|  Saving Prostate Cancer Patients from Collateral Damage Dr. Edward Soffen is a board-certified radiation oncologist and medical director of the Radiation Oncology Department at CentraState Medical Center's Statesir Cancer Center in Freehold, New Jersey. We are living during a remarkable age in the battle against cancer. Just a few decades ago, cancer was considered a terminal illness. Read More » Drones Save Lives in Disasters, When They're Allowed to Fly (Op-Ed)  | Robin Murphy directs the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University. Hurricane Katrina saw the first deployment of drones in a disaster, setting the stage for such drone deployments worldwide — from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident to the Nepal earthquake. The last decade has seen an evolution in small unmanned aerial vehicles (or UAVs, the preferred name agencies use for civilian, as opposed to military, drones).
| Read More » Hail Hydra! A Monstrous Constellation Explained  | Huw James is a science communicator, fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and guest lecturer at the University of South Wales. Follow James on Twitter @huwmjames and keep an eye on his website for more info on his upcoming "Constellation Series" book. Llyn y Fan Fawr is Welsh for "lake of the big peak," at the foothill of Fan Brycheiniog in Wales.
| Read More » Filmmakers Show the Scale of the Solar System in Amazing Video  | If Earth were as small as a marble, the solar system out to Neptune would cover an area the size of San Francisco — and that's just in two dimensions. That point is driven home by a new video called "To Scale: The Solar System," which shows filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, along with a few of their friends, building a size-accurate model of our cosmic backyard in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. "If you put the orbits to scale on a piece of paper, the planets become microscopic, and you won't be able to see them," Overstreet says in the 7-minute video, which has been viewed more than 1.4 million times since it was posted on YouTube Sept. 16.
| Read More » Bizarre Giant Hexagon on Saturn May Finally Be Explained  | The huge, mysterious hexagon at Saturn's north pole may finally have an explanation. The bizarre hexagonal cloud pattern was first discovered in 1988 by scientists reviewing data from NASA's Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980 and 1981, but its existence was not confirmed until NASA's Cassini spacecraft observed the ringed planet up-close years later. The structure, which contains a churning storm at its center, is about 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide, and thermal images show that it reaches roughly 60 miles (100 km) down into Saturn's atmosphere.
| Read More » US Dumps Twice as Much Trash as EPA Estimated The United States is sending more than twice as much solid waste into its landfills as previously thought, a new study finds. Researchers found that people threw away 289 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2012, a figure that is more than double the 135 million tons that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculated for that same year. The new estimate also exceeds by 4 percent the World Bank's predictions for the amount of waste the United States will generate in 2025, the researchers said. Read More » Some Fruits & Vegetables Are Better For Your Waistline Eating more fruits — particularly berries, apples and pears — and nonstarchy vegetables, like soybeans and cauliflower, may help you lose weight over the long term, a new study suggests. However, adding starchy vegetables like peas, potatoes and corn to your diet may not be as good for your waistline: People who increased their consumption of these vegetables gained weight over time, the study found. Read More » More Evidence That Coffee Is Safe for Your Heart Coffee lovers, rejoice. In the study, researchers found that drinking coffee was not associated with an increased risk of a condition called atrial fibrillation, which is a type of irregular heartbeat, in either men or women. "This is largest prospective study to date on the association between coffee consumption and risk of atrial fibrillation. Read More » Health-Promoting Texts Could Help Battle Heart Disease The health of heart disease patients might be improved by technology they're already carrying around in their pockets: cellphones. In a recent study, patients with coronary heart disease enrolled in a program to receive four text messages weekly on their cellphones, encouraging them to make heart-healthy lifestyle choices. For comparison, a separate group of patients with coronary heart disease didn't receive any text messages about their heart health. Read More » A Rose by Any Name: Nebula Blossoms in Sweet Space Photo, Video  | Omega Nebula, Swan Nebula, Checkmark Nebula, Horseshoe Nebula, Lobster Nebula — whatever you call it, the spectacular star-forming Messier 17 sparkles in a new photo. In this case, the rose's petals are picked out in the reddish glow of hydrogen gas, heated up by ultraviolet light released from the blue and white pinpricks of newly formed stars. The white at the center comes from the hottest gas emitting light that mingles with starlight, ESO officials said in a statement.
| Read More » Blood Moon Tunes: Music to Make Your 'Supermoon' Lunar Eclipse Rock  | As you settle in Sunday night (Sept. 27) to watch the supermoon lunar eclipse, kick back with some moon tunes as chosen by Space.com's staff. What might a supermoon lunar eclipse represent? NASA has contemplated the moon in song as well: Steven Williams from NASA's Planetary Science Division pulled together an infographic and long list of moon-inspired refrains.
| Read More » Here Comes the Sun: Water Blasts on Comets Tied to Sunlight Cycle  | The outbursts of water vapor seen emanating from comets are fueled by subsurface ice reservoirs, a new study suggests. Observations by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft show that surface ice on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta has been orbiting since August 2014, appears and disappears on a daily cycle tied to illumination by the sun. "Water gas activity is modulated by the diurnal cycle, and we see that also the presence of ice on the surface is modulated in the same way," said study lead author Maria Cristina De Sanctis, a scientist at the Institute for Astrophysics and Space Planetology in Rome.
| Read More » Fish scales to fangs: Surprising tale of how teeth got their bite  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The origins of the enamel that gives our teeth their bite is no ordinary fish tale.Scientists said on Wednesday fossil and genetic evidence indicates enamel did not originate in the teeth but in the scales of ancient fish that lived more than 400 million years ago, and only later became a key component in teeth. The researchers examined fossils of two primitive bony fish from the Silurian Period, a time of evolutionary advances in marine life, and found an enamel coating on their scales but no enamel on their teeth. In us, enamel is only found on teeth, and it is very important for their function, so it is natural to assume that it evolved there," said paleontologist Per Erik Ahlberg of Sweden's University of Uppsala, whose research appears in the journal Nature.
| Read More » Grisly Discovery: 9,000-Year-Old Decapitated Skull Covered in Amputated Hands  | Under limestone slabs in a cave in Brazil, scientists made a ghoulish new discovery: a decapitated skull covered in amputated hands. For example, in South America, heads of defeated enemies were often used as war trophies — the Arara people in the Brazilian Amazon used skulls of defeated enemies as musical instruments, the Inca turned skulls into drinking jars, and the Jivaro people of Ecuador shrunk heads to imprison the souls of foes. "Few Amerindian habits impressed the European colonizers more than the taking and displaying of human body parts, especially when decapitation was involved," said study lead author André Strauss, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
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