|  Curiosity Rover Headed to Dark Sand Dunes on Mars  | NASA's Curiosity rover will soon get history's first up-close look at Martian sand dunes. Curiosity is headed toward the dark Bagnold Dunes, which lie in the northwestern foothills of the towering Mount Sharp, and should begin investigating the sandy feature in the next few days, NASA officials said. Curiosity will study one dune that's as wide as a football field and as tall as a two-story building, NASA officials said.
| Read More » Astronomers see planet still growing in its stellar womb By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Astronomers have taken the first images of a planet still in formation, a discovery expected to shed light on how giant planets manage to beef up early in their lives, research published on Wednesday showed. Astronomers used a telescope in Arizona to peer at a young star located about 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Astronomers previously suspected that a giant planet was orbiting in the gap. Read More » Alarming new "superbug" gene found in animals and people in China By Kate Kelland LONDON, (Reuters) - A new gene that makes bacteria highly resistant to a last-resort class of antibiotics has been found in people and pigs in China - including in samples of bacteria with epidemic potential, researchers said on Wednesday. "All use of polymyxins must be minimized as soon as possible and all unnecessary use stopped," said Laura Piddock, a professor of microbiology at Britain's Birmingham University who was asked to comment on the finding. Researchers led by Hua Liu from the South China Agricultural University who published their work in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal found the gene, called mcr-1, on plasmids - mobile DNA that can be easily copied and transferred between different bacteria. Read More » Hobbits Were a Separate Species, Ancient Chompers Show  | An ancient, 3-foot-tall (0.9 meters) human whose diminutive stature has earned it the nickname "hobbit" has puzzled evolutionary scientists since its little bones were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. Some have suggested the individual was a Homo sapien with some miniaturizing disorder. Now, teeth from the hobbit suggest it belonged to a unique species rather than a modern human with a growth disorder.
| Read More » French Flags on Facebook: Does Social Media Support Really Matter? In the aftermath of the coordinated terrorist attacks across Paris last Friday (Nov. 13), support popped up in the new public arena: Facebook. The social network rolled out a tool allowing users to easily put a French flag overlay on members' profile pictures to express sympathy with the victims. "Got a French flag on your Facebook profile picture? Read More » Aston Martin debuts Castrol's 90 second oil change tech By Matthew Stock Motor-oil firm Castrol, part of the BP Group, has launched a removable container that packages the oil and filter into one unit, making changing a car's oil a far simpler task. The Nexcel oil cell is to be fitted as standard in the new Aston Martin Vulcan track-only supercar, while the technology is expected to be in regular cars within five years. The developers say the bucket-shaped unit makes an oil change much easier and cleaner. Read More » Earth-Like Exoplanet May Be Too Radiation-Blasted to Host Life  | ?"Large coronal mass ejections have the potential to strip away any atmosphere that a close-in planet like Kepler-438b might have, rendering it uninhabitable," study co-author Chloe Pugh, of the University of Warwick in England, said in a statement. "With little atmosphere, the planet would also be subject to harsh UV [ultraviolet] and X-ray radiation from the superflares, along with charged particle radiation, all of which are damaging to life," Pugh added. Kepler-438b, which lies about 470 light-years from Earth, may be able to retain an atmosphere if it possesses a global magnetic field like Earth does, the researchers said.
| Read More » Lunar Lovers, Why Now Is the Best Time to Moon Watch  | One of the first things every new moon watcher learns is that, when observing the moon, timing is everything.
| Read More » How to Flirt in Panda: Bears' Squeaks Decoded  | Maybe that sounds like nonsense to the average person, but to panda bears, those sounds may translate roughly to "let's get busy," "stop bothering me" or "more, please" respectively, according to a new study of panda bear sounds.
| Read More » Not So Precious: Eyeless 'Smeagol' Arachnid Discovered in Underground Lair  | In a deep, dank cave in Brazil, a pale, blind creature lurks, never venturing out to feel the sun. Researchers recently found the creature in its underground lair, a limestone cave in southeastern Brazil, and described it for the first time today (Nov. 18) in the journal ZooKeys. You may know harvestmen as "daddy longlegs," those spiderlike critters that crawl all over the yard during the summer months.
| Read More » 'X-Ray Vision' Tech Uses Radio Waves to 'See' Through Walls  | "X-ray vision" that can track people's movements through walls using radio signals could be the future of smart homes, gaming and health care, researchers say. A new system built by computer scientists at MIT can beam out radio waves that bounce off the human body. Receivers then pick up the reflections, which are processed by computer algorithms to map people's movements in real time, they added.
| Read More » 'RoboBees' with Laser Eyes Could Locate Disaster Victims  | Mechanical eyes that shoot laser beams could one day help robot bees fly without crashing into obstacles, researchers say. These laser eyes could also one day help people control smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearable technology and other mobile devices using only gestures, the researchers added. Previous research found that robot bees are capable of flying while tethered and moving while submerged in water.
| Read More » FDA approves first genetically modified salmon for consumption  | (Reuters) - AquaBounty Technologies' salmon became the first genetically engineered animal to receive U.S. approval for human consumption, setting the stage for more such approvals. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday the company's genetically engineered Atlantic salmon was as nutritious as the farm-raised ones and was safe for consumption.
| Read More » You Share 70% of Your Genes with This Slimy Marine Worm  | Over 500 million years ago, humans and certain worms shared a common ancestor, and people still share thousands of genes with the worms, said scientists who recently sequenced genomes from two marine worm species. The results suggest humans and acorn worms, so called because of their acorn-shaped "heads," are distant cousins, said the researchers, led by Oleg Simakov of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Okinawa, Japan. The researchers analyzed genes from two acorn worm species: Ptychodera flava, collected off Hawaii, and Saccoglossus kowalevskii, from the Atlantic Ocean.
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