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Thursday, October 8, 2015

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The Moon Goes Visiting: Bright Views in This Week's Early Morning Sky

Just before dawn, you'll be able to view four bright planets. Venus, as usual, is the brightest of the bunch, with Jupiter close behind. Mars and Mercury are more challenging, and you may need binoculars to spot them.

For Stargazers' Delight, Uranus and Neptune: The Most Distant Planets

It's officially autumn, and time once again to seek out the two most distant planets of our solar system, Uranus and Neptune. Uranus, in fact, can be seen with just your unaided eyes under a dark, clear sky — if you know where to look. Interestingly, although the planet Uranus can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under favorable conditions, its presence was unknown until March 13, 1781, when William Herschel discovered it by accident using a 6-inch reflecting telescope.

US Spysat Launch Early Thursday to Carry Fleet of Tiny Cubesats: Watch Live

An American spy satellite will blast off early Thursday morning (Oct. 8), taking 13 tiny "cubesats" along for the ride, and you can watch all the action live.

El Niño brings welcome rains to Chile's farmers, ski resorts

By Rosalba O'Brien SANTIAGO (Reuters) - After eight years of drought which left fields parched and ski resorts dry, a burst of wet weather, likely triggered by the El Niño phenomenon, has been welcomed in central Chile. August and September in Chile have both seen higher amounts of rain than average for the Southern Hemisphere spring, with capital Santiago's normally blue skies replaced with a grey pall and brown lawns turning a vibrant green. There is growing consensus among global weather forecasters that this year is seeing a strong El Niño, a warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific that can lead to hot, dry weather in Asia and rains in South America.

Nobel discoveries on DNA repair now fueling cancer drug research

When deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) repair mechanisms fail, they predispose people to cancer. Modrich, Tomas Lindahl and Aziz Sancar won the prize for "mechanistic studies of DNA repair." Their work mapped how cells repair DNA to prevent damaging errors from appearing in genetic information. Subsequent work by Dr. Bert Vogelstein of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Richard Kolodner, then at Harvard Medical School and currently at the University of California, San Diego, showed mismatch repair defects are the chief cause of the most common inherited form of colorectal cancer, affecting 15 percent of colon cancer patients.

Supercharged Auroras May Be Visible Across Northern US Tonight

A geomagnetic storm kicked up by high-speed solar wind should amplify the northern lights tonight — making them potentially visible as low as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon as the storm intensifies, space weather experts say. According to an Oct. 7 alert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, the storm will range from strong to extreme, reaching a G3 or greater on NOAA's scale and a K-index of 7 or greater. If you live in the potential visibility area, the best way to see the northern lights is to be well away from city lights in an area with extremely dark skies.

Sizzling Longevity: World's Oldest Person Eats Bacon Daily

Could it be that a few slices of bacon a day keep the doctor away? The world's oldest living person, Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, New York, recently said that she eats a serving of bacon every day. Jones, who turned 116 on July 6 and was crowned the world's oldest living person by Guinness World Records that month, confessed her bacon habit in an interview published this week on the New York Post's site Page Six.

Girl Develops Acute Hepatitis After Drinking Unusual Green Tea

A mysterious green tea drink likely caused a healthy teenage girl in the U.K. to develop an acute case of hepatitis, according to a new report of the girl's case. Jaundice is a yellowing of the skin, and is often a sign of liver problems. "I had only lost a couple of pounds, but then started having horrible pains in my joints, and felt very dizzy and sick," the girl said, writing in the "patient perspective" section of the case report.

Breast-Feeding Mothers Gain Support in Hospitals

Breast-feeding mothers are now getting more support from hospitals, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2013, over half of the hospitals in the United States were meeting at least five of 10 common recommendations for hospitals to support breast-feeding, up from 29 percent of hospitals that met that many recommendations in 2007. Breast-feeding is the most effective way for babies to get the best nutrition, and hospitals play a major role in supporting moms who want to breast-feed, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said at a news conference today (Oct. 6).

Scientists call for urgent trials to judge flu drugs for pandemics

By Kate Kelland LONDON, Oct 8 (Reuters) - - Scientists still don't know if two commonly-used flu drugs -- Roche's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza -- really work in seasonal or pandemic flu outbreaks and say robust clinical trials are urgently needed to find out. While such medicines are stockpiled by governments around the world and were widely used in the 2009/2010 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic, no randomised trials were conducted then, so evidence is scant on how effective that approach was. Publishing a report on the use of such antiviral drugs - known as neuraminidase inhibitors - against flu, experts co-led by Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar said this had been a huge wasted opportunity and one that should not happen again.

Bariatric Surgery May Increase Risk of Self-Harm

People who undergo bariatric surgery to help them lose weight may face an increased risk of self-harming behaviors in the two to three years following the surgery, a new study from Canada reports. In the study, researchers looked at more than 8,800 people who'd had weight-loss surgery, monitoring them for three years before their surgery and three years after their operation. There were 62 reports of self-harm in the three years prior to people's surgeries, compared with 96 reports of self-harm in the three-year period after these people had weight-loss surgery — an increase of 54 percent.

Online Ads Could Help Deliver Important Health Messages

Those pesky ads that show up in Internet searches might have a new use — to deliver public health messages that aim to prevent cancer, a new study suggests. In the study, researchers used the online advertising service Google Ads to create advertisements aimed at preventing skin cancer linked to indoor tanning. The ads contained warnings about the harms of tanning beds, and directed people who clicked on them to information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Beating parasites wins three scientists Nobel prize for medicine

By Simon Johnson and Ben Hirschler STOCKHOLM/LONDON (Reuters) - Three scientists from Japan, China and Ireland whose discoveries led to the development of potent new drugs against parasitic diseases including malaria and elephantiasis won the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday. Irish-born William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura won half of the prize for discovering avermectin, a derivative of which has been used to treat hundreds of millions of people with river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis. China's Tu Youyou was awarded the other half of the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has slashed malaria deaths and has become the mainstay of fighting the mosquito-borne disease.

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.

Extinct Hippolike Creature Was Prehistoric Vacuum Cleaner

Fossils of the newfound species — found on the Aleutian Islands' Unalaska, the location of the popular reality TV show "Deadliest Catch" — show that it had a long snout and tusks. Its unique tooth and jaw structure indicates it was a vegetarian, said study co-author Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas. "They were marine mammals, but they were not completely marine, like whales," Jacobs said in a video about his research.

Prolific Comet Hunter David Levy Donates Astronomy Logs

A prolific comet hunter has donated almost 60 years' worth — and counting! — of historic observation logs to be pored over by the public. Only one of David Levy's 18,500 recorded skywatching sessions contains the time he first spotted what would be named Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which later played a part in the first solar system collision humanity ever witnessed as it tore apart and barreled into Jupiter. Now, he's donated all 25 of those logs to the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri — the world's largest independently funded library devoted to science, engineering and technology — and promises more to come, just as soon as he writes them.

Hacking the Cosmos: Event Hopes to Solve Complex Data Challenges

Last week, astronomers, astrophysicists, data scientists and programmers came together at New York University to try to solve some of astronomy's toughest problems — in just five days. To deal with the huge complexity of data and simulation in astronomy today, many researchers are turning to data scientists and programmers for inspiration — or becoming programmers themselves. "Many of the projects [that] people are working on didn't exist before, let's say, a week ago," said Phil Marshall, a staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in California and one of Astro Hack Week's organizers.

Atlas rocket blasts off with U.S. spy satellite and 13 mini: satellites

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from California on Thursday to put a classified spy satellite and 13 tiny experimental spacecraft into orbit for the U.S. government. The rocket, built and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, lifted off from a seaside launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base at 8:49 a.m. EST, a live ULA webcast showed. The rocket's primary cargo, owned by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), was not disclosed.

Supersonic Planes 'Paint' Gorgeous Shock Waves in the Sky (Photos)

A new technique has captured images of the sonic waves that form when planes break the sound barrier. The new images could one day help engineers design quieter supersonic planes by identifying the regions where a shock wave produces the most noise.

Migraines May Begin Deep in the Brain

Blocking a single neurotransmitter in the brain may stop the firing of the nerves that are linked with migraine headaches, a new study in animals suggests. In experiments, researchers looked at the effects of two vasodilators — which are medicines that cause blood vessels to widen, increasing blood flow — on certain receptors in rats' brain cells. They found that when they administered one of these vasodilators, nicknamed PACAP, directly into the rats' brains, a cluster of neurons in the center of the head called the trigeminovascular system started firing more than normal, mimicking the symptoms of a migraine in the animals.

Antioxidant Supplements May Accelerate Melanoma Spread

Antioxidants are often touted for their potential cancer-fighting abilities, but now researchers say the compounds may actually speed up the spread of the potentially deadly skin cancer melanoma, according to a new study done in mice and in cultured human cancer cells. The compounds are widely consumed by both healthy people and people with cancer for their supposed ability to prevent and fight cancer, the researchers said. But research on the anti-cancer benefits of antioxidants has yielded mixed results, with some studies showing that taking antioxidants may actually increase cancer risk, they said.

US Spy Satellite Launches Into Space Along with 13 Tiny Cubesats

8:49 a.m. local California time), lofting the secret NROL-55 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that operates the United States' spy satellites. Nine of the tiny spacecraft were sponsored by the NRO, while NASA sponsored the other four. "That was a great launch and I'm very excited," Andres Martinez, program manager for NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology Program, said just after liftoff during NASA's live launch commentary.

This Pig-Nosed Rat with Vampire Teeth Will Haunt Your Dreams

It has a nose like a cute little piglet's, ears that only a mother could love and teeth that would make Dracula run in fear: This odd-looking rodent captured researchers' attention when they discovered it back in 2013, but now they've described it as a new species. The elusive animal, aptly named the hog-nosed rat (Hyorhinomys stuempkei), inhabits the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In 2013, researchers studying the island's other rat species caught two of these pig-snouted rodents inside traps.

Ancient Ethiopian man's genome illuminates ancestry of Africans

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - DNA extracted from the skull of a man buried 4,500 years ago in an Ethiopian cave is providing new clarity on the ancestry of modern Africans as well as shedding light on an influx of people from the ancient Middle East into the Horn of Africa. Until now, genome sequencing efforts on ancient people have focused on remains from cooler, drier climes that tend to better preserve DNA. The cave, sitting 6,440 feet (1,963 meters) above sea level in southwestern Ethiopia's Gamo highlands, was discovered in 2011, University of Cambridge geneticist Andrea Manica said.

Core Finding: Earth's Frozen Center Formed a Billion Years Ago

What's more, the new findings suggest that Earth's magnetic field, which is powered by the swirling flow of liquid iron surrounding the inner core, could continue going strong for quite a while, said study co-author Andy Biggin, a paleomagnetism researcher at the University of Liverpool in England. "The theoretical model which best fits our data indicates that the core is losing heat more slowly than at any point in the last 4.5 billion years and that this flow of energy should keep the Earth's magnetic field going for another billion years or more," Biggin said in a statement. For much of those early years, Earth was a blob of molten rock, but over time, the surface cooled and formed a crust that floated on the Earth's liquid core.

NASA Mars rover finds clear evidence for ancient, long-lived lakes

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Three years after landing in a giant Martian crater, NASA's Curiosity rover has found what scientists call proof that the basin had repeatedly filled with water, bolstering chances for life on Mars, a study published on Thursday showed. The research offered the most comprehensive picture of how Gale Crater, an ancient, 87-mile (140-km) wide impact basin, formed and left a 3-mile (5-km) mound of sediment standing on the crater floor. Early in its mission, Curiosity discovered the gravel remnants of streams and deposits from a shallow lake.

Ancient Mars Had Long-Lasting Lakes, Boosting Chances for Life

Ancient Mars harbored long-lasting lakes, boosting the odds that life could have existed on the Red Planet billions of years ago, a new study suggests. A series of freshwater lakes within Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater likely persisted for hundreds or thousands of years at a time, and perhaps even longer, according to the new study, which is based on observations made by NASA's 1-ton Curiosity rover. While these individual lakes were apparently transient, drying out and filling up repeatedly over time, the overall lake-and-stream system inside Gale Crater existed for a quite a long time, researchers said.

Idaho nuclear lab director eyes new generation of scientists

The new director of Idaho's federal nuclear facility says he sees plenty of opportunity to make it the nation's premier energy security lab while also bolstering the region's economy. Mark Peters has been ...

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