|  White House proposes measures to speed genomic test development  | By Toni Clarke WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House announced on Wednesday measures aimed at advancing President Barack Obama's precision medicine initiative, including plans to speed the development of tests used to identify genetic mutations and guide medical treatment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it planned to issue a proposal on Wednesday to create performance standards to guide development of next generation sequencing (NGS) tests.
| Read More » Multinational crew blasts off for space station  | A three-member multinational crew blasted off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan on Thursday for a two-day trip to the International Space Station, a NASA TV broadcast showed. NASA astronaut Kathleen "Kate" Rubins, Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 0136 GMT on Thursday (9:36p.m. EDT Wednesday) and reached orbit nine minutes later. The crew's Russian Soyuz capsule is scheduled to arrive at the station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, at 0412 GMT Saturday (12:12 a.m. EDT) to begin a four-month mission.
| Read More » Love in the Time of Tarantulas? Newfound Spider Named for Márquez  | A fearsome tarantula covered in bizarre "attack" hairs has been discovered in a mountain range in Colombia. The spider's "attack" hairs, or urticating hairs, look different from all other known tarantula hairs, the researchers found. Most tarantulas "kick" their urticating hairs at enemies, but the newfound spider is the first known species in its subfamily to use its hairs in direct contact attacks, they said.
| Read More » Philly's Poo: Old Toilets Reveal Early America's Secret History  | A treasure trove of artifacts tossed down the loo is revealing the secret life of pre-Revolutionary America. The nearly 300-year-old privies, which were uncovered in the heart of Philadelphia, have yielded more than 82,000 artifacts that span nearly three centuries, from the city's pre-Revolutionary roots to the modern day. Among the historic treasures were a ceramic punchbowl that provides a snapshot of Revolutionary America, shattered glasses from a back-alley tavern and the foundation of the city's first skyscraper, which was erected in 1850.
| Read More » Armor Up! Water Fleas Grow Helmets and Spines for Battle  | Water fleas prepare for battle by growing armor that's customized to specific enemies, new research finds. Now, researcher Linda Weiss of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany and her colleagues have found the neurotransmitters that help water fleas customize their bodies in response to the chemical cues in their watery environments. Daphnia is a genus comprising many species of the tiny crustaceans known as water fleas.
| Read More » 'I Think I Can:' How Talking to Yourself Brings Self-Improvement Twelve of the groups watched videos that trained them in a different motivational technique such as self-talk, while one group, which served as a control, only watched a basic instructional video that did not involve any such techniques. The researchers then asked the participants to play an online game that involved finding numbers on a grid and clicking on them in sequence, from 1 to 36, as quickly as possible. Read More » Seeing Green: Pot Changes Brain's Response to Money Smoking marijuana may change the way people's brains respond to certain rewards, such as the prospect of winning some money, according to a new study. The researchers found that the brains of people who smoked marijuana did not respond to the idea of winning the money as strongly as did the brains of people who did not use the drug. The results suggest that for people who smoke pot, "there is not as much pleasure that is being received from something that would naturally give somebody pleasure," study author Mary Heitzeg, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School, told Live Science. Read More » It May Smell Nice, But Is Your Sunscreen Actually Protecting You? The most popular sunscreens may not always be the most effective, a new study finds. Nearly half of the sunscreens that researchers looked at in the study didn't meet all of the guidelines recommended by the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD). But these criteria don't appear to play a major role in people's choices when they buy sunscreen, according to the study, led by Dr. Steve Xu, a dermatology resident at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Read More » 12,000-Year-Old Shaman's Elaborate Funeral Had 6 Stages  | A diminutive woman buried in a cave in Israel 12,000 years ago was likely a person of importance and was interred with great ceremony, including a feast of 86 tortoises, archaeological evidence suggests. Study lead author Leore Grosman, a professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered the grave in 2005, in a cave called Hilazon Tachtit, located in western Galilee in northern Israel. The skeleton of a woman about 4 feet 9 inches (1.5 meters) tall and about 45 years old had been carefully placed in a grave pit layered with sediment, seashells, tortoise shells, chalk and bony horn cores from gazelles.
| Read More » New High-Speed Camera Is So Fast It Can See Neurons Firing  | This upgrade could help researchers learn more about how the brain works and how to improve combustion-engine fuel efficiency, the scientists said. The scientists have now improved on this technique, called compressed ultrafast photography, boosting its resolution "by about 2.4 times," said study senior author Lihong Wang, an applied physicist at Washington University in St. Louis. In their latest work, the researchers started with a streak camera — an extremely fast type of camera that measures how the intensity of a pulse of light varies over time.
| Read More » Prehistoric Tattoos Were Made with Volcanic Glass Tools  | Volcanic glass tools that are at least 3,000 years old were used for tattooing in the South Pacific in ancient times, a new study finds. Torrence and her colleagues Nina Kononenko, of the Australian Museum, and Peter Sheppard, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, detailed their findings in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
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