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	(Sponsor this newsletter) 'Dinosaur disco' footprints reveal lifestyle of Jurassic giants By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On a platform of rock jutting into the Atlantic on Scotland's Isle of Skye, hundreds of newly discovered dinosaur tracks are changing the way scientists view the lifestyle of some of the largest creatures ever to walk the Earth. Scientists on Tuesday said they found the vast collection of Jurassic Period footprints, some reaching 28 inches (70 cm) in diameter, made when dinosaurs called sauropods waded through shallow water in a brackish lagoon 170 million years ago. "There were clearly lots of sauropods moving all around this lagoon. Read More » Diagnosing malaria with a cell phone By Ben Gruber COLLEGE STATION, TX (Reuters) - New technology that transforms a cell phone into a mobile polarized microscope can diagnose malaria in a Rwandan village with the same level of accuracy as a hi-tech lab in a major Western city, according to Texas A&M University biomedical engineers developing the device. "The way they diagnose malaria now is with a microscope but it is with a big bench top microscope that is relatively complicated to use, takes a trained technician, and you have to have the facility for that scope in a centralized lab somewhere. The device images a blood sample using polarized light that can detect a malaria parasite byproduct called Hemozoin crystals which appear as very bright dots in the image and are an accurate indicator of infection. Read More » Amid Controversy, Japanese Whaling Ships Return to Antarctic Ocean Japan sent two whaling ships back to Antarctica's Southern Ocean today (Dec. 1) after a one-year hiatus, resuming seasonal whale hunts that have come under increasing scrutiny and censure from the international community. Under a revised whaling plan, Japan proposes to kill 333 minke whales this year for research purposes — significantly fewer than past years' annual kill limit of 935 whales. Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which oversees the country's whaling program, stated on its website that researchers will study the whales' fish consumption and measure their competition with fisheries, creating ecosystem models for managing marine resources. Read More » U.S. bill ends legal quandary over mining rights in space By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - - A new law clears U.S. companies to own what they mine from asteroids and other celestial bodies, ending a legal quandary that had overshadowed technical and financial issues facing the startups, industry officials said on Tuesday. The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, signed by President Barack Obama last week, includes provisions that authorize and promote exploration and recovery of space resources by U.S. citizens, although no one can claim ownership of a celestial body. "It's not unlike fishing vessels in international waters," said Bob Richards, chief executive of Moon Express, a lunar transportation and mining company. Read More » Ethicists square off over editing genes in human embryos By Julie Steenhuysen WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Debate over the use of powerful new gene editing tools in human eggs, sperm and embryos grew heated on Tuesday as scientists and ethicists gathered at an international summit to discuss the technology, which has the power to change the DNA of unborn children. Several groups have already called for restrictions on use of the technology known as CRISPR-Cas9, which has opened up new frontiers in genetic medicine because of its ability to modify genes quickly and efficiently. Hille Haker, chair of Catholic Moral Theology at Loyola University Chicago, argued on Tuesday in favor of a two-year international ban on research that involves changing human reproductive cells, also known as germline cells. Read More » Growing push to expose more students to computer science Moving her finger over the laptop trackpad, 6-year-old Lauren Meek drags and drops a block of code to build a set of instructions. She clicks the "run" button and watches as the character moves ... Read More » Scientists, ethicists tackle gene editing's ethics, promise WASHINGTON (AP) — A hot new tool to edit the human genetic code has a big wow factor: the promise of long-sought cures for intractable diseases. But depending on how it's used, that same tool could also alter human heredity. Read More » One for the road: Breakthrough claimed with pot-booze breathalyzer An Oakland company working with scientists from the University of California at Berkeley is claiming a breakthrough in the race to develop an instant roadside marijuana breathalyzer. Hound Labs Inc, whose device is also uniquely designed to double up as an alcohol breathalyzer, is among a handful of companies and researchers hoping to capitalize on increasingly relaxed marijuana laws in the United States. Hound Labs said on Wednesday it had found an accurate way to measure THC - the psychoactive component in cannabis - within one or two blows. Read More » Global soil loss a rising threat to food production: scientists By Chris Arsenault TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - One third of the world's arable land has been lost to soil erosion or pollution in the last 40 years, and preserving topsoil is crucial for feeding a growing population, scientists said in research published during climate change talks in Paris. It takes about 500 years to generate 2.5 cm (one inch) of topsoil under normal agricultural conditions, and soil loss has accelerated as demand for food rises, biologists from Britain's Sheffield University said in a report published on Wednesday. "Soil is lost rapidly but replaced over millennia, and this represents one of the greatest global threats to agriculture," Sheffield University biology Professor Duncan Cameron said in a statement with the report. Read More » Oh Snap: Trap-Jaw Ants Jump with Their Legs, Too Trap-jaw ants are known for using their powerful jaws to launch themselves into the air, somersaulting several times their own body length to evade predators. Scientists recently discovered a trap-jaw species that leaps with its legs, a behavior that is extremely rare in ants and previously unknown in the trap-jaw family. Magdalena Sorger of North Carolina State University and author of the study describing this unusual behavior, was collecting trap-jaw ants in Borneo with a field assistant in 2012, when they noticed something "extremely strange," she told Live Science. Read More » Huge Geometric Shapes in Middle East May Be Prehistoric Thousands of stone structures that form geometric patterns in the Middle East are coming into clearer view, with archaeologists finding two wheel-shaped patterns date back some 8,500 years. And some of these giant designs located in Jordan's Azraq Oasis seem to have an astronomical significance, built to align with the sunrise on the winter solstice. Read More » An Ancient Nessie? Long-Neck Dinos Once Prowled Scottish Lagoon Hundreds of dinosaur footprints and handprints dating to 170 million years ago adorn the shore on the Isle of Skye, making it the largest dinosaur site ever discovered in Scotland, a new study finds. The discovery proves that dinosaurs — likely long-necked, four-legged, herbivorous sauropods — splashed around Scotland during the Middle Jurassic period, the researchers said. "These footprints were made in a lagoon, which is a pretty interesting environment for dinosaurs," said study lead researcher Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. Read More » World's Oldest Peach Pits Reveal Juicy Secrets The world's oldest peach fossils have been discovered in southwestern China, according to a new report. "If you imagine the smallest commercial peach today, that's what these would look like," Peter Wilf, a professor of paleobotany at Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement. In 2010, Wilf's colleague Tao Su, an associate professor at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China's Yunnan province, collected eight peach fossils that were exposed during the construction of a new road near the North Terminal Bus Station in Kunming, the capital of the province. Read More » Doctors Could 3D-Print Micro-Organs with New Technique Gone are the days when 3D printers merely built plastic trinkets — scientists say 3D-printed structures loaded with embryonic stem cells could one day help doctors print out micro-organs for transplant patients. Embryonic stem cells, obtained from human embryos, can develop into any kind of cell in the body, such as brain tissue, heart cells or bone. Scientists typically experiment with embryonic stem cells by dosing them with biological cues that guide them toward developing into specific tissue types — a process called differentiation. Read More » Safe Sleeping Is Just 1 Part of Preventing SIDS A safe sleeping environment is crucial for preventing sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), but it is not the only factor that determines the risk of the syndrome in babies, according to a new study. The rates of SIDS in the United States have decreased dramatically since 1992, when the American Academy of Pediatrics first recommended placing babies on their backs to sleep, instead of on their tummies, and since the importance of reducing suffocation hazards, such as soft bedding in cribs, has been recognized, the researchers said. "I work with a lot of parents whose children have died from SIDS, and the general climate is one where, because of the success of controlling the sleep environment, the parents often feel that they are responsible for the deaths of their children," said study author Dr. Richard Goldstein, of Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Read More »
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