Tuesday, September 22, 2015

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On Twitter, Astronaut Scott Kelly Chronicles His Yearlong Space Voyage

Scott Kelly just started the second half of the longest consecutive space mission a NASA astronaut has ever completed. To celebrate, he took to Twitter to answer questions from curious space enthusiasts on Earth. Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, March 27.


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'Guevedoces': Rare Medical Condition Hides Child's Sex Until Age 12

Some children with a rare genetic condition appear female at birth but later develop a penis and testes around the time puberty begins. A new article in BBC Magazine tells the story of some children in the Dominican Republic with this condition, who are known in the country as Guevedoces, which roughly translates to "penis at 12." One child named Johnny was raised as a girl, but when he matured and neared puberty, he grew a penis and his testicles descended, according to the BBC. Because DHT is responsible for the development of male sex organs, the lack of DHT means the male organs don't develop properly, according to the National Institutes of Health.

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Doctors to FDA: Don't Call Them 'Breakthrough' Drugs

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should avoid using words like "breakthrough" and "promising" to describe new drugs when making announcements aimed at the public, some researchers argue. These researchers contend that the general public may not understand the FDA's usage of these words. "Unless patients understand the FDA's usage of 'breakthrough,' they may have unwarranted confidence in the evidence supporting drug claims," researchers wrote in the Sept. 21 issue of the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

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AstraZeneca taps crowd sourcing to find cancer drug cocktails

Drugmaker AstraZeneca is harnessing the wisdom of crowds to help mix tomorrow's cancer drug cocktails. The company said on Tuesday its decision to release preclinical data from more than 50 of its medicines was unprecedented in scale and would help accelerate the hunt for synergistic tumour-fighting drug combinations. The crowd sourcing initiative is being run as part of the DREAM Challenge, an open innovation non-profit biology project in which scientists pool ideas and crunch data.


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Craig Venter's company in deal for whole exome tests at new low cost

A company formed by genome pioneer Craig Venter will offer clients of a South Africa-based insurance company whole exome sequencing - sequencing all protein-making genes in the human genome - at a price that marks yet another dramatic decline in the cost of gene sequencing, the two companies said on Tuesday. Venter's company, Human Longevity Inc, will provide the tests at a cost of $250 each through a special incentive program offered by Discovery Ltd, an insurer with clients in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Venter, the U.S. scientist who raced the U.S. government to map the human genome 15 years ago for a cost of $100,000, said the $250 price point per whole exome marks a new low in the price of gene sequencing.


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Craig Venter's company in deal for whole exome tests at new low cost

A company formed by genome pioneer Craig Venter will offer clients of a South Africa-based insurance company whole exome sequencing - sequencing all protein-making genes in the human genome - at a price that marks yet another dramatic decline in the cost of gene sequencing, the two companies said on Tuesday. Venter's company, Human Longevity Inc, will provide the tests at a cost of $250 each through a special incentive program offered by Discovery Ltd, an insurer with clients in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Venter, the U.S. scientist who raced the U.S. government to map the human genome 15 years ago for a cost of $100,000, said the $250 price point per whole exome marks a new low in the price of gene sequencing.

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Forget Fingerprints: You Can Be Identified by Your 'Microbial Cloud'

The results "demonstrate for the first time that individuals release their own personalized microbial cloud," James Meadow, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. Together, these bacteria make up what researchers call the human microbiome.

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Long-Lost Tomb of Jewish 'Maccabee' Rebels Possibly Found

An "unusual" new archaeological find could be the long-lost Tomb of the Maccabees, a burial site of leaders of a band of Jewish rebels from the second century B.C. First excavated 150 years ago, this site was thought to be the mausoleum of a priest named Mattathias the Hasmonean and his five sons, who led a rebellion against Greek rule of Judea. The new excavations haven't fully solved the mystery, but archaeologists say they can't rule out that the Maccabees were buried there.


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Welcome to Pluto! Dramatic Flyover Video Takes You There

A new video takes armchair explorers on a flyover tour of Pluto's stunning and varied landscapes. The new Pluto tour animation stitches together photos captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its historic flyby on July 14, which returned the first-ever up-close looks at the faraway dwarf planet. During the close encounter, New Horizons discovered, among other things, 2-mile-high (3.2 kilometers) ice mountains, a vast plain of ice dubbed Sputnik Planum and a dark area called Cthulhu Regio. All those features are highlighted in the new video, which was created by Stuart Robbins, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.


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Space Twins: Genetic Science Meets Space Travel on One-Year Mission

Does spaceflight affect the human body all the way down to the genetic level? Scientists working on NASA's one-year mission are taking the first steps toward answering those questions. Astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are living on the International Space Station for just shy of one Earth year.


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3D Computer Chips Could Be 1,000 Times Faster Than Existing Ones

The new method, which relies on materials called carbon nanotubes, allows scientists to build the chip in three dimensions. The 3D design enables scientists to interweave memory, which stores data, and the number-crunching processors in the same tiny space, said Max Shulaker, one of the designers of the chip, and a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford University in California. Reducing the distance between the two elements can dramatically reduce the time computers take to do their work, Shulaker said Sept. 10 here at the "Wait, What?" technology forum hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research wing of the U.S. military.


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Walk with Elephants: Explore African Sanctuary on Google Street View

Thanks to Google, it's now possible to frolic with elephants in your living room (or anywhere else your Internet-connected device happens to be). Save the Elephants, a research and conservation organization operating in Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, recently teamed up with Google to help share the story of Africa's imperiled elephants. Using truck- and airplane-mounted cameras inside the wildlife preserve, as well as photos taken by satellites in space, Google captured images of Samburu's elephant herds doing elephant things — like splashing in the mud and hanging out in the shade.


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Psychology of Immigration: Why Responses to Migrant Crisis Vary

There's also a gulf of difference between how European citizens and their governments are responding to the influx of asylum seekers from Syria, North Africa and other Middle Eastern nations. "One of the first things to appreciate is that the anti-immigrant reactions are really natural, and in some ways fundamental to who we are," said Steven Neuberg, a psychologist at Arizona State University who researches prejudice and in-group/out-group relations. Evolutionarily, the brain is primed for specific threats that would have loomed over our earliest relatives, such as dangers to physical safety, infectious disease and threats to resources, Neuberg told Live Science.

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Sainthood for Missionary Priest Is Disputed by Native Tribes

Pope Francis is set to canonize the Rev. Junípero Serra, a Franciscan priest who founded the first missions in the state of California, on Sept. 23. Several American Indian tribes oppose the canonization, saying that Serra was responsible for the enslavement and death of tens of thousands of indigenous tribespeople and the destruction of their culture. Some tribes are circulating petitions to protest the canonization.

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Shades of 'Star Trek'? Quantum Teleportation Sets Distance Record

A record-breaking distance has been achieved in the bizarre world of quantum teleportation, scientists say. The scientists teleported photons (packets of light) across a spool of fiber optics 63 miles (102 kilometers) long, four times farther than the previous record. This research could one day lead to a "quantum Internet" that offers next-generation encryption, the scientists said.


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Common Pregnancy Complications Tied to Heart Disease Deaths Later On

Pregnant women who experience certain complications related to their pregnancies may have an increased risk of dying from heart disease later in life, a new study suggests. Researchers found that the women in the study who had high levels of sugar in the urine during pregnancy were about four times more likely to die from heart disease over the 50-year study, compared with the women who did not have high levels of sugar in their urine when they were pregnant. The investigators also found that the women who experienced a decline in their levels of hemoglobin during pregnancy were about twice as likely to die from heart disease later in life, compared with the pregnant women who did not experience the decline.

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Sex After a Heart Attack? Doctors Give the All Clear

Sex does not increase heart attack survivors' risk of having another attack, except in rare cases, a new study finds. The finding may provide comfort for countless heart attack survivors. Many are unsure whether the vigorous activity of sex can trigger another heart attack, and there is limited and some contradictory data on the issue, the researchers said.

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Eyes in the Sky: How Satellite Images Help People on the Ground

The benefits of spaceflight extend far beyond the borders of countries capable of launching satellites, NASA officials say. On Thursday (Sept. 17), officials with NASA and the U.S. Agency For International Development (USAID) showcased the ways space science connects to developing countries as well. The two organizations hosted a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. called "Connecting Space to Village: Observing Earth from Space and How This Supports USAID Development Goals," which involved astronauts, USAID officials and scientists.


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Sunday's 'Supermoon' Total Lunar Eclipse: When and Where to See It

As with all lunar eclipses, the region of visibility for Sunday's blood-moon lunar eclipse will encompass more than half of our planet. The lunar eclipse will also feature the "biggest" full moon (in apparent size) of 2015, since the moon will also be at perigee on the very same day ? Almost everyone in the Americas and Western Europe will have a beautiful view of this eclipse.


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