Scientists find key gene mutations behind inherited heart disease

	Giant Squid and Whale Sharks Aren't As Big As People Think When it comes to determining the size of giant squid and other large sea animals, humans have a tendency to exaggerate, a new study suggests. A team of researchers compared scientific and popular media reports of body sizes for 25 species of marine creatures, including whales, sharks, squids, and other giant ocean dwellers, and found that most of the animals were smaller than what was reported. "It's human nature to tell a 'fishing story,'" said Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina. When one of McClain's students noticed the same thing about reports of whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), the researchers decided to conduct a systematic study of reported sizes for large marine animals. Read More » How Greenland Got Its Glaciers Greenland is famous for its massive glaciers, but the region was relatively free of ice until about 2.7 million years ago, according to a new study. The Greenland ice sheet began building after plate tectonics and the Earth's shifting tilt reshaped the region, the researchers found. "Our work was motivated by the question of why extensive glaciations of Greenland started only during the past few million years," the researchers wrote in the study. About 60 million years ago, a plume from the Earth's mantle, several layers below the planet's upper crust, thinned out part of Greenland's lithosphere above it. Read More » Plants versus ants: voracious vegetation is victorious By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tricky insect-eating plant from Borneo is living proof that one need not have a brain to outsmart the opposition. Scientists say the tropical carnivorous plant regularly exploits natural weather fluctuations to adjust the slipperiness of its pitfall traps in order to capture and dine on batches of ants at a time rather than individual ants. The research involved an Asian species of pitcher plant, so named because its leaves form cup-shaped insect traps that look like a pitcher. ... Read More » Fling or ring? Men's mating preferences not hard wired: study By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - From scientific studies to sitcoms, society portrays men as wired to prefer sexual flings and spurn commitment, and evolution wanted it that way. In a study published on Tuesday, anthropologists present evidence that male promiscuity is not a human universal wired into the brain by evolution. Instead, mating strategies are flexible, responding to circumstances such as gender ratios. ... Read More » Florida's Cape Canaveral may be world's busiest spaceport in 2015 By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - Florida's Cape Canaveral expects to be the world's busiest spaceport this year with up to 24 rocket launches, the U.S. Air Force's operations commander said on Tuesday. The 2015 launch lineup would give the Cape Canaveral spaceport its busiest year since 1992, said Thomas Falzarano, commander of the operations group for the Air Force's Eastern Range. Fourteen launches on the 2015 schedule would be for privately held Space Exploration, or SpaceX. Ten launches would be for United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co. ... Read More » Crew evacuates U.S. section of space station after leak: agencies MOSCOW (Reuters) - The crew of the International Space Station evacuated its U.S. section on Tuesday because of a leak of "harmful substances" from the cooling system, Russian news agencies reported. They quoted an official at the Russian space agency Roscosmos as saying the situation was now under control and all six crew - three Russians, two Americans and an Italian - were safe in the Russian section of the orbiting station. Interfax news agency said there had been an ammonia leak. (Reporting by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Elizabeth Piper) Read More » What Can We Do If an Asteroid Threatens Earth? Europe Starts Planning What should humanity do the next time a space rock threatens Earth? European officials recently spent two days figuring out possible ways to respond to such a scenario, with the aim of drawing up effective procedures before the danger actually materializes. The first-of-its-kind simulation considered what to do if an asteroid similar to, or larger than, the one that exploded over Russia in February 2013 — which was about 62 feet (19 meters) wide — came close to Earth. "There are a large number of variables to consider in predicting the effects and damage from any asteroid impact, making simulations such as these very complex," Detlef Koschny, head of near-Earth-object activities at the European Space Agency's Space Situational Awareness office, said in a statement. Read More » Saturn's Position in the Solar System Pinpointed Within 2 Miles Astronomers have pinned down the position of Saturn and its many moons with unprecedented precision, a breakthrough that should aid spacecraft navigation and basic physics research down the road. The researchers used the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) — a system of radio dishes set up in Hawaii, the continental United States and the Virgin Islands — to track the signals coming from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. After combining this information with data from NASA's spacecraft-tracking Deep Space Network system, the study team was able to pinpoint the Saturn system's center of mass, or barycenter, within about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers). The measurement represents a 50-fold improvement over the best estimates provided by ground-based telescopes, NASA officials said. Read More » Scientists Observe Solar System Planets Like Alien Worlds When it comes to unraveling the mysteries of far-off exoplanets, the same holds true — one more reason why astronomers want to thoroughly understand the local planets right here in our Solar System. A new scientific paper moves the ball forward in this regard by simulating how several rocky Solar System bodies would look if glimpsed at the light-years distance of alien worlds. The new study extends this concept to solid worlds unlike Earth, such as Mars and the Galilean moons, to broaden our basis for comparison. "We eventually want to investigate the surface environments of Earth-like exoplanets, and for this purpose the observable signatures of Earth have been widely studied," said lead author Yuka Fujii, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute. Read More » Steam Machine Turns Poop into Clean Drinking Water Bill Gates wants to turn your poop into clean drinking water, and he's got just the machine to do it. In a recent blog post and video, the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist showed off what he called an "ingenious machine," a steam-powered sewage processor that burns up solid waste and creates both potable water and electricity. Dubbed the "Omniprocessor," the machine was designed and built by the Washington-based engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy, which is now receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to further develop the technology. All of this improperly processed waste contaminates the drinking water of millions of people in communities around the globe. Read More » Dogs Arrived Late to the Americas Dogs may have arrived in the Americas only about 10,000 years ago, thousands of years after humans first did, researchers say. This date "is about the same time as the oldest dog burial found in the Americas," study co-author Ripan Malhi, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. The new finding suggests that dogs came to the Americas with a second wave of human migration, thousands of years after people first traveled to the Americas from Asia. "Dogs are one of the earliest organisms to have migrated with humans to every continent, and I think that says a lot about the relationship dogs have had with humans," lead study author Kelsey Witt, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. Read More » Ammonia Leak Scare on Space Station Prompts Astronaut Evacuation from US Side An alarm suggesting a potentially toxic ammonia leak on the International Space Station early Wednesday (Jan. 14) forced astronauts to evacuate the U.S. side of the orbiting lab, but NASA says there is no proof such a scary leak actually occurred. It might have beeen a false alarm. The station's six-person crew, which includes two Americans, three Russians and an Italian astronaut, took refuge in the station's Russian-built segment, isolating themselves from modules built by NASA, Europe and Japan due to the leak alarm at 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT). NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore, Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti are all "safe and in good shape" with their Russian crewmates, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said during a NASA TV update today (Jan. 14). Read More » Liberia's Ebola Epidemic Could End by Summer, Study Predicts The Ebola outbreak in Liberia could be largely brought to an end by June — if the country stays on track with getting a high percentage of the people who are ill to hospitals, a new study predicts. Researchers found that if 85 percent of people with Ebola in Liberia are hospitalized, transmission of the disease could be nearly stopped between March and June of this year. However, if Liberia's hospitalization rate remains where it was last summer, at around 70 percent, then transmission of the disease would "most certainly continue into the second half of 2015," the researchers said. The actual hospitalization rate in Liberia right now is not known, but it is likely close to 85 percent, said study researcher John Drake, an associate professor at the University of Georgia. Read More » Bladder Drug May Help Body Burn More Calories A drug used to treat people with overactive bladder can also boost the calorie-burning capacity of the body's brown fat, new findings show. Unlike its cousin "white fat," which stores calories, brown fat actually burns calories, helping babies and hibernating mammals to stay warm. Now, investigators hope that cranking up the metabolic activity of brown fat could help people lose weight, as well as bring other metabolic benefits. "I would say the results are promising, but there's a lot that we still have to figure out," said Dr. Aaron Cypess, head of the Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Obesity Branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Read More » Space Station Ammonia Leak Scare Likely a False Alarm, NASA Says A potentially scary ammonia leak on the International Space Station triggered an evacuation of astronauts and cosmonauts to the Russian side of the orbiting outpost early Wednesday (Jan. 14), but NASA flight controllers now think it was likely a false alarm. Space agency officials now think that the alarm, which sounded at about 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT) Wednesday, may have been caused by a malfunctioning piece of equipment, and not a leak of the toxic gas into the U.S. side of the orbiting outpost (which includes the European, Japanese and U.S. modules). NASA astronauts Terry Virts, Barry "Butch" Wilmore and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti are all safe on the Russian side of the station and have an impromptu day off due to the evacuation. "At this point, the team does not believe we leaked ammonia," Mike Suffredini, the manager of NASA's International Space Station program office, said during a live update on NASA TV today. Read More » Scientists find key gene mutations behind inherited heart disease By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified the crucial genetic mutations that cause a common heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), paving the way for more accurate diagnosis and screening of high-risk patients. In a study of more than 5,000 people, researchers sequenced the gene encoding the muscle protein "titin", known to be linked to this leading cause of inherited heart failure, to try to find which variations in it caused problems. ... Read More »