|  Mysterious Sonic Boom Reported Over New Jersey  | At least 10 sonic booms have been reported this afternoon (Jan. 28) from southern New Jersey along the East Coast to Long Island, New York, say scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The first sonic boom was recorded at 1:24 p.m. EST (18:24:05 UTC), about 2 miles (3 kilometers) north-northeast of Hammonton, New Jersey, and 37 miles (60 km) south of Trenton, New Jersey. In the following hour and a half, seismometers picked up at least nine other sonic booms along the Eastern Seaboard all the way to Long Island, according to the USGS.
| Read More » Knowing all the angles: Ancient Babylonians used tricky geometry  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ancient Babylonian astronomers were way ahead of their time, using sophisticated geometric techniques that until now had been considered an achievement of medieval European scholars. "No one expected this," said Mathieu Ossendrijver, a professor of history of ancient science at Humboldt University in Berlin, noting that the methods delineated in the tablets were so advanced that they foreshadowed the development of calculus. The methods were similar to those employed by 14th century scholars at University of Oxford's Merton College, he said.
| Read More » Mexican researchers fit dog with 3D printed prosthetic leg A six-year-old dog named Romina, who was injured in a lawnmower accident, is fitted with an articulated prosthetic leg made with 3D printing technology. Santiago Garcia, UVM's great species coordinator and specialist in prosthetics, said being able to print out the model in 3D made the process easier and enabled him to adjust it quickly. Read More » Publisher Zuckerman announces US-Israel science initiative NEW YORK (AP) — Real estate magnate and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has announced a scholarship program to pay for American graduate students in the sciences to study in Israel. Read More » Europe to launch first part of space-based data highway Europe plans to launch on Friday night the first part of a new space data highway that will pave the way for faster than ever monitoring of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The EDRS-A node is the first building block of the European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS), a "big data" highway costing nearly 500 million euros ($545 million) that will harness new laser-based communications technology. The EDRS will considerably improve transmission of large amounts of data, such as pictures and radar images, from satellites in orbit to Earth as they will no longer have to wait for a ground station on Earth to come into view. Read More » The Real 'X-Files'? CIA Reveals Weirdest UFO Stories The real-life stories of UFOs would be enough for the fictional "X-Files" FBI agents Mulder and Scully to spend a lifetime investigating. With a nod to the new "X-Files" reboot (which airs on Fox on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET), the Central Intelligence Agency has released a trove of once classified documents on several real-life unidentified flying objects. The space race was on, the Cold War fears had reached a fever pitch, and science-fiction movies like "The Flying Saucer" (1950) catapulted schlocky depictions of aliens and their flying machines into the popular consciousness. Read More » Octopuses Are Surprisingly Social — and Confrontational, Scientists Find  | Octopuses are well-known masters of camouflage and skillful escape artists, but they aren't exactly famous for their social skills. Scientists have long thought that this many-armed denizen of the deep was strictly solitary and didn't interact much with its fellows, reserving its color-shifting ability for intimidating predators — or hiding from them. But a new study reveals that both male and female octopuses frequently communicate with each other in challenging displays that include posturing and changing color.
| Read More » Babylonians Tracked Jupiter with Fancy Math, Tablet Reveals  | The brown clay tablet, which could fit in the palm of your hand, is scrawled with hasty, highly abbreviated cuneiform characters. "It sounds minute for a layperson, but this geometry is of a very special kind that is not found anywhere else, for instance, in ancient Greek astronomy," Ossendrijver said. The tablet has long been in the collection at the British Museum in London, and it was likely created in Babylon (located in modern-day Iraq) between 350 and 50 B.C. Ossendrijver recently deciphered the text, and he described his discovery in an article that's featured on the cover of the journal Science this week.
| Read More » Decapitated Gladiators Reveal Roman Empire's Genetic Influence  | DNA from seven decapitated skeletons thought to be gladiators is helping researchers unravel the gruesome origins of the ancient remains. The new findings suggest that the Roman Empire's genetic impact on Britain may not have been as large as researchers had thought. The headless skeletons were excavated between 2004 and 2005 from a Roman burial site in Driffield Terrace in York, England, the archaeologists said.
| Read More » Limited Zika Virus Outbreaks 'Likely' in US  | It's likely that the United States will face small outbreaks of Zika virus, but widespread transmission of the virus here is not expected, health officials said today. Zika virus is spreading rapidly in Central and South America, and there have been a few cases in the United States among travelers who caught the virus overseas. Although the virus isn't spreading locally in the United States yet, it is possible that it will, because the mosquitoes that transmit the virus are common in some parts of the country, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
| Read More » Important First-Aid Move: What to Do If a Child Loses Consciousness If a child passes out, parents can help them by performing a simple first-aid technique known as putting them in "the recovery position," a new study suggests. Children in the study who became unconscious because they fainted or had a seizure — but were still breathing — and were placed in the recovery position were almost 30 percent less likely to be hospitalized compared with children whose parents did not perform this first-aid method, researchers in Europe found. The finding shows that putting kids on their sides during a seizure really does help, and it works to keep kids from needing to be hospitalized, said Dr. David Mandelbaum, a pediatric neurologist at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the research. Read More » F-35 Fighter Jet Likely Caused Sonic Booms That Rocked New Jersey | The sonic booms that rattled residents of New Jersey up to Long Island, New York, yesterday may have been the result of fighter jet flight tests at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland. At 1:24 p.m. EST (18:24:05 UTC) about 2 miles (3 kilometers) north-northeast of Hammonton, New Jersey, and 37 miles (60 km) south of Trenton, New Jersey, a sonic boom was detected at nearby seismometers in the ground. At least nine others were picked up in the following hour and a half along the Eastern Seaboard up to Long Island, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
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