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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Antarctic Explorer Shackleton Hindered by Heart Defect, Docs Say It's been a century since Sir Ernest Shackleton led some of the first major expeditions to Antarctica, but today, medical sleuths suggest Shackleton might have had a hole in his heart, possibly explaining the health problems he had all his life. A famed explorer, Shackleton led the Nimrod Expedition of 1907 to 1909, members of which were the first people to climb Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the southernmost active volcano on Earth. The Endurance expedition was the third of four Antarctic expeditions that Shackleton undertook. Read More » Parents' Financial Debt Linked to Behavioral Problems in Their Kids Children whose parents have certain kinds of financial debt may be more likely to have behavioral problems, a new study suggests. The researchers found that the children in the study whose parents had "unsecured debt," such as credit card debt or unpaid medical bills, were more likely to experience behavioral difficulties than kids whose parents did not have this type of debt. Unsecured debt tends to be more expensive than secured debt, such as a mortgage or a car loan, because people generally pay higher interest rates for unsecured debt, and "it is expected to be paid off over a shorter period of time," compared with other types of debt, said study author Lawrence M. Berger, a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Read More » What Is Prediabetes? New Quiz Reveals Your Risk By taking a 1-minute quiz, you can find out if you're at risk for prediabetes. The quiz is part of a new public service campaign that aims to increase awareness of the condition. The goal is to give people an idea of their prediabetes risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put together the campaign in partnership with the American Diabetes Association, the American Medical Association, and the Ad Council. Read More » Mini T. Rex: 'Welsh Dragon' May Be Earliest Jurassic Dinosaur Two brothers hunting for ichthyosaur fossils along the coast of the United Kingdom came across something far more astounding: The bones of what may be the earliest known dinosaur from the Jurassic period in the U.K., and possibly even the world, a new study finds. After finding the bones in 2014, Rob Hanigan contacted his brother, Nick. Later, they reached out to paleontologists at the University of Portsmouth, who confirmed that the bones belonged to a theropod, a group of mostly meat-eating dinosaurs. Read More » What's Cookin'? Earth, Basically. But It's Not El Niño's Fault Scientists have analyzed the balmy trend, and El Niño is just part of the story, they say. Temperatures for December 2015 were especially unusual, with the highest average temperatures on land and sea surface recorded for any single month during 136 years of record keeping, according to a Jan. 20 statement by NASA and a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Part of the explanation for the heat spike toward the year's end lies in 2015's strong El Niño, a cyclical event that moves warm water along the equatorial Pacific from west to east, triggering climate activity that can drive temperatures upward in parts of the world and contribute to some extreme weather episodes. Read More » Walrus's Runny Nose Had Surprising Source (It Wasn't the Common Cold) No one likes a runny nose. But for one stuffed-up walrus, rivers of snot signaled a rare ailment. Read More » Metal 'Snow' May Power Earth's Magnetic Field The power source for Earth's magnetic field may be magnesium that has been trapped in the core since our planet's violent birth, a new model suggests. Magnesium is the fourth most common element in the Earth's outer layers, but previously, scientists thought there was almost no magnesium in the core. Iron and magnesium don't easily mix, and researchers thought that the Earth's core was mostly iron. Read More » Booze Buzz: Insect Guts Serve as Love Nests for Brewer's Yeast The yeast behind wine, beer and bread has sex in wasp intestines, researchers say. Bread, wine and beer depend on a single species of of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae — bread gets its spongy texture from bubbles of carbon dioxide released by this yeast, while wine and beer depend on this yeast for their intoxicating qualities. Despite the importance of S. cerevisiae, much remains unknown about how it behaves in the wild, such as how and where it breeds. Read More » Ligers and Tigons, Oh My! Cat Lineage Littered with Interbreeding Different species of cats mated with each other at several points in history, a new genetic study of felines reveals. The new cat family tree could also help explain many of the mysteries of cat evolution that have emerged in recent years, scientists added. When creating family trees of species, researchers can discover how closely related two species are by looking at the level of similarity between their DNA. Read More » Record hot years almost certainly caused by man-made warming By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - A record-breaking string of hot years since 2000 is almost certainly a sign of man-made global warming, with vanishingly small chances that it was caused by random, natural swings, a study showed on Monday. Last year was the hottest since records began in the 19th century in a trend that almost all scientists blame on greenhouse gases from burning of fossil fuels, stoking heat waves, droughts, downpours and rising sea levels. "Recent observed runs of record temperatures are extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused global warming," a U.S.-led team of experts wrote in the journal Scientific Reports. Read More » Spider Shows Off His Big Paddle to Woo Mates Males of the human variety may spend hours at the gym bulking up to attract the ladies, but that's nothing compared to the efforts of a new spider species from Australia. This little brown spider sports a massive, paddlelike appendage on its legs that it flashes at females to woo mates, new research has revealed. The paddle seems to be a way of separating the fertile females from those that have no interest in mating, said Jürgen Otto, the biologist who discovered the oddball spider. Read More » Migrating Storks Can't Resist a Garbage Dump Feast Garbage dumps may be such attractive pit stops for some storks that they shorten their migration routes to pay a visit, a new study suggests. A few years ago, Andrea Flack, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, was tracking the path of white storks from Germany, trying to get close enough to the birds to download flight data from the GPS trackers attached to their backs. Flack eventually found herself standing in an open garbage dump in Morocco, staring at her research subjects. Read More » US Military Wants Smaller and More Stable Atomic Clocks The U.S. military wants you … to design a better atomic clock. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense tasked with developing new technologies for the military, recently announced a new program called Atomic Clocks with Enhanced Stability (ACES). Atomic clocks are used to keep track of time in places where a tiny fraction of a second makes a huge difference. Read More »
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