Tuesday, July 5, 2016

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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NASA's Juno spacecraft loops into orbit around Jupiter

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - NASA'S Juno spacecraft capped a five-year journey to Jupiter on Monday with a do-or-die engine burn that looped it into orbit to probe the origins of the biggest planet in the solar system and how it impacted the rise of life on Earth, the U.S. space agency said. Juno fired its main engine for 35 minutes beginning at 11:18 a.m. EDT/0318 Tuesday GMT, slowing the spacecraft so it could be captured by the planet's gravity.     Once in position to begin its 20-month science mission, Juno will fly in egg-shaped orbits, each one lasting 14 days, to learn if Jupiter has a dense core beneath its clouds and map its massive magnetic field. The probe also will hunt for water in Jupiter's thick atmosphere, a key yardstick for figuring out how far away from the sun the gas giant formed.


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Freeloading Butterflies Get Away with Theft

A bizarre Amazonian butterfly is the ultimate freeloader, researchers say. The butterfly species steals and eats gooey bamboo secretions from its ant neighbors, in a relationship known as kleptoparasitism, new research has found. Pomerantz and his colleagues have now captured images of the odd behavior — the first time that kleptoparasitism has been documented between adult butterflies and ants.


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Tallest Mountain in US Arctic Crowned

Though Denali is the uncontested highest peak in North America — with a summit elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190 meters) — there has been a more than 50-year debate over which U.S. mountain can be crowned the tallest beyond the Arctic Circle. U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps from the 1950s show either Mount Chamberlin or Mount Isto as the highest mountain in the eastern Alaska Arctic region. At 8,975.1 feet (2,735.6 m), Mount Isto is the tallest peak in the U.S. Arctic, and Mount Chamberlin (at 8,898.6 feet, or 2712.3 m) is only the third highest.


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Revenge Is Bittersweet, Research Finds

Revenge is a dish best served cold. The culture is swimming with depictions of revenge: Sometimes it's deeply satisfying, sometimes it injures the avenger, and sometimes it's a little bit of both. "We show that people express both positive and negative feelings about revenge, such that revenge isn't bitter, nor sweet, but both," Fade Eadeh, a doctoral candidate in psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement.


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Tomb with a View: Ancient Burial Sites Served as 'Telescopes'

And the scientists are looking especially closely at passage graves, a type of tomb with a large chamber accessed through a long and narrow entry tunnel. This type of structure could have greatly enhanced views of faint stars as they rose on the dawn horizon. The findings were presented June 29 at the Royal Astronomical Society's (RAS) National Astronomy Meeting 2016 in Nottingham, in the United Kingdom.


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Female Komodo Dragon Saved After Her Eggs Burst

A complex surgery has saved the life of a captive Komodo dragon at the Denver Zoo. Anika, a 6-year-old female Komodo dragon, developed dystocia, a condition in which reptiles are unable to deposit their eggs. Zoo staff first noticed that Anika's abdomen was swollen and that she'd lost weight, even though her appetite (and eating) had increased dramatically.


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Your Brainwaves May Fall into a 'Texting Rhythm'

These days, it seems like smartphones are an integral part of people's daily lives — and a new study suggests that texting on these devices may actually change certain processes in the brain. They were surprised that the rhythm could be reproduced in different patients in the study, said Dr. William Tatum, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Florida, and the lead author of the study. The discovery of new brain-wave patterns is rare — it was more common in the years following the late 1920s, when the electroencephalogram (EEG) device, which shows brain activity, was invented, he said.

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Science Finds a Way to Overcome Life's Regrets

The people in the study who practiced self-compassion, or being kind to oneself, were more likely to overcome regrets than the people who did not do so, according to the study, published in February in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Although regrets are often painful, previous studies have suggested that some people can overcome them and feel stronger afterward, said Jia Wei Zhang, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers wanted to better understand why some people report feeling improvement from regrets but others don't, Zhang said.

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Satellite Spies International Space Station Orbiting Earth

A satellite captured a bird?s-eye view of the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting Earth, revealing spectacular images just released by NASA. With the Space Station orbiting at only 250 miles (400 km) above the surface, the Landsat 8's Operational Land Imager (OLI) gets a unique view of the ISS when the two orbits align. On June 19, 2016, the Landsat 8's OLI captured images of the ISS over the state of Odisha in eastern India.

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Court rules against White House science office in email case

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court says work-related emails on a private account used by the White House's top science adviser are subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

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New Robo-Salamander Can Really Move

With the help of X-ray videos, scientists have developed a new robot that mimics the way salamanders walk and swim. In general, scientists investigate animal locomotion for insights that could, among other things, help people recover from devastating losses of mobility, said study senior author Auke Ijspeert, a bioroboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Increasingly, scientists are creating robot copies of animals to perform such investigations of animal locomotion.


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Physics prepares to feast on collider data, seeking dark universe

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's physics research center CERN are preparing to unwrap the biggest trove of data yet from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), three years after they confirmed the existence of the elusive Higgs boson. "In the life of accelerator physics there are few moments like the one we are living through," said Tiziano Camporesi, leader of the CMS experiment at CERN. "This is the time when the probability of finding something new is highest." The Higgs boson, whose discovery secured the Nobel prize for physics in 2013, answered fundamental questions about how elementary matter attained mass.


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