|  Musk's SpaceX rocket launch canceled at final countdown  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - At the last second, Elon Musk's SpaceX scrubbed plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday, again delaying an attempt to put an satellite into orbit and then land the vehicle's first stage intact on a sea platform, a step that may eventually slash costs. The 23-story rocket, carrying a communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, was less than two minutes from blast-off at 6:47 p.m. when the launch team aborted the countdown, SpaceX said during a webcast. Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said that Air Force safety officers stopped the countdown after a boat strayed into a restricted zone east of SpaceX's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch site.
| Read More » Minds Everywhere: 'Panpsychism' Takes Hold in Science Is consciousness nothing more than the firing of neurons in the brain? Many objects people think of as conscious may not be, while some that are considered inanimate may in fact have much greater consciousness than previously thought, Koch said. Read More » Earth's Early Ocean Was No Scalding Sea  | Rocks from the deep past, some 3.5 billion years ago when life first appeared on the planet, were deposited on a deep, cold ocean floor, not in a scalding sea, a new study suggests. "This is the first evidence that over the entire 3.5 billion years, Earth has operated within a temperature range that suits life," said lead study author Maarten de Wit, a professor at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. To take the temperature of Earth's ancient ocean, the researchers trekked to the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa.
| Read More » 5D Black Holes Could Break Relativity  | Ring-shaped, five-dimensional black holes could break Einstein's theory of general relativity, new research suggests. "Here we may have a first glimpse that four space-time dimensions is a very, very good choice, because otherwise, something pretty bad happens in the universe," said Ulrich Sperhake, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge in England. From the beginning, Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes how matter warps space-time, predicted its own demise.
| Read More » Dutch Buzz: Bees Get Smaller, Men Taller  | A team of scientists took a closer look at declining bee populations in the Netherlands and discovered something unexpected — it wasn't just the bee populations that were shrinking. Over nearly a century and a half, big-bodied female bee species in the Netherlands have reduced in size by about 7 percent, according to a new study, the first to investigate variations in Dutch bee size over time.
| Read More » Ancient Stubby-Legged Reptiles with Tiny Heads Were World Travelers  | Before dinosaurs roamed the planet, tanklike herbivores called pareiasaurs — barrel-chested and stubby-legged turtle relatives — reigned as Earth's first large plant-eaters. With tiny heads and bony knobs studding their skulls and bodies, pareiasaurs wouldn't have won many beauty contests. Pareiasaurs lived during the Permian era, about 266 million to 252 million years ago.
| Read More » Obama encouraging young people to learn math, science  | President Barack Obama is launching a version of "take your child to work day" that's focused on America's science laboratories instead of its corporate workspaces. It's part of Obama's effort ...
| Read More » At Least 9 Pregnant Women in US Infected with Zika: CDC Nine pregnant women in the U.S. have now been confirmed to have had Zika virus infections that they contracted through travel to places where the virus is spreading, U.S. health officials said today. Among the nine cases in the pregnant women, three babies have been born, including two who showed no signs of illness and one who had severe microcephaly, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two women are continuing their pregnancies, and so far, there have been no signs of problems with the fetuses. Read More » Checking Embryo Viability? Give It a Good Squeeze  | In fact, the technique of gently squeezing a series of embryos appears to be the most accurate way for researchers to figure out which one to select for implantation, according to the study published Wednesday (Feb. 24) in the journal Nature Communications. Tests that involve implanting embryos chosen this way into human patients may start soon, the researchers said.
| Read More » How to Gain Weight During Pregnancy, the Healthy Way Gaining weight during pregnancy is both natural and essential. Women may think that "being pregnant gives them the license to eat anything," said Katherine Tallmadge, a registered dietitian and an op-ed contributor to Live Science. Indeed, studies show that the amount of weight a woman gains during pregnancy plays a major role in how much she'll lose after giving birth. Read More » Funeral Feast? Butchered Turtles in Ancient Grave Hint at Ritual  | In an ancient settlement on the banks of the Tigris River in Turkey, archaeologists have made a strange discovery: 17 butchered soft-shelled turtles in the grave of a woman and child. As there are no marks of trauma or injuries, it's not clear how the two people buried with the turtles died.
| Read More » 'Mojoe' on the Go: New Thermos Doubles as Portable Coffeemaker  | Hyman first dreamed up what would become the mojoe when he was a college student studying late at night in the library. The mojoe is the first of its kind, Hyman said, because unlike other portable coffeemakers on the market, the mojoe does not require you to heat water before brewing, and it can withstand superhot temperatures. To create a self-contained coffee-brewing system within a travel mug, Hyman and his team figured out how to combine aspects of drip brewing with vacuum brewing in a small, light and durable device.
| Read More » Physics of Skipping Stones Could Make Bounceable Naval Weapons  | "A text titled 'The Art of Shooting [in] Great Ordnaunce' by William Bourne was likely published in 1578, and is the first known account to mention that if cannonballs are fired at a sufficiently low angle they will ricochet across the water surface," said study co-author Tadd Truscott, a fluid dynamicist at Utah State University in Logan. "This bomb was made to spin at a great rate before impact, enabling it to move along the water surface and avoid torpedo nets on its way to destroy key German dams," Truscott told Live Science. "Water impact has been heavily studied for the past 100 years, with motivations ranging from understanding the physics of seaplane landing to, more commonly, a simple desire to better understand the world in which we live," Truscott said.
| Read More » Bill Gates 'Discovers' 14-Year-Old Formula on Climate Change  | Bill Gates just released a climate science equation that explains how the world can lower carbon dioxide emissions "down to zero," according to the 2016 edition the annual letter he and his wife, Melinda, published. But instead of grilling Gates about the origins of the formula, climate scientists are glad he's talking about it, said Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. The genesis of Gates' equation might remain a mystery for now — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didn't return Live Science's requests for comment.
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