|  Lone Star Flight Museum to Land Where NASA Astronaut Jets Take Off  | HOUSTON — For 24 years, former astronaut Bonnie Dunbar came to Ellington Field to fly. On Monday (Nov. 9), she returned to the southeast Houston airport, the home to NASA's aircraft operations, to dig — in honor of the history, and future, of flight. Dunbar, who launched aboard five space shuttle missions between 1985 and 1998, was among the dignitaries who took up a shovel of dirt to symbolically break ground on the new site of the Lone Star Flight Museum.
| Read More » Mars' Lost Atmosphere: MAVEN Probe Scientist Explains New Finding  | The MAVEN spacecraft recently revealed that Mars' once-thick atmosphere was stripped away by powerful solar activity at some time in its history. "MAVEN has been focused on trying to understand the changing Mars climate," Jakosky told Space.com. The new findings from MAVENshow that the Martian atmosphere was lost to space, with large amounts stripped away by strong solar activity — as opposed to the atmosphere going down into the soil.
| Read More » European scientists say weedkiller glyphosate unlikely to cause cancer  | By Barbara Lewis BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said on Thursday, and the agency proposed a higher limit on the daily amount of residue of the popular weed killer deemed safe if consumed. The EFSA advises EU policymakers and its conclusion could lead the 28-member European Union to renew approval for glyphosate, which was brought into use by Monsanto Co in the 1970s and is used in its top-selling product Roundup as well as in many other herbicides around the world. ...
| Read More » 1 in 45 US Kids Has an Autism Spectrum Disorder About 1 in 45 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder, according to a new government estimate of the condition's prevalence in 2014. This new report is based on data collected during the yearly National Health Interview Survey, from interviews of parents about their children, and is the first report of the prevalence of autism in the U.S. to include data from the years 2011 to 2014, according to the researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although the new estimate looks like a significant increase from the CDC's previous estimate — which put the autism spectrum disorder rate at 1 in 68 children — the previous estimate was made using data from a different CDC survey, called the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which gathers information from children's medical records. Read More » Here's How Many Americans Are Now Obese Nearly 38 percent of U.S. adults are obese, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 2013 and 2014, 37.7 percent of U.S. adults had a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, which is considered obese, according to a new CDC report. What is clear is that obesity rates have increased over the last decade. Read More » Brain Scan May Predict Chance of Coma Recovery Using a scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), doctors have zeroed in on a poorly studied brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) that appears to be involved with consciousness. This work is also ongoing. Read More » Woman in Africa Survives Double Whammy of Ebola, Stroke  | A middle-age woman in Africa who became infected with Ebola suffered a stroke during her bout with the virus but managed to survive both maladies, according to a new report of her case. The woman's case suggests that Ebola complications could include stroke, but more research is needed to say for sure, the authors said. The woman, in her 40s or 50s, went to an Ebola treatment center in West Africa in January 2015, according to the case report.
| Read More » Construction of Giant Next-Generation Telescope Begins in Chile  | Construction of the world's biggest telescope is now underway. A star-studded groundbreaking ceremony here in the Chilean Andes Wednesday evening (Nov. 11) — attended by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, United States ambassador to Chile Michael Hammer and other dignitaries — officially ushered the $1 billion Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) into the construction phase. When it's finished, GMT will boast a light-collecting surface more than twice as wide as that of any existing optical scope, and it will return images 10 times sharper than those of NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope, project representatives say.
| Read More » NASA's Innovative Drone Glider Prototype Aces Test Flight  | A remotely piloted aircraft achieved an important research milestone last month when a subscale "flying wing" glider successfully completed a series of flight tests. Previously, development on this concept led to some preliminary work on a NASA glider for Mars called Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars (Prandtl-m), designed with the idea that it could sail through the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet. "[Prandtl-D No. 3] flew beautifully," Albion Bowers, NASA Armstrong chief scientist and Prandtl-D project manager, said in a statement from the agency about the Oct. 28 flights.
| Read More » Ultrathin Graphene Can Improve Night Vision Tech  | Night-vision windshields on cars might one day be possible with advanced thermal imaging technology based on flexible, transparent, atomically thin sheets of carbon, researchers say. Thermal imaging lets people see the invisible infrared rays that objects shed as heat. Thermal imaging devices have helped soldiers, police, firefighters and others see in the dark and in smoky conditions so they can better do their jobs.
| Read More » El Nino sends rare tropical visitors to California waters  | El Nino's warm currents have brought fish in an unexpected spectrum of shapes and colors from Mexican waters to the ocean off California's coast, thrilling scientists with the sight of bright tropical species and giving anglers the chance of a once-in-a-lifetime big catch. Creatures that have made a splash by venturing north in the past several weeks range from a whale shark, a gentle plankton-eating giant that ranks as the world's largest fish and was seen off Southern California, to two palm-sized pufferfish, a species with large and endearing eyes, that washed ashore on the state's central coast. Scientists say El Nino, a periodic warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific, has sent warm waves to California's coastal waters that make them more hospitable to fish from the tropics.
| Read More » Incan Child Sacrified to the Gods Reveals History of American Expansion  | The mummy of an Incan child who was sacrificed to the gods more than 500 years ago belonged to a previously unknown offshoot of an ancient Native American lineage, new research finds. The child, a 7-year-old who was found frozen in the highest reaches of the Andes in Argentina, was part of a genetic lineage that arose when humans were beginning to cross the Bering Strait or first migrating into the Americas, the researchers found.
| Read More » Mysterious 'Blood Rain' Tints Water a Gruesome Hue  | Residents of several villages in northwest Spain received an unpleasant surprise last fall, when they noticed that the water in their fountains had turned a gory shade of red. The tint wasn't left behind by a guilty murderer's bloody hands, but rather by microscopic algae that arrived in a recent rainfall. Speculation ran rampant, blaming everything from contaminants dropped from airplanes to biblical plagues (a similar "blood rain" episode in Kerala, India, in 2001 sparked suggestions that the rain had extraterrestrial origins).
| Read More » Lost Pharaoh? Great Pyramid May Hide Undiscovered Tomb  | Speculation swirls anew that within Egypt's Great Pyramid of Khufu there lies a hidden tomb, possibly holding the pharaoh himself, sealed there for thousands of years. The discovery of so-called thermal anomalies by a team scanning the pyramid suggests an as-yet-unidentified open space that could be evidence of a tomb. Scientists and explorers have been searching for an undiscovered tomb within the Great Pyramid since the 19th century, so far failing to find one.
| Read More » Friday the 13th Times 3: Why So Many 'Unlucky' Days in 2015? Today's inauspicious (or perhaps completely insignificant) date comes on the heels of a Friday the 13th in both February and March of this year. Today is the third and last Friday the 13th of the year, but it's also the final Friday the 13th in a series of seven years, in which three of those years had three Friday the 13ths. In 2009, there were three Friday the 13th dates. Read More » 'WTF' Space Junk Meets Fiery Demise as Scientists Watch (Video)  | The mysterious space junk WT1190F fell from the sky this morning, and scientists had a flying, ringside seat as the object burned up in multicolored fireballs. A new video of the falling WT1190F shows the first observations taken by a worldwide collaboration of researchers watching from a Gulfstream 450 business jet as the object returned to Earth to meet its fiery doom. European Space Agency officials suggest the debris is likely from an old rocket mission, and the science team's analysis should help reveal the space junk's ultimate origin.
| Read More » Teens Are Happier Than in the Past — Why Are Adults So Miserable? "My conclusion is that our current culture is giving teens what they need, but not mature adults what they need," Twenge said. Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before" (Free Press, 2006), became interested in studying changes in happiness after seeing several conflicting papers on the topic. Very quickly, Twenge said, a pattern emerged: The eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders of today are happier than the eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders of previous decades. Read More » | |
