|  Concentration counts in mind controlled drone race It was a test of concentration and brainwaves for students at the University of Florida during what was billed as the first mind controlled drone race. Sixteen competitors wearing special headsets measuring the electrical activity of their brains used their powers of concentration to send their drones down a 10-yard (meter) course to the finish line. The students used brain-computer interface (BCI) which enables a person to use brainwaves to control a computer or other device. Read More » 4,000 Sickened in Spain: How Does a Virus Get into Bottled Water? Thousands of people in Spain were recently sickened with a virus spreading from an unlikely source: bottled water. The illnesses were linked to contaminated office water coolers that were distributed to hundreds of companies in the cities of Barcelona and Tarragona. Norovirus is a common cause of foodborne illness outbreaks, and it can also contaminate drinking water, such as water from private wells, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read More » Obesity Rates in US Kids Still Rising, Study Says Despite reports that childhood obesity may be declining in some parts of the United States, a new study suggests that childhood obesity is still on the rise nationwide. In particular, there has been an increase in the percentage of children with severe obesity, the study found. From 2013 to 2014, 6.3 percent of U.S. children ages 2 to 19 had a body mass index (BMI) of at least 35, which is considered to be severely obese. Read More » Glitch postpones first space flight from Russia's new launch-pad  | MOSCOW (Reuters) - A technical fault forced Russia's space agency on Wednesday to postpone at the last minute the inaugural launch of a rocket into space from its new Vostochny launch-pad, Russian media reported. An unmanned Soyuz rocket carrying three satellites had been scheduled to fire off into orbit from the Vostochny site, which was built to end Russia's reliance on the Baikonur cosmodrome in neighboring Kazakhstan. ...
| Read More » Whodunit? Mystery Lines Show Up in Satellite Image of Caspian Sea  | From 438 miles (705 kilometers) up, the floor of the north Caspian Sea looks like someone's just scoured it with a Brillo Pad. Don't get out the tinfoil hat yet: NASA scientists say these mystery lines are the work of sea ice. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ocean scientists noticed the image this month, shortly after it was acquired by the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
| Read More » Time to Change Your Sheets? Bedbugs Have Favorite Colors Do bedbugs prefer their hiding places to be a certain color? Researchers conducted a series of tests in a lab to see if bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) would favor different-colored harborages, or places where pests seek shelter. The scientists found that bedbugs strongly prefer red and black, and typically avoid colors like green and yellow. Read More » Hairy-Legged 'Chewbacca Beetle' Discovered in New Guinea  | The towering and shaggy Wookiee character Chewbacca from the "Star Wars" movies has a new namesake — a tiny weevil recently discovered in New Guinea. Though the insect is significantly smaller and much less hairy than everyone's favorite "walking carpet," dense scales on the weevil's legs and head reminded the scientists of Chewbacca's fur, prompting their name choice. Trigonopterus chewbacca is one of four new weevil species identified on the island of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago in New Guinea.
| Read More » Russia's Putin orders space program shake-up after launch delayed  | By Christian Lowe MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin told his space officials to raise their game on Wednesday after he flew thousands of kilometers to watch the inaugural launch of a rocket from a new spaceport, only for it to be called off. A prestige project for Putin, it is intended to phase out Russia's reliance on the Baikonur cosmodrome, in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan, for launching its rockets into space. "Without any doubt we will have to draw conclusions," a stern-looking Putin told a meeting of space industry officials at the cosmodrome, in Russia's remote Amur region near the border with China.
| Read More » Mars Comes to Earth: Scientists 'Visit' Red Planet with Augmented Reality  | NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s, but a new technology could help scientists explore the surface of the Red Planet — from its sprawling craters to its enormous volcanoes — from right here on Earth. Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, partnered with Microsoft to develop software that uses the tech giant's HoloLens headsets to allow scientists to virtually explore and conduct scientific research on Mars. The HoloLens is an augmented reality platform that "allows us to overlay imagery on top of the world and integrate it into that world as I'm looking at it," Tony Valderrama, a software engineer at JPL, said Sunday (April 24) in a demonstration of the technology here at the Smithsonian magazine's "Future Is Here" festival.
| Read More » SpaceX targets 2018 for first Mars mission  | By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - SpaceX plans to send an unmanned Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018, the company said on Wednesday, a first step in achieving founder Elon Musk's goal to fly people to another planet. The program, known as Red Dragon, is intended to develop the technologies needed for human transportation to Mars, a long-term goal for Musk's privately held Space Exploration Technologies, as well as the U.S. space agency NASA. "Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system," Musk posted on Twitter.
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