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	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) For Rare-Species Poachers, Scientific Journals Are Treasure Maps The moment he laid eyes on the geckos — creatures with remarkable green eyes and zebralike stripes speckled with yellow — Jian-Huan Yang knew they were special. The conservation officer at the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden in Hong Kong had discovered two new gecko species in China. Recently, commercial collectors have been using reports of such new species in scientific journals as tools to track down the newbies so they can sell them for a profit on the exotic pet trade market. Read More » Giant Dinosaur Had 2 Tumors on Its Tailbone It's fairly common to discover dinosaur remains scratched with ancient claw or bite marks, but finding fossils with signs of tumors is rare. Read More » 30-Year Deep Freeze Just Puts Tardigrade in the Mood After being locked in a deep freeze for more than 30 years, two microscopic creatures called tardigrades have been resuscitated, with one of the adults getting busy with reproduction "immediately" and "repeatedly," scientists reported. Read More » U.S. could still cancel Raytheon GPS ground system: general By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force could still cancel the ground control system Raytheon Co is developing to operate new GPS satellites, if the company does not improve its performance on the troubled system, a top U.S. general said. Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said officials were keeping close tabs on Raytheon's GPS Operational Control System, or OCX, which he described as the Air Force's "No. 1 troubled program." "OCX has significant promise, but no system is a no-fail system," Greaves told a breakfast hosted by the Air Force Association's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Read More » Branson's Virgin Galactic unveils new passenger spaceship By Irene Klotz MOJAVE, Calif. (Reuters) - Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture unveiled a new passenger spacecraft on Friday, nearly 16 months after a fatal accident destroyed its sister ship during a test flight over California's Mojave Desert. The rollout of the gleaming craft, dubbed Virgin Space Ship Unity, marks Branson's return to a race among rival billionaire entrepreneurs to develop a vehicle that can take thrill-seekers, researchers and commercial customers on short hops into space. "It's almost too good to be true," Branson said during a ceremony at the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 100 miles (160 km) north of Los Angeles. Read More » Shift in U.S. sanctions could ground Russian rocket engines: general By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force would ground the Russian-built RD-180 engines that power its Atlas 5 rockets if a U.S. government review determines that several sanctioned Russian individuals have too close a relationship with the engine maker, a top U.S. general said on Friday. Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said the Pentagon was reviewing responses about the sanctions issue and related matters in time to meet a Feb. 22 deadline set by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain. McCain last week asked the Air Force and Pentagon to explain why the U.S. government is continuing to use engines built by Russia's NPO Energomash given sanctions in place against Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and other sanctioned individuals, who control the company after a big reorganization. Read More » Disney's 'Miles From Tomorrowland' Fuses Space Science and Fun In an episode from "Miles From Tomorrowland" — a new Disney kid's TV show about a galactic-traveling family, whose first season finale will air in March — one of the characters sees Pluto out the spaceship's window and calls it a planet. "No, it's a dwarf planet," another character says, echoing the still hotly debated consensus from an International Astronomical Union decision in 2006. One of the show's advisers, Randii Wessen, has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since Voyager 2 flew by Saturn in 1980. Read More » Branson's Virgin Galactic moves to return to space race By Irene Klotz LONG BEACH, Calif. (Reuters) - Richard Branson said on Thursday his Virgin Galactic venture is eager to rejoin the race among rival billionaire entrepreneurs to send passengers and satellites into space, following a deadly accident 16 months ago. "To have three or four people who are fairly entrepreneurial competing with each other means we'll be able to open up space at a fraction of the price that governments have been able to do so in the past," Branson told Reuters as he toured Virgin Galactic's 150,000-square-foot LauncherOne rocket design and manufacturing plant in Long Beach, California. On Friday, Virgin Galactic plans to unveil its new SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger, two-pilot winged space plane designed to take thrill-seekers, researchers and commercial customers on five-minute hops into suborbital space, reaching altitudes of about 62 miles (100 km). Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) 'Good' Bacteria Lacking in City Homes The researchers found that homes in urban areas in South America tended to have lower levels of certain microbes commonly found in the environment, compared with homes in rural areas. However, homes in urban areas had higher levels of microbes associated with human presence, which could potentially mean an increase in the transmission of the bacteria that cause disease, the researchers said. For now, the researchers don't know with certainty whether the differences in bacterial composition found in the new study may affect people's health, said study author Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, an associate professor in the Human Microbiome Program at the New York University School of Medicine. Read More » Adderall Misuse Is a Growing Problem, Experts Warn Improper use of the stimulant Adderall is becoming a bigger problem among young adults — a growing percentage say they use the drug without a prescription, a new study finds. The results from a nationwide health survey show that from 2006 to 2011, the percentage of adults who said they took Adderall without a prescription increased from 0.73 percent to 1.2 percent. Young adults should be aware that Adderall can cause serious side effects, including high blood pressure and stroke, the researchers said. Read More » Surgery Leaves Woman with 'Temporary Kleptomania' A woman in Brazil who had cosmetic surgery ended up with not only a flatter stomach and larger breasts, she also developed kleptomania for a few weeks, a new case report reveals. A few days after being released from the hospital following her cosmetic surgery, the 40-year-old woman began to have "recurring, intrusive thoughts and an irresistible compulsion towards stealing," according to the case report, published online Jan. 29 in the journal BMJ Case Reports. The most likely explanation for her symptoms is that the woman suffered from inadequate blood flow to the brain at some point during or right after the surgical procedure, said case report co-author Dr. Fabio Nascimento, who is currently a neurologist at Toronto Western Hospital in Canada, but who was part of the medical team during the woman's hospitalization in Brazil at the time of the case. Read More » China looks to reward academic innovation to drive economic growth China will give greater financial rewards to innovative academics and small research bodies in a drive to convert interesting scientific ideas into commercial realities and rev up its high-tech industries as wider economic growth stalls. China's State Council said research bodies and university units who transferred their work to outside firms to develop and market should receive no less than half of the net income earned from the product as a reward. China is trying to boost its high-tech industries, from medicines to computer chips, to offset a slowdown in manufacturing and exports that has dragged its economic growth to its slowest level in a quarter of a century. Read More » Out of Africa, and into the arms of a Neanderthal By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Research showing that our species interbred with Neanderthals some 100,000 years ago is providing intriguing evidence that Homo sapiens ventured out of Africa much earlier than previously thought, although the foray appears to have fizzled. Scientists said on Wednesday an analysis of the genome of a Neanderthal woman whose remains were found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia near the Russia-Mongolia border detected residual DNA from Homo sapiens, a sign of inter-species mating. Previous research had established that Homo sapiens and our close cousins the Neanderthals interbred around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, said geneticist Sergi Castellano of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. Read More » 1st Case of Cancer in Naked Mole Rats Confirmed Naked mole rats are renowned for their ability to live cancer-free, even when researchers try to induce the disease artificially. For the first time on record, researchers have diagnosed two naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) with cancer. "These cases represent the first formal reports of cancer in the naked mole rat, a rodent species best known for its extreme longevity and apparent resilience to typical health-span-limiting diseases, including cancer," the researchers wrote in the report, published online today (Feb. 17) in the journal Veterinary Pathology. Read More » Medieval Shipwreck Hauled from the Deep The boat was likely deliberately sunk by maritime engineers more than 600 years ago in an effort to alter the flow of the Ijssel River, an offshoot of the mighty Rhine River that flows through six European countries. The trading ship sailed at a time when the Hanseatic League, a group of guilds that fostered trade across Europe, dominated the seas. The boat was first discovered in 2012 at the river bottom during efforts to widen the flow of the Ijssel River. Read More » Fertile Crescent? Neanderthals & Humans Likely Bred in the Mideast Neanderthals and modern humans may have interbred much earlier than thought, with ancient liaisons potentially taking place in the Middle East, researchers say. This finding supports the idea that some modern humans left Africa long before the ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians migrated out of Africa, scientists added. The Neanderthals were once the closest relatives of modern humans, living in Europe and Asia until they went extinct about 40,000 years ago. Read More »
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