|  Explosive news: Plants can fight back against TNT pollution - researchers  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered why TNT is so toxic to plants and intend to use this knowledge to tackle the problem of cleaning up the many sites worldwide contaminated by the commonly used explosive. Researchers on Thursday said they have pinpointed an enzyme in plants that reacts with TNT, which is present in the soil at contaminated sites, and damages plant cells. TNT pollution can devastate vegetation and leave land desolate.
| Read More » Confirmed: Wing Part Is From Missing Malaysian Flight French authorities confirmed today (Sept. 3) that a piece of debris that washed up on an island in the Indian Ocean in July came from the Malaysia Airlines plane that mysteriously disappeared last year. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 seemingly vanished without a trace on March 8, 2014, and the airplane part that washed ashore is the first piece of physical evidence recovered from the flight. In August, a week after the wing part washed ashore on the French island of Réunion, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that the part belonged to the missing aircraft. Read More » Key radar fails on $1 billion NASA environmental satellite  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A key instrument on a $1 billion NASA satellite has failed, reducing scientists' ability to capture data to measure the moisture in Earth's soil in order to improve flood forecasting and monitor climate change, officials said on Thursday. A second instrument remains operational aboard the 2,100-pound (950-kg) Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite, though its level of detail is far more limited. The satellite's high-powered radar system, capable of collecting data in swaths of land as small as about 2 miles (3 km) across, failed in July after less than three months in operation, NASA said.
| Read More » The Force is Strong With These Toys: New 'Star Wars' Line is Here!  | Inside, a lucky group of fans watched a particularly dramatic reveal of the new toys, featuring a hip hop dance by five Stormtroopers. Moments before midnight, a group of five Stormtroopers stepped in front of the curtain and got the crowd a cheering as they performed a choreographed hip hop dance (a video of these troopers doing the same dance went viral in 2014). The store was full of costumed characters from the "Star Wars" universe.
| Read More » Three-man international crew safely reaches space station  | A Russian Soyuz spaceship safely delivered a three-man international crew, including Denmark's first astronaut, to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, a day after having had to maneuver to avoid colliding with space debris. The Soyuz TMA-18M blasted off to the $100 billion space laboratory from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday to take Russian Commander Sergei Volkov, Kazakh cosmonaut Aidyn Aimbetov and Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen into orbit.
| Read More » Crowded House! International Crew Arrives at Space Station  | Three new crewmembers arrived at the International Space Station early Friday morning, boosting the orbiting lab's population to a level not seen since late 2013. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, the European Space Agency's Andreas Mogensen and Kazakhstan's Aidyn Aimbetov docked with the space station's Poisk module at 3:39 a.m. EDT (0739 GMT) Friday (Sept. 4), two days after blasting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The hatches separating the two spacecraft are scheduled to open at 6:15 a.m. ET (1015 GMT) Friday, NASA officials said.
| Read More » Snot-filled whale research takes flight By Ben Gruber Gloucester, Mass. (Reuters) - Snotbot is a drone whose name describes it perfectly, it's a robot that collects snot, specifically whale snot. Up until now, gathering samples for whale research involved shooting darts that penetrated the body. Instead of shooting darts at a whale for biopsy samples, a whale can unknowingly shoot snot at a drone. "We believe that whale snot or exhaled breath condensate is going to be the golden egg of data from a whale. Read More » NASA's Laser-Communication Tech for Spacecraft Zaps Forward  | NASA spacecraft may soon be able to beam their data home to Earth blazingly fast — with lasers! It can cause frustration and mistakes on the International Space Station, according to a new NASA study — and it's forcing scientists to wait 16 months to get all the data back from the New Horizons spacecraft's historic July 14 flyby of Pluto. But a new, high-precision laser communications system will burst through those old radio-wave barriers for a faster back-and-forth, agency officials say.
| Read More » Wild 'Hitchhiker' Spacecraft Idea Could Harpoon Comets  | A NASA spacecraft may one day sling itself from one comet or asteroid to another using a harpoon and a superlong tether. That's the idea behind Comet Hitchhiker, a proposal that received funding last year from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which seeks to encourage the development of transformative exploration technologies. "This kind of hitchhiking could be used for multiple targets in the main asteroid belt or the Kuiper Belt, even five to 10 in a single mission," Comet Hitchhiker concept principal investigator Masahiro Ono, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
| Read More » Denali's Digits: North America's Tallest Peak 'Shrinks' by 10 Feet  | Denali — the tallest peak in North America — not only has a new name (or, more accurately, its old name), but a new official height, geologists announced Wednesday (Sept. 2). The Alaskan mountain had been called Mount McKinley until Sunday (Aug. 30), when Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said it would officially be given its former name — Denali, which translates to "the tall one." But "the tall one" is not quite as tall, it seems, as geologists once thought: The newly measured height of 20,310 feet (6,190 m) is 10 feet less than the official altitude of 20,320 feet established in 1953 by Bradford Washburn, a mountaineer, photographer and cartographer. Washburn calculated the peak's height using aerial photographs and a triangulation method.
| Read More » Rare Roman-Era Coffin Features Carving of Curly-Haired Man  | A 1,800-year-old sarcophagus that archaeologists are calling the rarest one ever discovered was unearthed last week during a building project — but construction workers are now being accused of damaging, and then trying to hide, the massive Roman-era coffin, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported. The workers uncovered the Roman-era sarcophagus as they were building villas in Ashkelon, a city along Israel's Mediterranean coast. The discovery is one of the rarest sarcophagi ever discovered, according to the IAA.
| Read More » Liberia Is Ebola Free (Again) For the second time this year, Liberia has stamped out Ebola transmission and been declared free of the disease, health officials say. Today (Sept. 3) marks 42 days since the last person to have Ebola in Liberia was cured and released from the hospital, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Health officials typically wait 42 days to declare a country Ebola-free, because this is twice as long as the 21-day incubation period of the virus (the time it takes for a person infected with the virus to show symptoms). Read More » How Much Do Chronic Diseases Cost in the US? The most expensive health condition in the United States is cardiovascular disease, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The numbers in the report come from a CDC tool called the Chronic Disease Cost Calculator, and one of the reasons the researchers wrote the report was to demonstrate exactly what the tool can do, said Justin Trogdon, an associate professor of health policy and management at the University of North Carolina and a lead author of the new report, published today (Sept. 3) in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease. Read More » Toyota partners with Stanford, MIT on self-driving car research  | By Paul Lienert DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp is collaborating with two top U.S. universities on artificial intelligence and robotics research aimed at ramping up the Japanese automaker's efforts to develop self-driving cars. Toyota said on Friday that it would spend $50 million over the next five years to establish joint research centers at both universities, one in the heart of Silicon Valley and the other outside Boston. Toyota has lagged behind rivals in developing self-driving cars and implementing hands-free driver assistance systems.
| Read More » 'Citizen Mars' Web Series Features Would-Be Red-Planet Colonists  | "There's a tremendous amount of interest in the Mars One project, and many are skeptical about the mission's feasibility, which is why we thought it an important story to tell, and why the subjects involved are so compelling," Engadget Editor-in-Chief Michael Gorman said in a statement. "Citizen Mars" is billed as the first docu-drama to focus on the personal lives of Mars One contestants. Mars One's ambitious plans have attracted scrutinty and criticism.
| Read More » The Moon Hits a Cosmic Bull's Eye Tonight: How to See It  | If you live in the eastern-third of the United States or southeast Canada and your local skies are clear on tonight (Sept. 4), take a good close look at the rising moon, which has a celestial date with a star this evening. The moon will appear 52-percent illuminated and be just hours before it reaches last quarter phase. If the bright star Aldebaran isn't right next to the moon, it may be directly behind the lunar disk and about to pop back out. Weather permitting, at least some stage of this occultation can be seen by North American observers living east and north of a line running from Duluth, Minnesota to Miami, Florida.
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