|  Freak Waaaay Out This Halloween with the Scariest Space Movies  | No Halloween season is complete without a few scary movies, so here are Space.com's recommendations for the most frightening flicks with a cosmic twist. In film, science fiction and horror have gone hand in hand since either genre was born. [Please note that these movies are not suitable for all viewers, and many of them contain disturbing images.
| Read More » Dawn Probe Heads to Superclose Orbit of Dwarf Planet Ceres  | NASA's Dawn spacecraft has begun the long journey to its final orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. The probe should begin collecting data and capturing photos from the new orbit in mid-December, NASA officials said. Dawn has been getting closer and closer to Ceres since arriving at the dwarf planet this past March.
| Read More » Scientists: Warming ocean factor in collapse of cod fishery  | PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The rapid warming of waters off New England is a key factor in the collapse of the region's cod fishery, and changes to the species' management are needed to save one of America's oldest industries, according to a report published Thursday in Science magazine.
| Read More » Scientists announce progress toward better battery to power cars  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have created a battery whose technology in principle could power electric cars and other energy-hungry devices far better than current lithium-ion batteries, but it remains years away from commercial use. Researchers at the University of Cambridge on Thursday announced the creation of a laboratory demonstration model of a lithium-oxygen battery that overcomes many of the barriers that have held back the development of this technology. Clare Grey, a Cambridge professor of materials chemistry who led the research, called it "a step towards a practical battery, albeit with many hurdles ahead." The researchers said it could be more than a decade before a practical lithium-oxygen battery is ready, in part because the battery's ability to charge and discharge is too low.
| Read More » Scientific Prizes Bring Needed Attention to Mental Health Research  | Dr. Herbert Pardes is executive vice chairman of the board of trustees at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and president of the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation — and last year was the first to win the prize that now bears his name. Pardes contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. This fall, scientists around the world will trade lab coats for tuxes and ball gowns for the annual "award season" announcements of the Nobel Prize, the MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the Lasker Awards, and the star-studded and televised Breakthrough Prize awards.
| Read More » The More Severe-Burn Patients Eat, the Faster They Heal (Op-Ed)  | Dr. Larry Jones, director of the Comprehensive Burn Center at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, contributed this column to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Patients with severe burns, understandably, suffer from substantially diminished appetites because they're in a considerable amount of pain and are often sedated, as a result. Despite these challenges, when burn patients are admitted to the Comprehensive Burn Center at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, we make nutrition a priority, often beginning a feeding tube within 6 hours.
| Read More » Facing Organ Donor Shortage, Patients Forced to Get Creative  | Dr. Todd Pesavento is medical director of kidney and pancreas transplantation and interim executive director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Every 10 minutes, another name goes on the list of Americans waiting for an organ transplant. Most of those patients will have to wait months or even years before finding a donor organ, and unfortunately, some never will.
| Read More » Fossil unearthed in Spain sheds light on ape evolution  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The well-preserved partial skull and skeleton of a gibbon-like creature that lived 11.6 million years ago in Spain is shedding new light on the evolutionary history of modern apes.Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery in Catalonia of fossil remains of a small, fruit-eating female ape that lived in a warm, wet forested region teeming with animals including elephant relatives, rhinos and saber-toothed predators.They gave the ape, weighing 9-11 pounds (4-5 kg), the scientific name Pliobates cataloniae and the nickname "Laia. ...
| Read More » Large asteroid set to shoot by Earth on Halloween By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A large asteroid that scientists only discovered this month will make a relatively close approach to Earth on Saturday, astronomers say, providing one of the best opportunities in years to gather data about a passing space rock. The asteroid, estimated to be about 1,300 feet (400 meters) in diameter, will shoot past the planet at 22 miles (35 km) per second at around 1 p.m. (1700 GMT) on Halloween afternoon. Known as 2015 TB145, it will come within about 300,000 miles (480,000 km) of Earth, farther away than the moon but relatively close by cosmic measures. Read More » Halloween Asteroid Flyby: Here's What We Know About 2015 TB145  | As a big asteroid flies by at a close but safe distance from Earth on Saturday (Oct. 31), astronomers will likely get a better radar view of the surface than ever before. Asteroid 2015 TB145 — discovered earlier this month, on Oct. 10 — will fly by slightly outside the moon's orbit. TB145 will fly by at 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) from Earth, but poses no threat to our planet.
| Read More » NASA Probe Flies Through Saturn Moon Enceladus' Plume  | NASA's Cassini spacecraft has made its deepest dive yet through the plume emanating from the south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.
| Read More » Party Like It's 2500 B.C.: Stonehenge Builders Hosted Barbecues The ancient builders of Stonehenge may have hosted massive barbecue cookouts where thousands of revelers feasted on meat, new research suggests. Archaeologists at the Neolithic settlement of Durrington Walls in modern-day southern England, where the builders of Stonehenge likely lived, found evidence that the village hosted open-air meat-roasting parties 4,500 years ago, with animals likely walking to the site for slaughter from regions far and wide. At the time, thousands of ancient pilgrims may have flocked to the site of Stonehenge to honor their dead, while heading back after hours to party and grill at Durrington Walls, the study authors speculated. Read More » Tiny Bird Fossil Solves Big Mystery About Life After Dinosaurs  | The newfound skeleton dates back to about 62.5 million to 62 million years ago, making it the oldest known modern bird specimen in North America to live after the dinosaur-killing mass extinction, the researchers said. "Birds were explosively diversifying right after the end of the Cretaceous, right after the big mass extinction," said study co-author Tom Williamson, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. "Maybe a dozen or less lineages of birds survived," said study co-author Daniel Ksepka, curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.
| Read More » Little Cousin: Human, Ape Ancestor Had 'Goggle Eyes'  | The fossil of a small primate with "goggle" eyes that strode atop tree branches, snagging snacks of fruit, suggests the last common ancestor of all apes might have been less like humans' closest living relatives than often thought, researchers say. This discovery could shed light on what the last common ancestor of all apes and humans might have been like, scientists added. For instance, the newfound species was a small-bodied ape that would have weighed about 8.8 to 11 lbs. (4 to 5 kilograms), making it similar in size to the smallest living gibbons.
| Read More » Swim for the Earth: 3D-Printed Bikini Scrubs Water Pollution  | Engineers from the University of California, Riverside, teamed up with designers from Eray Carbajo, an architecture and design firm based in New York City, to design a bikini that can absorb contaminants from water while a person swims. Sponge is a new material that engineers at UC Riverside started developing four years ago. "This is a supermaterial that is not harmful to the environment and [is] very cost-effective to produce," Mihri Ozkan, a member of the research team and an electrical engineering professor at UC Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering, told UCR Today, the school's online news publication.
| Read More » 'Be the Astronaut' and 'Journey to Space' in New Museum Exhibits  | In Los Angeles, the California Science Center has debuted "Journey to Space," a hands-on, climb-aboard experience at what it takes to live and work off the Earth. And in Texas, Space Center Houston recently opened "Be the Astronaut," a multimedia exhibit that takes visitors on trips to the moon, Mars, asteroids, Jupiter and beyond. From exploring the International Space Station to landing on multiple worlds, these new, separate attractionsfeature authentic artifacts, replica space hardware and interactive displays to entertain and educate children and the general public about the physics, science and technology needed to support human space exploration, both now and in the future.
| Read More » Halloween Fireballs Will Blaze in the Sky Through November  | During the next couple of weeks, there is a fairly good chance that Earth will encounter a swarm of unusually large space particles, capable of generating some eye-catching fireball meteors. The Taurid meteors, sometimes called "Halloween fireballs,"(fireballs are extremely bright meteors) create one of this year's longest meteor showers, with at least a couple of shooting stars per hour from Oct. 20 to Nov. 30. Meteors — popularly known as "shooting stars" — are produced when debris enters and burns up in Earth's atmosphere.
| Read More » Allied Navies Destroy Mock Ballistic Missile in Practice Test  | How many navies does it take to shoot down one ballistic missile? On Oct. 20, naval armed forces from nine different nations teamed up to shoot down a mock ballistic missile high above Earth's atmosphere. The fiery interception was part of a demonstration by the Maritime Theater Missile Defense (MTMD) Forum, an organization established in 1999 to promote cooperation among allied navies and to facilitate the coordination of sea-based defense systems.
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