|  Chances of Earthquake Hitting L.A. Area Soon: Like, for Sure  | The chance of a moderate-size earthquake striking the Los Angeles area soon is almost guaranteed, if a new study is correct. The Greater Los Angeles area has a 99.9 percent chance of having an earthquake of magnitude 5.0 or greater in the next two and a half years, thanks to several hidden faults that have built up considerable strain, according to a study published Sept. 30 in the journal Earth and Space Science. "Identifying specific fault structures most likely to be responsible for future earthquakes for this system of many active faults is often very difficult," Andrea Donnellan, a geologist in the Science Division of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
| Read More » Brilliant Venus to Join Jupiter and Mars in Pre-Dawn Sky Monday: How To See It  | Venus has been dominating the morning sky for the past two months, and Monday (Oct. 26), it will form a vivid tableau with Jupiter and Mars as it reaches its farthest point from the sun. In the early morning of Oct. 26, Venus will reach its greatest elongation west — 46 degrees west of the sun, or to the right in the sky. The inner planets, Mercury and Venus, never stray far from the sun in Earth's sky.
| Read More » Look Ahead on Back to the Future Day!  | Today, the White House is marking "Back to the Future Day" with a series of conversations with innovators across the country. The White House site says "Get excited, and remember: Where we're going, we don't need roads," but adds: "Just kidding. "We've come a long way in the 30 years that have passed since the original Back to the Future came out.
| Read More » Cuba launches initiative to protect sharks  | By Daniel Trotta HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba on Wednesday launched an initiative to protect sharks in some of the most pristine habitat for the predators whose populations have been in steep decline. The action plan, reached through two years of collaborative research with the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), will impose size and capture limits on fishermen, set aside protected areas and create closed seasons for shark-fishing, officials said. The Cuban government has recognized its special place in the world of sharks as scientists believe nearly 100 of the world's 500 shark species swim in Cuban waters, sustained by a relatively healthy coral reefs, the EDF says.
| Read More » Shell game: New species of Galapagos giant tortoise identified  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified a new species of giant tortoise on the Galápagos Islands, using genetic data to determine that a group of 250 of the slow-moving grazing reptiles was distinct from other tortoise species residing in the Pacific archipelago. The newly identified species lives in a 15-square-mile (40-square-km) area of Santa Cruz Island and is as different genetically from the other giant tortoise species on the island as species from other islands, the scientists said on Wednesday. The research differentiated the new Eastern Santa Cruz tortoise, given the scientific name Chelonoidis donfaustoi, from a larger population of about 2,000 tortoises living about 6 miles (10 km) away on the western part of the island that belong to the species Chelonoidis porteri.
| Read More » Jazz-Playing Robots Will Explore Human-Computer Relations The new project, called MUSICA (short for Musical Improvising Collaborative Agent), aims to develop a musical device that can improvise a jazz solo in response to human partners, just as real jazz musicians improvise alongside one another. MUSICA is part of a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. military responsible for developing new technologies. "There is definitely a desire for more natural kinds of communications with computational systems as they grow in their ability to be intelligent," Ben Grosser, an assistant professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. Read More » Un-intelligent Design: No Purpose for Vestigial Ear-Wiggling Reflex  | Today, the muscles aren't capable of moving much — but their reflex action still exists. And then there are the educational implications: This muscle reflex is new evidence against the notion of creationism or intelligent design, Hackley said. "According to intelligent design and creationism, our body was designed by a being with perfect intelligence," he said.
| Read More » Star-Crossed Lovers? Two Suns Caught Smooching  | Catching two stars in this phase of life is "extremely rare," the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said in a statement, because the stars don't remain in this state for long. Known collectively as VFTS 352, the enormous stars provide a rare look at the mixing of material from two different stellar sources, said Leonardo Almeida, at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and lead author of a study that identified the unusual pair. When two double stars orbit one another close enough that they share their components, they are known as "overcontact binaries," according to the statement from the ESO.
| Read More » Devout Americans less likely to say faith, science clash -study  | (Reuters) - Highly religious Americans are less likely than others to believe their faith is at odds with science, but when they do, the main sticking points are evolution and how the universe was created, according to a study released on Thursday. While a majority of the U.S. public says science and religion often conflict, that perception is driven largely by those who are less religiously observant, according to a 2014 survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center and made public in Washington on Thursday. The survey found that 76 percent of respondents who have no religious affiliation think that science and religion often clash.
| Read More » Milky Way Glitters in Most Enormous Image Ever  | A new, insanely massive picture of the Milky Way — 46 billion pixels across — marks the largest astronomical image of all time, researchers say. The amazing view of the Milky Way was built out of 268 individual views of the galaxy that includes the sun and the Earth, captured night after night over the course of five years with telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert. The researchers made the zoom-able, searchable image available their website, so galactic explorers can scroll across the Milky Way and examine its famous and lesser-known features with more detail than ever before.
| Read More » Lunar Pit Stop? Mars-Bound Astronauts May Refuel Near Moon  | Such a strategy would reduce the mass of a Mars mission by up to 68 percent at launch, resulting in significant cost savings, researchers said. "This is completely against the established common wisdom of how to go to Mars, which is a straight shot to Mars, carry everything with you," study co-author Olivier de Weck, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and of engineering systems at the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. Exploiting lunar resources in this way could greatly reduce the cost of spaceflight, helping open up the solar system to human exploration, moon-mining advocates say.
| Read More » Moon's Shattered Crust Could Shed Light on Earth Life's Origins  | The moon's battered surface could help scientists understand how life first took root on Earth. Some parts of the moon were so heavily bombarded with small asteroids billions of years ago that the impacts completely shattered the upper crust there, a new study reports. "The whole process of generating pore space within planetary crusts is critically important in understanding how water gets into the subsurface," study lead author Jason Soderblom, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement.
| Read More » Eating a Healthy Diet May Reduce Brain Shrinkage People who eat a diet rich in fish, fruits and vegetables but low in meat may lose fewer brain cells as they age, according to a new study. The researchers scanned the participants' brains, and found that those whose diets included at least five of these nine components had brain volumes that measured 13.11 millimeters larger on the scans, on average, compared with the brain volumes of the people whose diets included fewer than five components. This difference in brain volume between the two groups is equivalent to the amount of shrinkage that happens over five years of aging, the researchers said. Read More » Poop Goes Mainstream: Fecal Transplants Get Past the 'Ick' Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), as it is properly called — and there's no sugarcoating the description here — is the process of placing the feces of a healthy person into the gut of a patient with an intestinal problem, such as chronic diarrhea or irritable bowel syndrome. More than 4,000 gut specialists have gathered at the 80th annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in Honolulu, Hawaii, and one item on their agenda is discussing the merits of FMT. Several presentations on Monday (Oct. 19) addressed the key concerns about FMT. Read More » US Marijuana Use Has More Than Doubled in a Decade Marijuana use in the United States more than doubled from 2001 to 2013, according to new research. Moreover, as more people began using marijuana, the number of people with the mental health condition that researchers call "marijuana use disorder" also increased, to about 3 percent of U.S. adults, the researchers found. The uptick in marijuana use coincides with a profusion of increasingly permissive marijuana laws. Read More » NASA Asteroid-Sampling Probe Fully Built, Enters Test Phase  | NASA's first asteroid-sampling spacecraft is now fully assembled. "This is an exciting time for the program, as we now have a completed spacecraft and the team gets to test drive it, in a sense, before we actually fly it to Bennu," said Rich Kuhns, the OSIRIS-REx program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which will also provide flight operations for the mission. "The environmental test phase is an important time in the mission, as it will reveal any issues with the spacecraft and instruments while here on Earth, before we send it into deep space," Kuhns said in a statement.
| Read More » Rosetta Team Names Comet Features for Lost Colleagues  | Two prominent features on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko were selected by the European Space Agency's Rosetta team to be dedicated to two mission colleagues, respectively, who recently passed away. "These two features were chosen for their prominence on Comet 67P/C-G, and for their very distinctive and striking gatelike appearances, considered to be highly appropriate monuments for our absent colleagues," Taylor wrote. The C. Alexander Gate, located on the smaller lobe of Comet 67P/C-G, has been named for Claudia J. Alexander, a U.S. Rosetta project scientist.
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