|  Total Lunar Eclipse Will Bring a Moon Triple Treat Sunday  | First, the moon will be full, as it always must be for a lunar eclipse to occur. This is a special full moon, because this is the Harvest Moon. Second, the full moon will be at its closest to Earth in all of 2015, what is known to astronomers as a "perigee moon." In recent years this has become known as a "supermoon." Perigee (meaning "closest to Earth") occurs at 10 p.m. EDT, the moon being a mere 222,374 miles (357,877 km) from Earth.
| Read More » Four Blood Moons: Supermoon Eclipse Will Cap Epic Lunar Tetrad  | The rare "supermoon" total lunar eclipse on Sunday (Sept. 27) will mark the end of a great eclipse-viewing era. The Sunday evening eclipse is the last in a "tetrad" — a term for four total lunar eclipses happening at six-month intervals — that has been stunning skywatchers across the United States for the past 18 months, and also sparking conspiracy theories about what it could mean. "The most unique thing about the 2014-2015 tetrad is that all of them are visible for all or parts of the USA," NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak said in a statement last year.
| Read More » Scientists say car emissions rigging raises health concerns By Kate Kelland LONDON, (Reuters) - Volkswagen's admission that it rigged car emission tests has prompted environmental and health experts to ask whether such deception could have hampered progress in reducing death and disease from air pollution. Volkswagen's Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday over the falsification of test data from diesel cars in the United States, the latest twist in a scandal that has rocked the global car industry and raised concerns about what it may mean for the environment and public health. For now the main focus is on the United States, but VW says 11 million cars worldwide may be affected and experts note that diesel-fuelled cars account for just 3 percent of passenger vehicles in America, compared with some 50 percent in Europe. Read More » Fall's Back! Equinox Heralds Colorful Leaves and Bad Weather At higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, the date of equal daylight and darkness comes at the end of a period with longer daylight hours and this marks the shift to less light hours as this hemisphere transitions to cooler weather. However, the fall season brings more than just shorter daylight hours, changing leaf colors and an abundance of seasonal treats. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service warns that the new season also brings the potential for hazardous weather. Read More » Scientists say car emissions rigging raises health concerns  | By Kate Kelland LONDON, (Reuters) - Volkswagen's admission that it rigged car emission tests has prompted environmental and health experts to ask whether such deception could have hampered progress in reducing death and disease from air pollution. Volkswagen's Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday over the falsification of test data from diesel cars in the United States, the latest twist in a scandal that has rocked the global car industry and raised concerns about what it may mean for the environment and public health. For now the main focus is on the United States, but VW says 11 million cars worldwide may be affected and experts note that diesel-fuelled cars account for just 3 percent of passenger vehicles in America, compared with some 50 percent in Europe.
| Read More » NASA Mars Probe Marks One Year at Red Planet  | NASA's newest Mars probe has now been circling the Red Planet for a year. MAVEN endured a two-month checkout phase on orbit and then began studying Mars' atmosphere, in an attempt to determine how fast the planet's air is escaping into space. Such information will help researchers better understand how and when Mars shifted from a relatively warm and wet world in the ancient past to the cold and dry planet it is today, NASA officials have said.
| Read More » Nobel Prize predictions see honors for gene editing technology Scientists behind the discovery of a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 that allows researchers to edit virtually any gene they target are among the top contenders for Nobel prizes next month, according to an annual analysis by Thomson Reuters. The predictions announced on Thursday come from the Intellectual Property & Science unit of Thomson Reuters (which also owns the Reuters news service). Since 2002, it has accurately identified 37 scientists who went on to become Nobel laureates, although not necessarily in the year in which they were named. Read More » Scientists: Drought stressing California's Giant Sequoias  | SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — Giant Sequoias growing in California's Sierra Nevada are among the largest and oldest living things on earth, but scientists climbing high up into their green canopies say they are seeing symptoms of stress caused by the state's historic drought.
| Read More » Brain-computer link enables paralyzed California man to walk  | By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A brain-to-computer technology that can translate thoughts into leg movements has enabled a man paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury to become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics, doctors in Southern California reported on Wednesday. The slow, halting first steps of the 28-year-old paraplegic were documented in a preliminary study published in the British-based Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, along with a YouTube video. The feat was accomplished using a system allowing the brain to bypass the injured spinal cord and instead send messages through a computer algorithm to electrodes placed around the patient's knees to trigger controlled leg muscle movements.
| Read More » Spectacular Solar Eclipse View Wins Astronomy Photographer of the Year Prize  | The winning images from the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition were announced last week, and the list is an awe-inspiring collection of celestial awesomeness. The contest's overall winner, titled "Eclipse Totality Over Sassendalen," captures the 2015 solar eclipse, taken on an icy plane in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. When describing this year's winning solar eclipse image, contest judge Melanie Vandenbrouck said, "It is one of those heart-stoppingly beautiful shots for which you feel grateful to the photographer for sharing such an exceptional moment.
| Read More » Mars' Mysterious Dark Streaks Spur Exploration Debate  | These "recurring slope lineae" (RSL), which have been spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) at low and middle latitudes on the Red Planet, fade during cooler months but come back again annually at nearly the same locations over multiple Martian years. More than 200 researchers and engineers participated in that meeting, sifting through data and imagery in an effort to narrow down potential landing sites for NASA's next Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020. Evidence is mounting that RSL are the mark of some kind of volatile substance, and a leading theory posits that they are caused by the flow of salt-laden liquid water.
| Read More » Pope Francis Visit: What Catholics Think of Their Church  | Pope Francis, now on his historic first visit to the United States, is encountering a Catholic population that is part of a universal church with very American challenges. From the devout grandma in a lacey veil who never misses Mass, to the young gay man who struggles with church teaching on homosexuality, American Catholics are about as diverse as the country itself, said Mary Ellen Konieczny, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. This population can be sharply divided on social issues.
| Read More » Eavesdropping on Aliens: Why Edward Snowden Got E.T. Wrong  | Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked National Security Agency secrets publicly in 2013, is now getting attention for an odd subject: aliens. In a podcast interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Snowden suggested that alien communications might be encrypted so well that humans trying to eavesdrop on extraterrestrials would have no idea they were hearing anything but noise. There's only a small window in the development of communication in which unencrypted messages are the norm, Snowden said.
| Read More » Cheers! Wild Yeast Could Yield New Kinds of Beer These wild microbes could also lead to new and faster ways of brewing traditional varieties of beer, the scientists added. There are hundreds of species of these microbes, and many of them include a wide variety of strains. "A lot of wild yeast used to be used in the making of beer — typically, the yeast inhabiting the breweries," said John Sheppard, a bioprocessing researcher at North Carolina State University. Read More » Boxing Mantis Shrimp Prefer Flurry of Hits Over Knockout Punches Mantis shrimp are notorious for their clublike front limbs, which they use to kill prey. Researchers from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, engineered fights over an artificial burrow between mantis shrimp of roughly the same size from the species Neogonodactylus bredini. Surprisingly, the scientists found that victorious mantis shrimps weren't necessarily the ones with the most powerful punch. Read More » India's 1st Mars Mission Celebrates One Year at Red Planet  | India's first-ever Mars probe is now one year into its historic mission, and it's still going strong. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft, also known as Mangalyaan, arrived at the Red Planet on the night of Sept. 23, 2014 (Sept. 24 GMT and Indian Standard Time), just two days after NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe (MAVEN) reached Mars orbit. Mangalyaan, which means "Mars craft" in Sanskrit, was the first interplanetary probe ever launched by India, and its $73 million mission is primarily a technology demonstration, officials with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have said.
| Read More » Biggest Moon Myths for the 'Supermoon' Total Lunar Eclipse  | Sunday's rare "supermoon" total lunar eclipse has prompted greater discussion of the moon — and those discussions sometimes involve persistent lunar myths. Other myths are more conspiracy-oriented, such as the idea that the Apollo moon landings were faked. The discussion may give you something to think about Sunday evening (Sept. 27) while watching the first supermoon lunar eclipse — so named because it will occur when the moon appears abnormally large and bright in the sky — since 1982, and the last until 2033.
| Read More » Holy Dream Team? The Most Notorious Catholic Saints  | Yesterday (Sept. 23), Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra, the man who first brought Catholicism to California. The move has sparked controversy because Serra was tied to a system that decimated the population of Native Americans. What ultimately gained these individuals entrance to sainthood, Catholic theology says, was not a spotless life but rather a singular focus on getting closer to God, Craughwell said.
| Read More » 3 Square Meals? People Don't Eat Like That, App Reveals The average time between the first bite of breakfast and the last bite of dinner (or an evening snack, or drinks at the bar) was 14 hours and 45 minutes, Panda and his team report today (Sept. 24) in the journal Cell Metabolism. This is promising news because it suggests an easy way to improve weight and health — people could limit their food consumption to a smaller window, Panda said. Other researchers had said that those findings probably didn't apply to humans, based on the idea that humans mainly eat three meals within a time period of less than 12 hours, Panda said. Read More » Paralyzed Man Walks Again Using Brain-Wave System A 26-year-old man who was paralyzed in both legs has regained the ability to walk using a system controlled by his brain waves, along with a harness to help support his body weight, a new study says. Using this system, the patient, who had been paralyzed for five years after a spinal cord injury, was able to walk about 12 feet (3.66 meters). "Even after years of paralysis, the brain can still generate robust brain waves that can be harnessed to enable basic walking," study co-author Dr. An Do, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. Read More » Double Black Holes May Warp Spacetime - But Quietly  | A new paper searching for signs of these space-time ripples — known as gravitational waves — came up empty, suggesting that theorists need to rethink their models of these monster pairs. The new work affects searches for gravitational waves using pulsars — dead stars that appear to create regular pulses of light, not unlike a lighthouse. Gravitational waves were originally predicted by Albert Einstein, but no one has ever found direct evidence they exist.
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