|  Abraham Lincoln Was a Science Champion, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson Says  | Abraham Lincoln is best known for abolishing slavery and keeping the United States together through the Civil War, but he also helped the country become the scientific and engineering powerhouse we know today. For example, Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, creating a system of land-grant colleges and universities that revolutionized higher education in the United States, notes famed astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson. "Known also as the people's colleges, they were conceived with the idea that they would provide practical knowledge and science in a developing democratic republic," Tyson, the director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium in New York City, writes in an editorial that appeared online today (Nov. 19) in the journal Science.
| Read More » Stellar Graveyard Reveals Clues About Milky Way's Ancient Birth  | NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has peered far back in time, detecting clues about how the Milky Way galaxy came together, shortly after the universe's birth. Astronomers trained Hubble on the Milky Way's dense central bulge and spotted a population of superdense stellar corpses called white dwarfs that are remnants of stars that formed about 12 billion years ago. "It is important to observe the Milky Way's bulge, because it is the only bulge we can study in detail," study lead author Annalisa Calamida, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, said in a statement.
| Read More » Weird Sea Mollusk Sports Hundreds of Eyes Made of Armor  | Acanthopleura granulata is a chiton, a pill bug of the sea. Researchers have long known that chitons have soft tissue embedded in their flexible suits of armor, and that some of this soft tissue is sensitive to light. Even weirder, these eyes are made of the same calcium-carbonate mineral as the chiton shell.
| Read More » No Fair! Children's Sense of Equality Is Shaped by Culture  | Across cultures, children develop a dislike of receiving less than others by age 10, but it isn't until later that they begin to feel discomfort when others get the short end of the deal, the new research found. In the study of kids ages 4 to 15 from seven countries, children in just three countries showed any sign of caring about fairness for other kids. "A negative reaction to getting less than others may be a human universal," said study co-author Katherine McAuliffe, a psychologist at Yale University.
| Read More » 'Flying' Tadpoles & Fleeing Fish Win Prestigious Photo Contest  | What does the world look like to a tadpole? The photo he took came out swimmingly, earning him first place in a photography competition hosted by the Royal Society, London. The man behind the pollywog photo is Bert Willaert, a biologist and environmental advisor in Belgium who has snapped thousands of photos of the natural world.
| Read More » A Magic Moment: The Milky Way from Yellowstone National Park (Photo)  | Before twilight and shortly after the moon set in Yellowstone National Park, astrophotographer A. Garrett Evans found the perfect moment to capture this stunning image. Evans took the image from near the edge of the Grand Prismatic Spring in the Midway Geyser Basin in Yellowstone on June 27 and recently shared it with Space.com.
| Read More » Kids Quiz One-Year Astronaut on Life in Space  | Astronauts aboard the International Space Station fielded rapid-fire questions from curious middle schoolers this morning (Nov. 19), delving into life on the orbiting lab and the everyday strangeness that invites. Sixty-five students from East Side Middle School in New York City, chosen for its science, technology, engineering and math focus, got the chance to talk with NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren aboard the station as part of an event hosted in the Time-Life building by the publication Time for Kids. "This is [Time for Kids'] 20th anniversary, so we think this is a fantastic way to celebrate 20 years of bringing the world to kids — and now, bringing 'outside the world' to kids," Nellie Gonzalez Cutler, Time for Kids' editor in chief, told Space.com.
| Read More » Pick Up the Pace: Walking Speed Linked with Heart Health in Older Adults For older adults, walking a little faster, or for a few extra blocks, may increase the heart-healthy benefits of your stroll, a new study finds. In the study, the researchers found that older adults who walked faster than 3 miles per hour had a 50 percent lower risk of heart disease than those who walked at a pace slower than 2 miles per hour. In addition, those who walked an average of seven blocks daily had a 47 percent lower risk of heart disease than those who walked five or fewer blocks each week, according to the study, published today (Nov. 19) in the journal Circulation. Read More » Researchers Grow Vocal Cord Tissue That Can 'Talk' Researchers have grown vocal cord tissue in the lab, and it works — the tissue was able to produce sound when it was transplanted into intact voice boxes from animals, according to a new study. "This is years away from trial just because of reality of the regulatory requirements," said study author Nathan Welham, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Vocal cords consist of two flexible bands of muscle that are lined with a specialized tissue, called mucosa, which vibrates as air moves over the cords, generating the voice. Read More » Bright Light Therapy Can Ease Depression Symptoms For people with depression, using "bright light therapy" either alone or combined with an antidepressant might help treat their condition, a new study suggests. In the eight-week study of 122 people with major depression, the researchers found that people who were treated with either a bright light box or a combination of light box therapy with an antidepressant drug experienced more improvement in their symptoms than people treated with a placebo. In comparison, those treated with an antidepressant drug (without light therapy) did not show improvements over those taking only a placebo pill. Read More » Jet-Propelled 3D-Printed Drone Claims Speed Record  | A new jet-powered drone might be the most complex flying machine ever built using 3D printing. The drone, which made its debut at the Dubai Airshow earlier this month, looks nothing like your average 3D-printed toy plane. It has a 9-foot-long (3 meters) wingspan and an aerodynamic design that gives it a futuristic appearance.
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