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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Zika Virus Mystery: New Utah Case Stumps Researchers In a puzzling case, a person in Utah became infected with the Zika virus, but health officials can't figure out how the person contracted it. "Zika continues to surprise us," and there's still a lot we don't know about the virus, Dr. Satish Pillai, incident manager for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Zika response, said at a news conference today (July 18). Read More » 8-Year-Old's Fossil Discovery Explains Why Turtles Have Shells The turtle's shell may serve as a protective shield nowadays, but ancient turtles actually developed shells for an entirely different reason, a new study finds. "Why the turtle shell evolved is a very Dr. Seuss-like question, and the answer seems pretty obvious — it was for protection," lead study author Tyler Lyson, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, said in a statement. The evolutionary history of the turtle shell has long mystified scientists, largely because of "the scarcity of critical fossils," the researchers wrote in the study. Read More » Ancient Logbook Documenting Great Pyramid's Construction Unveiled A logbook that contains records detailing the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza has been put on public display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in honor of the pharaoh Khufu (reign ca. 2551 B.C.-2528 B.C.) and is the largest of the three pyramids constructed on the Giza plateau in Egypt. Read More » Why Florida's Recent Earthquake Is So Rare The 3.7-magnitude quake had an epicenter that was 104 miles (168 kilometers) east-northeast of Daytona Beach, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). According to the USGS ShakeMap, some weak tremors were reported and picked up by scientific instruments on the mainland, but the quake was too weak to cause any damage. Earthquakes are rare in Florida, and the reason for the relative peace has to do with Florida's position on the North American plate. Read More » Tiny 'Atomic Memory' Device Could Store All Books Ever Written "You would need just the area of a postage stamp to write out all books ever written," said study senior author Sander Otte, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology's Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. All in all, this orderly system of markers could help atomic memory scale up to very large sizes, even if the copper surface the data is encoded on is not entirely perfect, they said. Read More » Solar Plane Zooms Over Egypt's Pyramids on Historic Flight A solar-powered airplane buzzed the pyramids in Egypt, flying over the iconic, haze-cloaked monuments, during the most recent leg of its historic journey around the world. The dramatic photos of Solar Impulse 2 soaring over the pyramids offer a striking contrast between ancient and futuristic technology, with the solar-powered aircraft representing a way that some machines, including airplanes, could be powered one day. "This was an emotional and meaningful leg for me, being able to enjoy once more the incredible sensation of flying day and night thanks only to the energy of the sun and enjoying fully the present moment," pilot André Borschberg, Solar Impulse's co-founder and CEO, who flew the plane from Spain to Egypt, said in a statement. Read More » Living Near a Fracking Site May Increase Your Risk of Asthma Living close to a site used for hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, may increase a person's risk of developing asthma, a new study finds. "Fracking" is a shorthand term often used to refer to an unconventional way of getting natural gas out of the ground. Read More » Stem Cells Could Replace Hip Replacements This is a major step toward being able one day to use a patient's own cells to repair a damaged joint, thus avoiding the need for extensive joint-replacement surgery. The new technique may be ready to test in humans within three to five years and may ultimately work with other joints, such as knees, said Farshid Guilak, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who co-led the project. The work, a collaboration between researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and researchers from Cytex Therapeutics, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina, appears today (June 18) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read More » Pediatricians Should Discuss Sexuality with Kids, Group Says Pediatricians should help educate their patients about sex and help parents learn how best to talk to their kids about sexuality, advised a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics. By acting as an additional source for trustworthy information about sex and sexuality, pediatricians could complement the education that kids may receive at school or at home, the authors of the report said. "Research has conclusively demonstrated that programs promoting abstinence-only [behavior] until heterosexual marriage occurs are ineffective," the lead author of the report, Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a chairperson of the AAP Committee on Adolescence, said in a statement. Read More »
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