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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Monkey mariners made monumental migration 21 million years ago By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Monkeys resembling today's capuchins accomplished the astonishing feat of crossing at least 100 miles (160 km) of open ocean 21 million years ago to get from South America to North America eons before the two continents joined together. Scientists said on Wednesday they reached that conclusion based on the discovery of seven little teeth during excavations involving the Panama Canal's expansion, showing monkeys had reached the North American continent far earlier than previously known. South America at the time was secluded from other continents, with a strange array of mammals evolving in what 20th century American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson called "splendid isolation." How Panamacebus performed the feat is a bit mysterious. Read More » China to launch 'core module' for space station around 2018 China will launch a "core module" for its first space station some time around 2018, a senior official told the state-run Xinhua news agency on Thursday, part of the country's plan to have a permanent manned space station in service around 2022. Advancing China's space program is a priority for Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for the country to establish itself as a space power. The "core module" will be called the "Tianhe-1", the Chinese word for galaxy or Milky Way, Wang Zhongyang, spokesman for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, told Xinhua. Read More » Some Science Coming from Japan's Ailing Hitomi Satellite Japan's troubled Hitomi satellite managed to collect some science data before going silent last month, scientists said. Officials haven't heard from the Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite since late March, about six weeks after the satellite's launch, and the craft appears to have broken into several pieces. "I am aware of the situation right now with Hitomi," Hornschemeier said here Sunday (April 17), during a session at the American Physical Society's April Meeting. Read More » Flexible Camera Wraps Around Objects to Capture 360-Degree Views A new camera that looks like a flat sheet of paper is so thin and flexible that it could be wrapped around everyday objects, such as desks, cars, streetlights and even clothing, new research shows. Read More » This 'Smart' Juicer Is Like a Keurig Machine for Juice A glass of freshly squeezed juice certainly beats the mass-produced kind you'd buy off a store shelf — after all, it's both tasty and nutritious. Now, a company has developed a new high-tech juicer that can deliver fresh, organic juice with the simple push of a button. The new juice system, made by the company Juicero, operates much like a single-cup coffee brewing system, but for juice. Read More » Google Celebrates National Park Week with Virtual Views It's National Park Week, but for anyone who is stuck indoors and can't hit the road, Google is making it easy to virtually visit many of America's treasures. Google Street View and Google Cultural Institute have teamed up to showcase U.S. national parks and historic sites on one easy-to-navigate web page. Users can overlook the Merced River in Yosemite National Park in California, view volcanic cinder cones at Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument and take a virtual hike in the Everglades in Florida, among other virtual adventures. Read More » South Africa boosts crop forecast accuracy with satellite imagery By Ed Stoddard PRETORIA (Reuters) - South Africa's estimates for key crops such as maize have become increasingly accurate thanks to satellite imagery and as farmers' often biased input has been cut out of the picture, a conference was told on Thursday. South Africa's maize crop has been hard hit this season by a scorching drought, bringing into sharp focus the need for accurate forecasts of the harvest's size to guide government policy and markets. From 1997 to 2002, all of the maize forecasts made by the official Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) underestimated the size of the harvest, said Eugene du Preez, director of privately-held SiQ, which provides the committee with satellite and aerial data, which helps it determine the size of the area planted. Read More » Longer Legs Linked to Cancer Risk Colorectal cancer has been linked to a number of risk factors, such as inactivity, smoking and eating a lot of red meat. Now, a new study suggests a slightly more surprising risk factor: long legs. Compared with people who had shorter legs, those with longer legs had a 42 percent higher risk of developing colorectal cancer, according to the new study presented here today (April 19) at the American Association for Cancer Research's annual meeting. Read More » Aspirin Linked to Lower Brain Cancer Risk Taking aspirin regularly may reduce a person's risk for a certain type of brain cancer, a new study finds. In the study, researchers found that people who regularly took aspirin had a nearly 34 percent lower risk of a type of brain tumor called a glioma, compared with people who didn't take aspirin regularly. This is not the first study to look at the link between over-the-counter pain relievers and brain cancer risk. Read More » How the Plants Around Your Home May Affect Your Life Span Women in the study with the most greenness near their homes — whether it was plants, trees and other vegetation — had a 12 percent lower death rate during the study period, compared with women who had the least amount of vegetation near their homes, the researchers found. "It is important to know that trees and plants provide health benefits in our communities, as well as beauty," Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which funded the study, said in a statement. For the study, researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston looked at the level of vegetation around the homes of about 110,000 women who were registered nurses living across the United States, and were participating in a large ongoing research effort called the Nurses' Health Study. Read More »
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