|  NASA Rocket Launch May Spawn Glowing Clouds Off US East Coast Wednesday  | A NASA rocket launch on Wednesday (Oct. 7) should give skywatchers in the Eastern United States a real treat, weather permitting. NASA plans to launch a sounding rocket at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) on Wednesday from the agency's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. If all goes according to plan, the liftoff will produce several multicolored patches of light in the darkening sky that will be visible to many people in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast United States.
| Read More » Doomsday Revised: New Claim World Will End on Oct. 7 The 2012 Mayan apocalypse was a total bust. Falling into a long tradition of repurposing and revamping old doomsday predictions, an online Christian group is insisting that the now-deceased preacher, Harold Camping, was right, and that his prophecies forecast the end of the world. In 2011, Camping claimed that after the May 21 day of judgment, there would be only about five months until the world's end on Oct. 21, 2011. Read More » Should doctors help infertility patients who cross borders for care? By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Should doctors offer infertility treatment to patients who cross international borders to get care they can't legally receive in their home country? Yes, if they want to, some ethicists argue in an essay in the European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. "Physicians should abide by national laws," lead author Wannes Van Hoof, a bioethicist at Ghent University in Belgium, said by email. Read More » Doomsday Revised: New Prediction Claims World Will End on Oct. 7 The 2012 Mayan apocalypse was a total bust. Falling into a long tradition of repurposing and revamping old doomsday predictions, an online Christian group is insisting that the now-deceased preacher, Harold Camping, was right, and that his prophecies forecast the end of the world. In 2011, Camping claimed that after the May 21 day of judgment, there would be only about five months until the world's end on Oct. 21, 2011. Read More » South Korea's Lee to head U.N. panel of climate scientists By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - South Korea's Hoesung Lee, chosen on Tuesday to head the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists, favours wider pricing of carbon dioxide output to curb emissions of the greenhouse gases the group blames for global warming. Government representatives meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia, picked the professor of the economics of climate change to succeed India's Rajendra Pachauri as chair of the IPCC, whose findings are the main guide for combating global warming. Read More » DNA scientists win 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, the U.S.-based Paul Modrich and Turkish-born Aziz Sancar won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on mapping how cells repair damaged DNA, the award-giving body said on Wednesday. "Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crowns ($969,000) Chemistry was the third of this year's Nobel prizes. The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will. Read More » Scientists win Nobel chemistry award for work on DNA repair STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and U.S.-Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for "mechanistic studies of DNA repair." Read More » DNA scientists win 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry  | Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and Turkish-born Aziz Sancar won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on mapping how cells repair damaged DNA, giving insight into cancer treatments, the award-giving body said on Wednesday. "Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crowns ($969,000) Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell's genome occur on a daily basis while radiation, free radicals and carcinogenic substances can also damage DNA. To keep genetic materials from disintegrating, a range of molecular systems monitor and repair DNA, in processes that the three award-winning scientists all helped map out, opening the door to applications such as new cancer treatments.
| Read More » DNA scientists win 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry  | Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and Turkish-born Aziz Sancar won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on mapping how cells repair damaged DNA, giving insight into cancer treatments, the award-giving body said on Wednesday. "Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crowns (£633,434) Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell's genome occur on a daily basis while radiation, free radicals and carcinogenic substances can also damage DNA. To keep genetic materials from disintegrating, a range of molecular systems monitor and repair DNA, in processes that the three award-winning scientists all helped map out, opening the door to applications such as new cancer treatments.
| Read More » DNA scientists win 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry  | Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and Turkish-born Aziz Sancar won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on mapping how cells repair damaged DNA, giving insight into cancer treatments, the award-giving body said on Wednesday. "Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crowns ($969,000) Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell's genome occur on a daily basis while radiation, free radicals and carcinogenic substances can also damage DNA. To keep genetic materials from disintegrating, a range of molecular systems monitor and repair DNA, in processes that the three award-winning scientists all helped map out, opening the door to applications such as new cancer treatments.
| Read More » Private Moon Race Heats Up with 1st Verified Launch Deal  | A team from Israel called SpaceIL has signed a contract to launch its robotic lunar lander toward the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the second half of 2017. SpaceIL is therefore a strong contender to win the $20 million top prize in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP), contest organizers said. "We are proud to officially confirm receipt and verification of SpaceIL's launch contract, positioning them as the first and only Google Lunar X Prize team to demonstrate this important achievement thus far," X Prize Vice Chairman and President Bob Weiss said in a statement.
| Read More » Glowing Clouds from NASA Launch Tonight Visible from US East Coast: Watch Live  | A NASA suborbital rocket launch Wednesday evening (Oct. 7) is expected to produce glowing clouds high above Earth, and you can watch all the eye-catching action live online. Weather permitting, a Black Brant IX sounding rocket is scheduled to blast off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) Wednesday and deploy colorful clouds of barium and strontium that will be visible to observers throughout the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. The main goal of Wednesday's launch is to test the performance of the two-stage Black Brant IX, which will be flying with a reformulated motor, NASA officials said.
| Read More » Rocker Grace Potter Mixes Space, Science and Music on Instagram (Video)  | Space.com sat down with Potter prior to her performance at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Saturday (Oct. 3) to discuss her cosmic influences, which shined through not only in our interview but on stage as well. "That's what it's all about!" Potter told the audience. Other Potter posts reference the recent 25th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Large Hadron Collider and more.
| Read More » Nobel prize for solving puzzle of ghostly neutrino particles By Simon Johnson and Ben Hirschler STOCKHOLM/LONDON (Reuters) - A Japanese and a Canadian scientist won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for discovering that elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass, opening a new window onto the fundamental nature of the universe. Neutrinos are the second most bountiful particles after photons, which carry light, with trillions of them streaming through our bodies every second, but their true nature has been poorly understood. Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald's breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation that has upended scientific thinking and promises to change understanding about the history and future fate of the cosmos. Read More » Extinct Tree-Climbing Human Walked with a Swagger  | A recently unearthed extinct human species — perhaps the most primitive ever discovered — had hands and feet adapted for a life both on the ground and in the trees, researchers say. Although modern humans are the only human species alive today, other human species once walked the Earth. The most recently discovered human species, Homo naledi, had a brain about the size of an orange, but it nevertheless possessed enough of a mind to perform ritual burials of its dead.
| Read More » The Latest: Nobel winner hopes to inspire science in Turkey  | STOCKHOLM (AP) — Latest developments in the announcements of the Nobel Prizes (all times local):
| Read More » Israeli team signs first launch deal in Google moon race  | By Ari Rabinovitch JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli team competing in a race to the moon sponsored by Google has signed a with California-based SpaceX for a rocket launch, putting it at the front of the pack and on target for blast-off in late 2017, officials said on Wednesday. With the deadline to win a $20 million first-place prize just two years off, pressure is mounting on the 16 rivals from around the world hoping to complete a privately funded moon landing. "This is the official milestone that the race is on ... They've lit the fuse, as it were, for their competitive effort." The key hurdle was finding an affordable ride to outer space without government funding, said Eran Privman, CEO of SpaceIL.
| Read More » Sneezing Monkeys & 'Walking' Fish: Fascinating New Species Discovered  | A monkey that sneezes whenever it rains, a fish that can survive out of water for four days and a venomous pit viper that is as lovely to look at as a piece of jewelry: These are just a few of the hundreds of new species discovered over the past few years in the diverse but highly threatened region of the east Himalayas. An average of 34 new plant and animal species have been discovered annually in the region for the past six years, according to a newly released report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "I am excited that the region — home to a staggering number of species including some of the most charismatic fauna — continues to surprise the world with the nature and pace of species discovery," Ravi Singh, CEO of WWF-India and chair of the WWF Living Himalayas Initiative, said in a statement.
| Read More » Trio Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Finding DNA Fixers This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists whose research helps to explain how human beings continue to thrive despite an invisible disadvantage — their totally unstable DNA. Each of the three recipients of the prestigious award — Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar — has researched a different way that cells repair damaged DNA to safeguard genetic information. Read More » Ruffling the feathers: scientists formulate bird family tree  | The evolutionary relationships among the world's 10,000 bird species have been tough to decipher. But scientists on Wednesday unveiled the most comprehensive account of the avian family tree ever formulated, detailing how modern bird groups are connected based on genome-wide data from 198 living bird species. They focused in particular on understanding the group called Neoaves, encompassing more than 90 percent of all birds, the exceptions being large flightless birds like ostriches and a group including ducks and chickens. "It means that all of these aquatic birds may have evolved from a single common ancestor, as opposed to evolving an aquatic ecology multiple times independently," Cornell University ornithologist Jacob Berv said. "So the common ancestor of the woodpecker and the chickadee in your garden was a vicious, hawk-like meat-eater," Prum said.
| Read More » These Mysterious Blazing-Fast Ripples Racing Around a Star Defy Explanation  | Scientists were looking for planets forming in the large disk of dust surrounding a young star when they encountered a surprise: fast-moving, wavelike arches racing across the disk like ripples in water. The team first spotted the five structures in data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile while searching for lumps and bumps that might indicate planets forming around the young star. When the researchers looked back at images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 and 2011, they managed to spot the same features — but in new locations. A new video of the mysterious ripples, describes the strange features as seen by ESO scientists.
| Read More » Ruffling the feathers: scientists formulate bird family tree The evolutionary relationships among the world's 10,000 bird species have been tough to decipher. But scientists on Wednesday unveiled the most comprehensive account of the avian family tree ever formulated, detailing how modern bird groups are connected based on genome-wide data from 198 living bird species. They focused in particular on understanding the group called Neoaves, encompassing more than 90 percent of all birds, the exceptions being large flightless birds like ostriches and a group including ducks and chickens. "It means that all of these aquatic birds may have evolved from a single common ancestor, as opposed to evolving an aquatic ecology multiple times independently," Cornell University ornithologist Jacob Berv said. "So the common ancestor of the woodpecker and the chickadee in your garden was a vicious, hawk-like meat-eater," Prum said. Read More » Brain trauma widespread among high school football players, researchers say More than half of the players participating in the trials showed signs of altered neurological function and dramatic changes to the wiring and biochemistry of their brains, according to a series of studies published by the Purdue Neurotrauma Group. Some of them heal and some of them don't by the time they start playing their next season and that was the thing that really got us nervous," he added. The researchers placed sensors on the athletes to record impact forces and coupled that data with brain scans and cognitive tests to track neurological function over the course of the trial. Read More » | |
