|  Odd ancient lizard-like reptile called earliest-known turtle  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It was a creature that one scientist said resembled "a strange, gluttonous lizard that swallowed a small Frisbee." But a sophisticated skull analysis showed that this reptile called Eunotosaurus africanus that lived in southern Africa 260 million years ago is actually the earliest-known turtle, even though it had no shell, researchers said on Wednesday. Eunotosaurus, about a foot (30 cm) long, possessed wide and flat ribs that gave it a distinctly rounded and turtle-like profile. "Think of your neighborhood box turtle, but much more flattened and with scaly skin and a long tail," said New York Institute of Technology anatomy professor Gaberiel Bever, describing Eunotosaurus.
| Read More » NASA Wants to Use Hoverboard Tech to Control Tiny Satellites  | NASA wants to make this vision a reality, and soon. The space agency is teaming up with California-based company Arx Pax, which has developed a real-life hoverboard using a technology called Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA). "Arx Pax and NASA will work together to design a device with the ability to attract one object to another from a distance," Arx Pax representatives said in a statement today (Sept. 2).
| Read More » NASA vehicles maintenance contractors in federal fraud lawsuit  | ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - Two contractors hired to manage NASA's vehicle fleet at the Kennedy Space Center defrauded the agency of at least $387,000 for unnecessary tire replacements, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Florida.
| Read More » New NASA soil moisture satellite loses 1 science instrument LOS ANGELES (AP) — A NASA satellite launched seven months ago has lost use of one of two science instruments, but the agency says the mission to map global soil moisture will continue. Read More » In Men with Breast Cancer, Double Mastectomies Are on the Rise More men with breast cancer are opting to get both breasts removed, even the healthy one, a new study finds. Between 2004 and 2011, the rates of contralateral prophylactic mastectomies in men nearly doubled, with 5.6 percent of men with breast cancer undergoing the operation in 2011, compared with 3 percent in 2004, according to the study. A contralateral prophylactic mastectomy is an operation to remove a healthy, unaffected breast after a diagnosis of invasive cancer in the other breast. Read More » Powerful Rocket Launches Light Up the Skies Just Hours Apart (Photos)  | Just before dawn today (Sept. 2), a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying a military communications satellite. Earlier in the day (12:37 a.m. EDT (0437 GMT), a Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying three human passengers headed for the International Space Station.
| Read More » Syfy Space Shows 'Dark Matter' and 'Killjoys' Will Be Back for 2nd Seasons  | The space-based action shows "Killjoys" and "Dark Matter" will both be getting second seasons in 2016, the Syfy network announced this week. "Killjoys" follows three space-romping bounty hunters and their talking spaceship through a planetary system called The Quad, where class tensions are about to boil over. The show averaged 1.5 million viewers in its first season, according to Syfy.
| Read More » Alien Oceans' Glint Could Reveal Habitable Water Worlds  | The planet's oceans reflect a great deal of light, especially during the crescent phase. "Seeing excessive brightness at the crescent phases could be a telltale signal of ocean planets," Tyler Robinson, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. In 1993, for example, Carl Sagan and other researchers used observations made by NASA's Jupiter-studying Galileo spacecraft during a 1990 flyby of Earth to search for signs of life on our planet.
| Read More » Why Record-Breaking Hurricane Trio Swirls Above the Pacific  | A parade of tropical storms traipses across the Pacific in a new satellite image showing the once-in-a-lifetime (or more than one lifetime) event. Kilo, Ignacio and Jimena were all Category 4 hurricanes when these mosaic images over Hawaii were made on Aug. 29 and 30. Category 4 storms have winds ranging from 130 to 156 mph (209 to 251 km/h) — strong enough to uproot trees and severely damage structures, according to the National Weather Service.
| Read More » 60,000 Antelopes Died in 4 Days — And No One Knows Why  | When geoecologist Steffen Zuther and his colleagues arrived in central Kazakhstan to monitor the calving of one herd of saigas, a critically endangered, steppe-dwelling antelope, veterinarians in the area had already reported dead animals on the ground. "But since there happened to be die-offs of limited extent during the last years, at first we were not really alarmed," Zuther, the international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science. But within four days, the entire herd — 60,000 saiga — had died.
| Read More » Fairy-Tale-Inspired 'Gremlin Drones' Could Spy in Swarms  | The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for developing new technologies for the military, recently announced its "gremlin" program, a drone design initiative. The program is named for the "imaginary, mischievous imps that became the good luck charms of many British pilots during World War II," DARPA said. Like their make-believe counterparts, DARPA's mechanical gremlins will reside inside of manned aircraft.
| Read More » Say 'Aaaah': Zoo's Aardvark Gets 2 Teeth Pulled  | Getting a tooth pulled is never fun, but it's especially irksome if you're an aardvark. Ali, an aardvark at the Cincinnati Zoo, recently learned this lesson firsthand after two infected teeth landed her in the dentist's chair. Aardvarks, the only extant species in the order Tubulidentata, are unusual animals — and they have unusual teeth, said Jack Easley, a Kentucky-based veterinarian who specializes in dentistry.
| Read More » Earth Lost Half Its Trees to Humans  | A new global census of all the trees on Earth estimates that more than 3 trillion call this "pale blue dot" home. The study is billed as the most accurate inventory of Earth's tree population to date, revealing that there are 3.04 trillion trees, which is roughly equivalent to 422 trees for every person on the planet. Researchers used satellite images, forest inventories and supercomputing technologies to calculate the number of trees on Earth.
| Read More » #JunkOff: Why Animal Genitals Are Important to Science Did you know that male black widow spiders have corkscrew-shaped genitals? If you've been following scientists on Twitter in the past week or so, you probably do. "It all goes back to the basis of animal behavior and evolution," said Anne Hilborn, a doctoral student at Virginia Tech and cheetah researcher who launched #JunkOff and helped start the warmer-and-fuzzier follow-up hashtag, #CuteOff. Read More » Jimmy Carter: I Want the 'Last Guinea Worm to Die Before I Do'  | When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced earlier this month that he had melanoma, he also took the opportunity to slam another health issue: the Guinea worm. At the Aug. 20 news conference, Carter said that, even as he receives treatment for his cancer, he still wants to hear updates on the world's last few remaining cases of Guinea worm, a parasite that spreads through contaminated water and causes a devastating disease, leaving people incapacitated for months. "I would like the last Guinea worm to die before I do," said Carter, who will turn 91 on Oct. 1.
| Read More » Why Is Powdered Caffeine Dangerous? Powdered caffeine products are much more potent than caffeine-containing beverages like coffee, and they're dangerous because it is easy for people to consume a lethal amount of powdered caffeine, the FDA said. Just 1 teaspoon of the caffeine powder contains about the same amount of caffeine as 28 cups of regular coffee, the FDA said. "Powdered caffeine is very concentrated," said Henry Spiller, director of Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Read More » Spinal Manipulation Relieves Back Pain … for Some Manipulating the spine can help people with lower back pain — but it doesn't work for everyone, according to a new study. Spinal manipulation, or applying force to the joints of the spine, is a technique commonly used by chiropractors and physical therapists, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. "The big finding is that both sides have been right all along," said Greg Kawchuk, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Alberta and co-author of the study. Read More » Tatooine-Like Planets with 2 Suns Need Perfect Ingredients to Form  | "It may seem surprising given the disk is less massive, but if you're moving far from the central star a lot of the disk material is around you, while the central binary is concentrated toward the center," Kedron Silsbee, a graduate student at Princeton University, said at the recent Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium at Pennsylvania State University. Working with Roman Rafikov, also of Princeton, Silsbee modeled planetary formation in close binaries. "It turns out the disk can actually be the dominant component," Silsbee said.
| Read More » 'Floating Spoon' on Mars Is Just a Weird Rock, But Still Awesome  | A so-called "floating spoon" on Mars spotted by NASA's Curiosity rover is cooking up a storm on the Internet, but it's actually a cool rock formation sculpted over time by the Martian winds, officials with the space agency say. The uncannily spoon-shaped rock was photographed by Curiosity on Sunday (Aug. 30) during the rover's 1,089th day on Mars, and word of the rock spread online in the days that followed. In the Curiosity photo, a handle shape juts out from an outcrop and ends in a rounded tip much like a spoon.
| Read More » Scientists turn to aspirin to turbo-charge cancer immunotherapy By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Giving cheap aspirin to cancer patients may turbo-charge the effectiveness of expensive new medicines that help their immune systems fight tumors, experiments on mice suggest. Immunotherapy promises to revolutionize cancer care by offering a better, longer-lasting response with fewer adverse side effects than conventional treatment, but the new drugs do not work well in all cases. One reason is that cancer cells often produce large amounts of the molecule prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), which turns down the immune system's normal attack response to tumor cells, according to scientists at London's new Francis Crick Institute. Read More » Robot mother builds and improves its own children By Matthew and Stock Scientists from the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that independently builds its own children and then tests their performance to inform the design of the next generation. By analyzing the data it collects from observing the child, the mother robot ensures that preferential traits are passed down to the next iteration, while letting weaknesses fall by the wayside. "We developed a robot that creates robots. Read More » 20 kilometer high space elevator tower planned By Jim Drury Ambitious plans to build a twenty kilometer (12.4 miles) tall space elevator tower have been announced by a Canadian space technology firm. Although this distance is a mere fraction of that reached in space missions, Thoth Technology says its ThothX Tower will make a major cost reduction in space flights by helping navigate the difficult first 50 kilometers (31 miles) of travel that traditionally requires rockets. Despite first being proposed more than a century ago, the idea of a space elevator has always appeared fanciful. Read More » Scientists turn to aspirin to turbo-charge cancer immunotherapy By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Giving cheap aspirin to cancer patients may turbo-charge the effectiveness of expensive new medicines that help their immune systems fight tumours, experiments on mice suggest. Immunotherapy promises to revolutionise cancer care by offering a better, longer-lasting response with fewer adverse side effects than conventional treatment, but the new drugs do not work well in all cases. One reason is that cancer cells often produce large amounts of the molecule prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), which turns down the immune system's normal attack response to tumour cells, according to scientists at London's new Francis Crick Institute. Read More » The Science of Adorable: What It Takes to Win #CuteOff  | Science Twitter has gone full squee. "I don't generally think of fish as cute, but there were some alarmingly cute fish," said Anne Hilborn, a doctoral student and cheetah researcher at Virginia Tech who helped launch the hashtag. Based on the types of animals posted — and previous scientific research on adorableness — here are seven features that could help an animal win a cuteness contest.
| Read More » | |
