|  'Spooky' Halloween Asteroid May Actually Be a Comet  | The big asteroid that will zoom past Earth on Halloween may actually be a comet, NASA researchers say. The roughly 1,300-foot-wide (400 meters) asteroid 2015 TB145, which some astronomers have dubbed "Spooky," will cruise within 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) of Earth on Halloween (Oct. 31) — just 1.3 times the average distance between our planet and the moon. Though 2015 TB145 poses no threat on this pass, the flyby will mark the closest encounter with such a big space rock until August 2027, when the 2,600-foot-wide (800 m) 1999 AN10 comes within 1 Earth-moon distance (about 238,000 miles, or 385,000 km), NASA officials said.
| Read More » How to Help Someone Who's Addicted to Drugs Odom's experience echoes the worst nightmares of the friends and family of people with drug addictions: a downward spiral, a medical crisis and even the possibility of death. But experts say that friends and family are among the greatest resources drug-addicted people have to help them recover. Convincing someone to seek treatment is often difficult, but it can be done in many cases — and friends and family don't have to wait for the person to hit rock bottom. Read More » Many Ads in Parenting Magazines Show Unsafe Practices for Kids The heartwarming images of children — smiling, laughing out loud and snuggling — that fill the pages of parenting magazines actually hold a less-than-obvious problem: Many of these ads show kids doing things that are not safe. In fact, about one in six advertisements in two of the top-selling parenting magazines in the United States contains images or promotes products that could be considered unsafe for a child's health, a new study reveals. Read More » Scientist eats, drinks and paints simultaneously By Matthew Stock Scientists from Imperial College London have developed computer software that enables a person to control a robotic arm to paint a picture using just the movement of their eyes. The researchers say the technology demonstrates a potential use for robots to help people extend their range of abilities and do more than one task at a time. At the college's Brain and Behavior Lab, engineers have taken a robotic arm and devised a system for it to be used as an extension of the human body. Read More » 'Black Death' germ has afflicted humankind longer than suspected  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The plague germ that caused the "Black Death" in the 14th century and other ferocious pandemics has stalked humankind far longer than previously known. A study unveiled on Thursday of DNA from Bronze Age people in Europe and Asia showed the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, afflicted humans as long ago as about 2800 BC, more than 3,000 years earlier than the oldest previous evidence of plague. Seven had evidence of Yersinia pestis infection.
| Read More » Not Rocket Science! NASA's 3D Camera Could Improve Brain Surgery  | Scientists are one step closer to changing the way doctors do brain surgery, thanks to a tiny 3D camera in development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The new JPL camera could take 3D images from inside the brain, allowing surgeons to see brain tissue in intricate detail and leading to faster, safer surgeries, NASA officials said. The new device, known as MARVEL (short for Multi-Angle Rear Viewing Endoscopic Tool) is attached to an endoscope, a snaking instrument used to examine the inside of the human body.
| Read More » 2 Comets Collided to Form Rosetta's 'Rubber Ducky' Target  | The strange shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has been studying for more than a year, arose from the long-ago collision of two separate, slow-moving comets, researchers say. "How the comet got its curious shape has been a major question since we first saw it," Holger Sierks, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, said in a statement. "Now, thanks to this detailed study, we can say with certainty that it is a 'contact binary,'" added Sierks, who serves as the principal investigator of Rosetta's Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS), the main camera system for the mission.
| Read More » Cadaver Experiment Suggests Human Hands Evolved for Fighting  | Just in time for Halloween, gore-resistant scientists are swinging frozen human cadaver arms like battering rams — in the name of science, of course. The researchers say their macabre experiments support the hotly debated idea that human hands evolved not only for manual dexterity, but also for fistfights. David Carrier, a comparative biomechanist at the University of Utah, and his colleagues have controversially suggested that fist fighting might have helped to drive the evolution of not only the human hand, but also the human face and the human propensity to walk upright.
| Read More » Talks on climate deal heat up over bill for global warming BONN, Germany (AP) — The trillion-dollar question of who should pay for global warming is coming to a head in talks on an international climate pact, as developing countries worry they won't get enough money to tackle the problem. Read More » Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'StarTalk' Returns to TV Sunday with Guest Bill Clinton  | The second season of "StarTalk," the science-themed TV talk show hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, premiers this Sunday (Oct. 25) on the National Geographic Channel.
| Read More » Ingredients for Life Were Always Present on Earth, Comet Suggests  | Astronomers detected 21 different complex organic molecules streaming from Comet Lovejoy during its highly anticipated close approach to the sun this past January. "This suggests that our proto-planetary nebula was already enriched in complex organic molecules (as disk models suggested) when comets and planets formed," study lead author Nicolas Biver, of the Paris Observatory, told Space.com via email. Biver and his colleagues studied Comet Lovejoy with the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique's 100-foot-wide (30 meters) radio telescope in Spain during two separate three-day stretches in January 2015.
| Read More » Astronaut's Watch Worn on the Moon Sells for Record $1.6 Million  | The Bulova timepiece, which Apollo 15 commander David Scott wore during NASA's fourth successful lunar landing mission in 1971, was sold by RR Auction of Boston for an astronomical $1,625,000 to a businessman from Florida who wished to remain anonymous. In the 1960s, NASA issued Omega Speedmaster watches to the Apollo astronauts to wear on their missions. At the end of the program in 1973, the space agency transferred the chronographs to the Smithsonian, where most of them are still held today.
| Read More » Photo of Iceberg that Sank Titanic for Sale: Is It Real?  | A photo of what could be the notorious iceberg that sunk the Titanic is up for auction this weekend, but experts are unsure whether the historic snapshot actually shows the destructive iceberg, or simply one that was floating in the vicinity at the time of the accident. The liner's chief steward took a photo of an iceberg with three crownlike points and an odd red streak on it, possibly from the Titanic's hull, he wrote in a note accompanying the photograph. "On the day after the sinking of the Titanic, the steamer Prinz Adalbert passes the iceberg shown in this photograph," the chief steward wrote in a message to commemorate the event.
| Read More » Howl of a good time: Deep monkey roars come with intimate secret  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The howler monkeys whose guttural calls reverberate through Central and South American rainforests possess a secret that the males of the species may prefer to be left unrevealed. Howler monkeys make among the loudest, deepest sounds of any land animal, and males use their roars to attract the ladies for mating and intimidate other males. Among nine howler monkey species studied, those with the biggest hyoid produced the deepest and lowest-frequency calls, but also had the littlest testes for sperm production.
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