|  Mountains on Pluto believed to be ice volcanoes, scientists say  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered what appear to be ice-spewing volcanoes on the surface of Pluto, raising questions about how the tiny, distant world has been so geologically active, according to research presented on Monday. The findings, released at an American Astronomical Society meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, paint a far more complicated picture of Pluto and its moons than scientists imagined. "The Pluto system is baffling us," planetary scientist Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told reporters during a webcast news conference.
| Read More » Icy Volcanoes May Erupt on Pluto  | Icy volcanoes may lie on the southern rim of Pluto's frozen heart. Images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft have identified two peaks that tower nearly 4 miles (6 kilometers) high over the surface of the dwarf planet, and scientists say the peaks' physical features suggest they might be volcanoes. "These are two really extraordinary features," Oliver White, a New Horizons postdoctoral researcher with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said today (Nov. 9) during a news conference here at the 47th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
| Read More » Scientists warn of health damage from Indonesia's haze fires  | By Alisa Tang BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Toxic fumes from the Indonesian fires that have spread a chohttp://cdn.pictures.reuters.com/Doc/RTR/Media/TR3_UNWATERMARKED/8/5/6/6/RTS58G8.jpgking haze across Southeast Asia may be doing more harm to human and plant health than officials have indicated, scientists measuring the pollution say. Farmers are expecting a poor harvest because plants have too little sunlight for normal photosynthesis, while government figures of half a million sickened by the smoke are only the "tip of the iceberg", said Louis Verchot, a scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Meanwhile, the fires are converting carbon stored in burning peatlands into greenhouse gases, contributing to climate change.
| Read More » CORRECTED - Science's 'Breakthrough' winners earn over $21 million in prizes  | (Corrects paragraph 3 to physicists instead of physicians) By Sarah McBride SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Academia just turned a little more glitzy for a select group of scientists. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner handed out $21 million Sunday in seven Breakthrough Prizes, the award for scientific accomplishment he created three years ago alongside technology giants including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 23andme founder Anne Wojcicki and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The prizes are worth $3 million, around three times the sum a Nobel Prize winner receives.
| Read More » Virgin Galactic Recruits Female Test Pilot Kelly Latimer  | Kelly Latimer, the first female research test pilot ever to join what is now NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, has joined Virgin Galactic as the spaceflight company's newest pilot. Latimer, a retired a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, worked on NASA projects such as the 747 space shuttle carrier aircraft, the T-34 and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a flying astronomical observatory. "I have wanted to go to space ever since I can remember doing anything," Latimer said in a statement from Virgin Galactic.
| Read More » 'Electric Sails' Could Propel Superfast Spacecraft by 2025  | Robotic spacecraft may ride the solar wind toward interstellar space at unprecedented speeds a decade or so from now. Researchers are developing an "electric sail" (e-sail) propulsion system that would harness the solar wind, the stream of protons, electrons and other charged particles that flows outward from the sun at more than 1 million mph (1.6 million kilometers per hour). "It looks really, really promising for ultra-deep-space exploration," Les Johnson, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said of the e-sail concept here at the 100-Year Starship Symposium on Oct. 30.
| Read More » Photos Capture Great White Sharks Mid-Bite  | Massive great white sharks launching their 3-ton bodies out of the ocean and into the air can be a spectacular sight, if you're lucky enough (and brave enough) to be in the right place at the right time. "I've been in the water with sharks, but the emotion of seeing them flying like a UFO is really something," Daniel Botelho told Live Science. Botelho hit the shark jackpot in Gansbaai, South Africa.
| Read More » Why You Should Check Your Blood Pressure in the Morning People who have high blood pressure are often advised to monitor their blood pressure at home, and now, a new study suggests that blood pressure measured in the morning may be a better predictor of stroke risk than blood pressure measured in the evening. In the study, researchers looked at data from people in Japan and found that, when measured in the morning, higher blood pressure was related to an increased risk of stroke. When measured in the evening, however, higher blood pressure was not as closely related to people's stroke risk. Read More » Pandemonium! Motion of Pluto's Moons Perplexes Scientists  | The orbits of Pluto's four smallest moons are even more chaotic than scientists had expected, according to new results from the New Horizons mission, which made a close flyby of Pluto in July. "The way I would describe this system is not just chaos, but pandemonium," Mark Showalter, a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission, said today (Nov. 9) during a news conference at the meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. The new results show that as the four moons orbit Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, some of them are spinning incredibly fast, one is spinning backward against its orbit and some are tilted on their sides.
| Read More » Scientists tracking rain, snow in soggy Washington state  | SEATTLE (AP) — Using everything from a customized DC-8 jetliner to ground radars to 4-inch rain gauges, scientists are fanning out across one of the soggiest places in the United States this month to measure raindrops and snowflakes.
| Read More » | |
