|  El Niño Expected to Strengthen, Bring Wild Weather Across US  | El Niño is likely to strengthen by the end of the year, potentially bringing more precipitation than usual to much of the United States. This year's El Niño is among the strongest since 1950, according to meteorologists. Already, the atmospheric pattern is among the top three since that time, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
| Read More » Face Transplants Move Forward with Most Extensive Operation Yet  | The man recently underwent the most extensive facial transplant done to date, said the doctors who treated him. "The amount of tissue that was transplanted [in this surgery] had not been transplanted before," Rodriguez said. Prior to this surgery, Rodriguez told the patient, Patrick Hardison, that the surgery had a 50/50 chance of success, Rodriguez said.
| Read More » UNESCO Celebrates 70th Anniversary with High-Tech Light Show  | The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year with some very high-tech decorations. Today (Nov. 16), a slew of superpowerful projectors will turn the many facades of the organization's headquarters in Paris into a giant digital photo album. The live projection show will literally reflect the accomplishments that the multinational agency has achieved over the past seven decades, displaying never-before-seen photos from the UNESCO archives.
| Read More » Lockheed-Boeing venture says will not bid for U.S. GPS satellite launch United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, on Monday said it would not bid for the next U.S. Air Force global positioning system (GPS) satellite launch, effectively ceding the competition to privately held SpaceX. ULA, the monopoly provider of such launches since its creation in 2006, said it was unable to submit a compliant bid because of the way the competition was structured, and because it lacked Russian-built RD-180 engines for its Atlas 5 rocket. The Pentagon last month declined to issue a waiver from a U.S. law that last year banned use of the Russian engines for military and spy satellite launches. Read More » Famous Leonid Meteor Shower Peaks This Week  | One of the year's most anticipated meteor showers peaks this week. The Leonid meteor shower will reach its maximum overnight Tuesday into Wednesday (Nov. 17 to Nov. 18), giving skywatchers the chance to see some brilliant "shooting stars." However, though the Leonids have put on some amazing displays in the past, this year's show will likely be on the subdued side. The Leonids are so named because the meteors appear to originate from the constellation Leo (the Lion).
| Read More » Going batty: secrets behind upside-down flight landings revealed  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It is an aerial maneuver far beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated modern aircraft: landing upside down on a ceiling. Brown University scientists observed two species: Seba's short-tailed bat and the lesser dog-faced fruit bat. "Flying animals all maneuver constantly as they negotiate a three-dimensional environment," Brown biology and engineering professor Sharon Swartz said.
| Read More » Genetic sleuthing helps sort out ancestry of modern Europeans  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - DNA extracted from a skull and a molar tooth of ancient human remains discovered in the southern Caucasus region of Georgia is helping sort out the multifaceted ancestry of modern Europeans. Scientists said on Monday they sequenced the genomes of two individuals, one from 13,300 years ago and the other from 9,700 years ago, and found they represented a previously unknown lineage that contributed significantly to the genetics of almost all modern Europeans. At the time, Europe was populated by Neanderthals.
| Read More » Going batty: secrets behind upside-down flight landings revealed  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It is an aerial maneuver far beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated modern aircraft: landing upside down on a ceiling. Brown University scientists observed two species: Seba's short-tailed bat and the lesser dog-faced fruit bat. "Flying animals all maneuver constantly as they negotiate a three-dimensional environment," Brown biology and engineering professor Sharon Swartz said.
| Read More » U.S. firefighter gets world's most extensive face transplant  | A volunteer firefighter from Mississippi whose face was burned off during a home fire rescue received the world's most extensive face transplant, New York University Langone Medical Center said on Monday. After a 26-hour surgery performed at the New York hospital in August, 41-year-old Patrick Hardison is living with the face of 26-year-old David Rodebaugh, a BMX extreme bicycling enthusiast from Brooklyn who was pronounced brain dead after a cycling accident. Now, for the first time since that raging fire in Senatobia, Mississippi in 2001, Hardison can blink and even sleep with his eyes closed - key steps to sparing his blue eyes from blindness that previously seemed all but inevitable, said Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, the plastic surgeon who led the 150-person medical team that performed the procedure.
| Read More » Ancient Board Game Found in Looted China Tomb  | Pieces from a mysterious board game that hasn't been played for 1,500 years were discovered in a heavily looted 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China. There, archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board. The tile when reconstructed was "decorated with two eyes, which are surrounded by cloud-and-thunder patterns," wrote the archaeologists in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.
| Read More » Wild, History-Making Comet Landing By Philae Probe Recreated in Video  | The new video, which the European Space Agency (ESA) released last week, reconstructs history's first-ever touchdown on a comet, which was performed by the Rosetta mission's Philae lander on Nov. 12, 2014. Things didn't go entirely according to plan that day: Philae's anchoring harpoons failed to fire, and the lander bounced twice, at one point drifting in space near Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for about 2 hours. The new video animation is based on data collected by Philae's instruments, as well as those onboard the Rosetta mothership, which has been orbiting Comet 67P since August 2014, ESA officials said.
| Read More » Bulova to Sell Replica of Astronaut's Watch Worn on the Moon  | Bulova, the American watchmaker that made the unofficial — and by some accounts, "unauthorized" — backup watch that Apollo 15 commander David Scott wore on the third of his three moonwalks in 1971, has announced it will begin selling a modern edition of the astronaut's chronograph in January 2016. An unnamed Florida businessman bid on and won the original flown watch for a record $1.625 million in October, when it was offered by RR Auction of Boston on Scott's behalf. As such, Scott retrieved his personal backup, a watch he later said no one but his supervisor and his two crewmates knew was aboard at the time, to wear for the remainder of the mission.
| Read More » Leonid Meteor Shower Peaks Overnight Tonight: What to Expect  | You can see the famous Leonids this year even if clouds or bright city lights spoil your skies: The online Slooh Community Observatory will air a free Leonids webcast Tuesday at 8 p.m. EST (0100 GMT Wednesday) featuring live views from locations on four continents. You can watch this broadcast by joining Slooh and also gain access to the observatory's archive of past shows. You can also watch the Leonid meteor shower webcast on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh.
| Read More » 8-Hour Sleepers More Likely to Be Heart Healthy In the study, researchers compared groups of people who slept for different average lengths of time, looking at how well each group met the seven criteria from the American Heart Association for "ideal" heart health. Although previous studies have linked people's sleep duration to negative outcomes, such as their risk of heart disease, few studies have looked at sleep duration and good outcomes, such as ideal heart health, said the researchers. Read More » Polar Ice May Hold Secrets of Futuristic Materials (Video)  | For a few curious birds, it's been mathematician Ken Golden drilling cores from Antarctic sea ice. "Sea ice is a very complicated system," said Golden, who has been studying it firsthand since his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1980. The interactions between the sea ice and its environment dramatically change the ice and how it behaves.
| Read More » Moon Over Mars: Why US Needs a Lunar Mission First (Op-Ed)  | Elliot Pulham is the CEO of the Space Foundation. A 30-year veteran space leader, he served as spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center for the Magellan, Galileo and Ulysses interplanetary missions, as well as for numerous space shuttle and U.S. Department of Defense missions. Wanting to send astronauts to Mars seems all the rage these days, and the popularity of Andy Weir's "The Martian" has certainly enlivened the discussions.
| Read More » Mystery Extinct Cavemen Were More Diverse Than Neanderthals  | A mysterious extinct branch of the human family tree that once interbred with modern humans was more genetically diverse than Neanderthals, a finding that also suggests many of these early humans called Denisovans existed in what is now southern Siberia, researchers say. In 2008, scientists unearthed a finger bone and teeth in Denisova cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains that belonged to lost relatives now known as the Denisovans (dee-NEE-soh-vens). Analysis of DNA extracted from a finger bone from a young Denisovan girl suggested they shared a common origin with Neanderthals, but were nearly as genetically distinct from Neanderthals as Neanderthals were from living people.
| Read More » Einstein's True Biggest Blunder (Op-Ed)  | Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, America's largest Large Hadron Collider research institution. Lincoln contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. It has been a century since Albert Einstein published his first papers laying out his crowning intellectual achievement, the theory of general relativity.
| Read More » 8 Baby Turtles and Tortoises: Cute, and Critically Endangered (Photos)  | Avi Shuter is a wild-animal keeper at the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Bronx Zoo Herpetology Department. Julie Larsen Maher is staff photographer for WCS. In addition to documenting WCS field work, Maher photographs the animals at WCS's five New York-based wildlife parks: the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Zoo, New York Aquarium, Prospect Park Zoo and Queens Zoo.
| Read More » Hunger Games: How to Avoid Real Food Riots (Op-Ed)  | The global food system is heavily networked and complex, making it vulnerable to a variety of risks. In 2007 and 2008, the world watched how a modern-era food crisis erupted from the complex interplay of several drivers: droughts in major grain- and cereal-producing regions, increased biofuel production consuming grain supplies, and a range of long-evolving structural policy failures. The International Food Policy Research Institute's "Reflections on the Global Food Crisis" report highlights how significant price spikes for rice (224 percent), wheat (108 percent) and corn (89 percent) — beginning as early as January 2004 — eroded global food security and prompted food aid requests from 36 nations.
| Read More » Birth Control Lawsuit: What Happens When You Skip a Few Pills? Exactly what can happen if a woman misses one or more days of her birth control pills is highlighted by a new lawsuit: A company that allegedly mislabeled its birth control pills is being sued by more than 100 women who say they became pregnant because of the error. Pregnancy is especially possible for women who miss birth control pills while using these pills as their only form of birth control, doctors said. The women involved in the lawsuit reportedly took their birth control pills as instructed on the packaging. Read More » Aha Moment! Art & Science Converge to Inspire Creative Solutions  | In our first public event, Space.com featured the art of mathematician and cosmologist Ed Belbruno in a gallery showing at New York's Café Minerva — and, next door, hosted a panel discussion probing science, art and the origin of inspiration with a problem-solving artist, an artistic scientist and Belbruno himself, who mingles the two. Although his professional art and scientific careers do not overlap consciously, Belbruno says, he often finds elements of his scientific work reflected in his paintings: the whorls of orbital mechanics or strange time, and dimensions of cosmology and the origin of the universe. Next door, at Hamilton's Soda Fountain and Luncheonette, Belbruno met with his friends Robert Vanderbei and Rob Mars, a Princeton mathematician and a New York-based contemporary pop artist, respectively, to dig into the connections and differences between creating artistically and forging ahead in mathematics and science.
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