolated rhinos into these zones to maximize their chances of reproducing, the researchers said.
| Read More » Jet of Electric Current Boosts Space Weather at Equator  | Solar explosions can threaten power grids even in areas near the equator, places long thought safe from such disruptions from the sun, say researchers who studied a weird flow of electricity pulsing above the equatorial regions.
| Read More » Life Might Spread Across Universe Like an 'Epidemic' in New Math Theory  | As astronomers get closer to finding potential signatures of life on faraway planets, a new mathematical description shows how to understand life's spread — and to determine if it's jumping from star to star. "Life could spread from host star to host star in a pattern similar to the outbreak of an epidemic," study co-author Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said in a statement.
| Read More » Human Eye's Blind Spot Can Shrink with Training The blind spot of the human eye can be shrunk with certain eye-training exercises, thus improving a person's vision slightly, a small new study suggests. In the study of 10 people, researchers found that the blind spot — the tiny region of a person's visual field that matches up with the area in the eye that has no receptors for light, and hence cannot detect any image — can shrink 10 percent, with special training. That amount of change "is quite an improvement, but people wouldn't notice, as we are typically unaware of our blind spots," said study author Paul Miller, of the University of Queensland in Australia. Read More » Elusive Sea Creature with Hairy, Slimy Shell Spotted After 31 Years  | The Allonautilus scrobiculatus, a species of mollusk in the same family as the nautilus, was spotted off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific in early August, the scientists said. The Allonautilus' shell has been known to science since the 1700s. The Allonautilus is so rare likely because it is completely reliant on scavenging to survive, Ward said.
| Read More » SpaceX rocket grounded for 'couple more months,' company says  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - SpaceX plans to keep its Falcon 9 rocket grounded longer than planned following a launch accident involving the unmanned booster in June, the company president said on Monday. The privately held company is owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, who earlier this summer was targeting the Falcon 9's next flight for September. "We're taking more time than we originally envisioned, but I don't think any one of our customers wants us to race to the cliff and fail again," Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said at a webcast panel discussion at the AIAA Space 2015 conference in Pasadena, California.
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