|  One boy, two girls win Intel U.S. Talent Search The winners in three categories - basic research, global good and innovation - will each receive $150,000, it said in a statement. Amol Punjabi, 17, of Marlborough, Massachusetts, won the basic research category for developing software that may help drug makers to create new cancer and heart disease therapies. Read More » Drone meets blimp for crowd-friendly UAV By Matthew Stock A new breed of unmanned aerial vehicle that is safe to fly at close proximity to crowds has been developed by a spin-off team from Swiss university ETH Zurich. The helium-filled flying machine, known as Skye, combines the manoeuvrability of a traditional quadcopter with the energy efficiency of a blimp. The makers say their safe and 'friendly' drone offers a new and innovative way for brands to interact with their audiences in public settings. Read More » Frigid Pluto is home to more diverse terrain than expected By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The most detailed look at Pluto's surface to date has revealed an unexpected range of mountains, glacial flows, smooth plains and other landscapes, according to studies released on Thursday. The interplanetary space probe made the first-ever visit to Pluto and its five moons last July. Another scientist described the diversity of landscapes as "astonishing." How the varied terrain came to be remains a mystery for the distant Pluto, which has an average surface temperature of minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 229 degrees Celsius). Read More » Cat stem cell trial could lead to human treatments By Ben Gruber Davis, CA (Reuters) - The past five years of Smokey's life have been unbearable. "Chronic stomatitis is a common disease in the cat. Cats with FCGS usually have all their teeth removed, clearing up the inflammation in some but not all cases. Read More » Blame Methane Blasts for Sea Craters, But Not for the Bermuda Triangle  | A number of media outlets took that to mean that similar explosive methane activity in the Bermuda Triangle region of the Atlantic Ocean could be blamed for unexplained disappearances. Since the inexplicable 1945 disappearance of "Flight 19" — five U.S. military aircraft — a number of ships and airplanes containing hundreds of people have been reported missing after passing through or over waters in the Triangle, which is bounded by points in Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico. In an abstract published online March 2016 following its submission to the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, the scientists detailed a number of craters in the Barents Sea, an area in the Arctic Ocean with a basin shared by Norway and Russia.
| Read More » Here Are the US Cities at Highest Risk for Zika Transmission  | Miami, Houston and Orlando, Florida, are the cities within the continental U.S. that have some of the highest risk of having "local transmission" of the Zika virus, meaning the virus will spread to people from mosquitoes in the local area, new research suggests. Overall, the southeast part of the country faces the highest risk, the Eastern Seaboard faces a moderate risk and the western U.S. has a lower risk. However, evidence from similar viruses suggests that if Zika does begin spreading locally, the spread even in the highest-risk cities will be limited, affecting dozens of people at most, said study co-author Andrew Monaghan, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
| Read More » Brain Stimulation Could Speed Stroke Recovery For people who've had a stroke, a treatment that involves applying an electric current to the brain may help boost recovery of their mobility, a small clinical trial found. Stroke is the most common cause of severe, long-term disability. Rehabilitation training, which helps patients re-learn how to use their bodies, can help some patients recover their ability to move. Read More » Russia slashes space funding by 30 percent as crisis weighs  | Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev agreed to slash funding for Russia's space program by 30 percent on Thursday, an effort to reign in state spending in the face of a deepening economic crisis. Approving a plan submitted by Russian space agency Roscosmos in January, Medvedev ordered Russia's space program budget for 2016-2025 to be cut from 2 trillion rubles ($29.24 billion) to 1.4 trillion rubles. "It is a large program, but we need such big programs, even in circumstances when all is not well with the economy," TASS news agency quoted Medvedev as saying.
| Read More » Monster Mystery: Scientists Solve Decades-Long Puzzle of Alienlike Creature  | In 1958, amateur fossil collector Francis Tully found a prehistoric creature so strange that even scientists called it a monster. The beast has perplexed researchers ever since, with some calling the so-called "Tully monster" a worm and others classifying it as a shell-less snail. But now, an analysis of more than 1,200 Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium) fossils has uncovered the monster's true identity.
| Read More » What is a Tully Monster? Scientists finally provide an answer  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For more than half a century, scientists have scratched their heads over the nature of an outlandishly bizarre creature dubbed the Tully Monster that flourished about 307 million years ago in a coastal estuary in what is now northeastern Illinois. "I would rank the Tully Monster just about at the top of the scale of weirdness," said paleontologist Victoria McCoy of Britain's University of Leicester, who conducted the study while at Yale University. "I've always loved detective work, and in paleontology it doesn't get much better than this," said paleontologist James Lamsdell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
| Read More » What is a Tully Monster? Scientists finally provide an answer  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For more than half a century, scientists have scratched their heads over the nature of an outlandishly bizarre creature dubbed the Tully Monster that flourished about 307 million years ago in a coastal estuary in what is now northeastern Illinois. "I would rank the Tully Monster just about at the top of the scale of weirdness," said paleontologist Victoria McCoy of Britain's University of Leicester, who conducted the study while at Yale University. "I've always loved detective work, and in paleontology it doesn't get much better than this," said paleontologist James Lamsdell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
| Read More » Trees adapt to higher temperatures, limiting global warming impact  | By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Trees can adapt to rising temperatures and limit their natural emissions of greenhouse gases, according to a study published on Wednesday that suggests plants may have a smaller than expected role in stoking man-made global warming. As temperatures rise, trees use more energy in respiration and emit more carbon dioxide from their leaves. "Plant respiration results in an annual flux of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that is six times as large as that due to the emissions from fossil fuel burning, so changes in either will impact future climate," scientists wrote in the journal Nature.
| Read More » Scientists develop new human stem cells with half a genome By Bill Berkrot NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists for the first time have generated a type of embryonic stem cell that carries a single copy of the human genome rather than the usual two, a development that could advance research in gene editing, genetic screening and regenerative medicine. Derived from a female egg, the stem cells are the first human cells known to be capable of cell division with just one copy of the parent cell's genome, according to a study appearing on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Human cells are considered diploid because they inherit two sets of chromosomes, 23 from the mother and 23 from the father. Read More » The Gravitational Wave Crests: Big Discoveries are Worth the Wait (Op-Ed)  | Fleming Crim is assistant director for the NSF Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Crim leads a staff of nearly 180 and oversees an annual budget of $1.3 billion, with the directorate supproting core research in astronomy, chemistry, physics, material science and mathematics. Late last month, I testified before the U.S. Congress alongside three leading physicists about a topic largely unknown on Capitol Hill: gravitational waves .
| Read More » These Spiders Like Some Greens with Their Insects  | Spiders are known as clever predators, trapping and stalking their insect prey. Spiders chow down on everything from nectar to sap to small fruiting bodies, wrote the study's leader, Martin Nyffeler, a research fellow in conservation biology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and colleagues. "Such a large diversity of plant types, plant taxa and plant materials being used as food by spiders is novel," Nyffeler told Live Science.
| Read More » Watch 6 Teensy Robots Pull a 2-Ton Car  | "They use a synthetic gecko adhesive that is turned on when a shear force is applied, and then turned off as soon as it released," said David Christensen, a mechanical engineering doctoral candidate at Stanford University in California, who helped design the robots. The "μ-tugs" (pronounced MicroTugs) are named after the Greek letter "mu" that denotes the coefficient of friction in physics. The robots' adhesive force "behaves more like friction from a user perspective, except the force available is much, much, much larger than friction would be," Christensen told Live Science in an email.
| Read More » Marijuana May Help Cancer Patients, But Questions Remain Marijuana could potentially help cancer patients who have nausea or pain, and could possibly even be used as a treatment for certain cancers, but much more research is needed before any of these uses could be recommended, a new review article said. There is promising research on marijuana use in the field of cancer medicine, but many of the studies that have been done are outdated, looked at only a small number of people or were conducted in animals, said Dr. Tina Rizack, a co-author of the review and an oncologist at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. For now, the drug isn't recommended as a first-line treatment for any cancer or cancer-related side effect, but as legalization of, access to and research on marijuana increases, this may change, the researchers said. Read More » Living with Your Partner? No Problem, More Americans Say The survey reflects changes in behavior that have been going on for some time, said Paula England, a professor of sociology at New York University. Wendy Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, agreed. These results are not entirely surprising, because they're following general trends, Manning told Live Science. Read More » Do Sit-Stand Desks Improve Workers' Fitness? Desks that let you sit down or stand up to work may be a trendy piece of office furniture, but the health benefits of these desks are largely unproven, a new Cochrane Review study suggests. The researchers found that there's not yet much high-quality evidence to support the widespread use of these popular desks, which let you adjust the height of the work surface so that you can either sit or stand. From the six studies done on sit-stand desks included in the review, the researchers concluded that workers who used them logged from 30 minutes to 2 hours less sitting time per day than their colleagues who used conventional desks. Read More » Drawn to Safety: Doodles Could Secure Your Phone  | Soon, you might be able to ditch all of them and unlock your phone, apps and accounts with a doodle. Researchers have found that doodle passwords created on touch screens using free-form gestures were easier to remember than typed-out passwords. Researchers tested software that allowed users to create passwords by drawing any type of shape on their phones' touch screens, using either one or two fingers.
| Read More » Alien of the Deep: 'Winged' Green-Eyed Creature Stuns Fishermen  | Some fish look odd, but a mysterious, green-eyed fish recently pulled out of Nova Scotia's waters is downright bizarre. Scott Tanner was about 30 days into a 42-day fishing trip when he spotted the freaky fish. "Everybody was just like, 'Wow, that's weird, never seen one of those before,'" said Tanner, who is a fisherman from Nova Scotia.
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