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Wednesday, November 27, 2013

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See the Moon and Mars Before Sunrise on Wednesday

The Red Planet currently shines at magnitude 1.3, a brightness that would rank it near the bottom of the listing of the 21 most luminous stars in the sky. A month from now, however, Mars will have brightened about a half magnitude — a sure sign of much greater things to come this winter and spring. The Red Planet is still too small to show any surface features in most telescopes even when well up in the southeast. It will remain there until early August of next year, and in the process it will engage Virgo's brightest star, Spica, in an unusual triple conjunction, the first of these pairings taking place in early February. The Red Planet will then be a match for Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

Controversial T. Rex Soft Tissue Find Finally Explained

The controversial discovery of 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins — and possibly even DNA — can survive millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana. The find was also controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions.

2009 Swine-Flu Death Toll 10 Times Higher Than Thought

The swine-flu pandemic of 2009 may have killed up to 203,000 people worldwide—10 times higher than the first estimates based on the number of cases confirmed by lab tests, according to a new analysis by an international group of scientists. Looking only at deaths from pneumonia that may have been caused by the flu, they found that Mexico, Argentina and Brazil had the highest death rates from the pandemic in the world. The new estimates are in line with a previous study published last year that used a different statistical strategy to evaluate the impact of the pandemic caused by the H1N1 virus. However, that study, which was done before countries' data on overall death rates in 2009 had become available, found that the majority of deaths occurred in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Amur Leopard Cubs Spotted on Critter Cam in China

Two Amur leopard cubs were spotted on a wildlife camera in China, the first evidence that this critically endangered big cat is breeding in the region, the Wildlife Conservation Society announced today (Nov. 26). The leopard cubs were seen with a female adult leopard at the Wangqing Nature Reserve in northeast China, about 18 miles (30 kilometers) away from the main Amur leopard population on the Russia-China border. Firstly, it shows that our current efforts are paying off, but, secondly, it shows that China can no longer be considered peripheral to the fate of both wild Amur leopards and tigers," Joe Walston, the Wildlife Conservation Society's executive director for Asia Programs, said in a statement.

23andMe: What's Really Wrong with Personal Genetic Tests

A major shortcoming of the genetic tests offered by the Google-backed company 23andMe is not necessarily their accuracy, but rather the limited information they use to evaluate a person's lifetime risk of complex diseases, experts say. Recently, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to 23andMe telling the company to stop marketing its DNA testing kits, because the kits require FDA approval, which the company had not obtained. The letter emphasizes the need for 23andMe to prove that their tests are accurate. "FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results from the [Personal Genome Service] device;

Amazing Ice Circle Appears On River

A spinning ice disk spotted on the Sheyenne River in North Dakota is a totally natural phenomenon and not the work of aliens or secret government spies, according to reports.

White Wine and Beer Important Sources of Arsenic

White wine, beer and Brussels sprouts can be major sources of the toxic metal arsenic in people's diets, according to a new study. Of the 120 foods the researchers looked at, four turned out to significantly raise people's arsenic levels: beer, white wine (and to a lesser extent, red wine), Brussels sprouts and dark-meat fish such as salmon, tuna and sardines, according to the study, published last week (Nov. 16) in the Nutrition Journal. The results suggest that diet can be an important source of people's arsenic exposure over the long term, regardless of arsenic concentrations in their drinking water, the researchers said. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits the arsenic in drinking water to 10 micrograms per litter for drinking water, but there are few limits set for foods.

Should You Eat Breakfast on Thanksgiving?

On Thanksgiving, people may forgo breakfast or lunch to save room for a feast in the evening. "It's a big mistake to fast before a big meal at a party, or at Thanksgiving dinner," said Katherine Tallmadge, a registered dietitian and op-ed contributor to LiveScience. When people skip meals, they end up feeling so hungry by dinnertime that they overeat, Tallmadge said. To avoid this scenario, Tallmadge recommends eating a regular breakfast and lunch on Thanksgiving, at the same time you normally would eat these meals.

How Science Can Help You Cook a Better Thanksgiving Feast

And with only days to go before turkeys hit dinner tables across the country, the Test Kitchen chefs have been busy, said Jack Bishop, chef, TV personality and editorial director of America's Test Kitchen. But the line between cooking a good turkey and awful turkey is relatively small. It's not hard to cook a turkey well, but it's pretty easy to cook one poorly." [Thanksgiving Gallery: 8 Fascinating Turkey Facts] To prepare a fresh turkey, Test Kitchen chefs recommend brining the bird overnight, which involves soaking the turkey in a container of salty water for at least 12 hours.

Comet ISON Nears Sun for Thanksgiving Encounter in NASA Video

A NASA spacecraft has captured its best video yet of the icy Comet ISON streaking toward a Thanksgiving Day encounter with a sun, a close shave that the comet might just not survive.

'Warriors 4 Wireless' Program Helps Vets Find Tech Industry Jobs

A new nonprofit program aims to help veterans and returning service members find jobs in wireless telecommunications, as part of a broader goal to have 5,000 vets employed in the expanding industry by the year 2015, according to officials from the Department of Defense.

New Housecat-Size Feline Species Discovered

Oncillas are housecat-size felines found throughout much of South America, and are also known as little tiger cats, little spotted cats or tigrinas. But not all oncillas are the same: New research suggests that little tiger cats in northeastern Brazil belong to a different species from those elsewhere on the continent, although they look virtually identical. Researchers analyzed the genetic material of oncillas in northeastern Brazil, and compared them with nearby populations in the south. This, along with other genetic differences, led researchers to conclude the two populations do not interbreed and are in fact different species, said study co-author Eduardo Eizirik, a researcher at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

Comet may be visible from Earth if it survives sun's heat, gravity

A comet that left the outer edge of the solar system more than 5.5 million years ago will pass close by the sun on Thursday, becoming visible in Earth's skies in the next week or two - if it survives. "There are three possibilities when this comet rounds the sun," Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in an interview posted on NASA's website. The second possibility is that the sun's gravity could rip the comet apart, creating several big chunks. The third option: If the comet is very weak, it could break up into a cloud of dust and be a complete bust for viewing.

Rare diplodocus dinosaur sells for $650,000 at British auction

The skeleton of a diplodocus dinosaur that roamed what is now the United States some 160 million years ago was sold for 400,000 pounds ($651,100) to an unidentified public institution at an auction in Britain on Wednesday. It was found by the teenage sons of German dinosaur hunter Raimund Albersdoerfer in Dana quarry in Wyoming, in the western United States. The auctioneers, Summers Place Auction, declined to disclose any details about the buyer, who wished to remain anonymous. "Finding a reasonably complete diplodocus of this size is extremely rare," Errol Fuller, a natural history expert and curator of the sale, told Reuters by telephone from West Sussex in England.

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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

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FDA warns Google-backed 23andMe to halt sales of genetic tests

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned 23andMe, a company backed by Google Inc, to halt sales of its genetic tests because they have not received regulatory clearance. 23andMe, which was founded in 2006 by Anne Wojcicki with the backing of Google, sells a $99 DNA test that the company says can detect a range of genetic mutations and provide information about a person's health risks. Wojcicki recently separated from her husband, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google. In a warning letter dated November 22 and released on Monday, the FDA said products that are designed to diagnose, mitigate or prevent disease are medical devices that require regulatory clearance or approval, "as FDA has explained to you on numerous occasions." The privately held company, which is based in Mountain View, California, acknowledged receipt of the letter and said in a statement that "we recognize that we have not met the FDA's expectations regarding timeline and communication regarding our submission." The FDA said some of the intended uses of the company's Saliva Collection Kit and Personal Genome Service (PGS) are particularly concerning, including risk assessments for certain cancers.

Heart-Attack Chest Pain Similar in Men and Women

The signs of a heart attack in women might be different from those in men, but this may not be the case when it comes to chest pain, new research reveals. A European study found that the symptoms of chest pain experienced by women and men during the early stages of a heart attack (formally called acute myocardial infarction) were not all that different. When researchers analyzed the data on chest-pain complaints in women only, they found it was not a reliable diagnostic tool to quickly detect a heart attack: The study showed that women who were truly having a heart attack described symptoms that were very similar to the ones described by women who had chest pain from other causes. The findings were surprising, and also disappointing, said study researcher Dr. Christian Mueller, a professor of cardiology at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland.

Fewer Thanksgiving Travelers Expected This Year

Fewer people plan to drive to visit friends and family for Thanksgiving this year than in 2012, according to estimates by auto association AAA. About 90 percent of those Thanksgiving trips are by car, as are most personal long-distance journeys throughout the year, AAA said in a statement. Though AAA said total Thanksgiving air travel would be only 3.14 million people from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1, a 3.7 percent drop from 2012, a trade group for the airline industry expects the number of fliers to increase by 1.5 percent this year. The group, Airlines for America, said there would be 25 million fliers during a 12-day period before and after Thanksgiving (Nov. 22 to Dec. 3).

Russia Launches Robotic Cargo Ship to Space Station

An unmanned cargo-carrying spacecraft launched on its way toward the International Space Station today (Nov. 25) for a post-Thanksgiving Day docking with the orbiting lab.

Happy Turkey Day: Thanksgiving Turns 150

It's a tradition the country associates with a Pilgrim feast in the 1600s, but actually, 2013 marks only the 150th anniversary of official Thanksgiving. The "First Thanksgiving" taught to schoolchildren around the country dates back to 1621, when the Calvinist settlers of Plymouth Colony, better known as the Pilgrims, got together with the Wampanoag tribe for a fall harvest festival. Spanish explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles got together with Native Americans in St. Augustine, Fla., on Sept. 8, 1565, for a Catholic mass and a feast of thanksgiving, giving Florida a claim to the "first Thanksgiving" title. Virginia likes to claim that mantle as well: Settlers in Jamestown, Va., held a thanksgiving meal in 1607.

Comet ISON Spotted by Mercury Probe, Sun Observatory Ahead of Thursday Solar Encounter

A NASA probe orbiting Mercury has returned new photos of Comet ISON, and a number of other spacecraft are all set to document the icy wanderer's much-anticipated solar flyby on Thursday (Nov. 28). NASA's Messenger spacecraft snapped new images of Comet ISON on Nov. 19 as the icy object sped by Mercury at a distance of 22.5 million miles (36.2 million kilometers). Meanwhile, the agency's sun-studying Stereo-A probe captured its own ISON photo on Nov. 21, and a phalanx of other solar space observatories will watch the comet's close encounter with the sun on Thursday, which will bring it within just 730,000 miles (1.24 million km) of the solar surface. Messenger has been watching ISON and another comet, Encke, for the last month, monitoring both of them with imagers and spectrometers.

Mercury Shines Near Saturn in Pre-Dawn Sky Tuesday: How to See it

Two bright planets — Mercury and Saturn — will get together for a rather close rendezvous, albeit quite low in the east-southeast sky that morning. If we were living in the days before the invention of the telescope, this event might have been noteworthy to stargazers as a meeting between the fastest planet (Mercury) and the "highest" planet (Saturn). Saturn would have been known as the "highest" planet because it marked the outer limit of the known solar system at that point in time. The Romans identified Saturn with the Greek god Cronus — the allegorical name for Chronos — who was often portrayed as an old, wise man with a long, grey beard like "Father Time." In the sky, Saturn takes nearly 30 years to make one circuit around the sky. In contrast, Mercury, the speedy messenger of the gods, darts back and forth around the sun several times within the course of a single year.

Michael Mann: Super Typhoon Haiyan and the Realities of a Warmed World (Op-Ed)

Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University and was recognized in 2007, with other IPCC authors, for contributing to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a lead author on the "Observed Climate Variability and Change" chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report. Mann contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. This was the feeling captured by Yeb Saño, the Philippine's lead negotiator to this year's global climate talks — the Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

China to send 'jade rabbit' buggy to the moon next month

China will land its first probe on the moon in early December which will deploy a buggy to explore its surface, an official said on Tuesday, marking a major milestone in the country's space ambitions. China has already photographed the surface of the moon to prepare for the landing, said a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e One orbiter, named after a lunar goddess, which took images of the surface and analyzed the distribution of elements. "In taking on the mission to land on the moon, Chang'e Three will help China fulfill it's lunar exploration dream, it's space dream and the Chinese dream," said Wu.

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Monday, November 25, 2013

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Pretty in Pink: 3D-Printing 'Jimmy Choos' for Horses

Gone are the days when a sinewy blacksmith would hammer out a set of horseshoes over a hot anvil. One Australian racehorse is now sporting high-tech horseshoes that some are calling "the Jimmy Choos of horseshoes," referring to the luxury shoe designer. Designed by researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the Australian science agency, the hot-pink horseshoes are custom-made for each of a horse's four hooves, using lightweight titanium and 3D-printing technology. Each new shoe weighs about 3.5 ounces (100 grams) less than a regular aluminum horseshoe — and every ounce counts in the high-stakes world of horse racing.

Gotcha! Photons Seen Without Being Destroyed in a First

The atom was in two states. In the other state it isn't — the atom is "out of tune" with both the cavity and the incoming photon. Atoms and subatomic particles are governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, which allowed the rubidium atom to be in both states at once. When the photon reached the cavity, it would either continue inside and get reflected straight back or it would just bounce off the cavity, never entering — which happened if the atom was coupled to the cavity.

Twice as Much Methane Escaping Arctic Seafloor

The Arctic methane time bomb is bigger than scientists once thought and primed to blow, according to a study published today (Nov. 24) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Last Chance to See Comet ISON Before Its Thursday Sun Encounter

The early morning of Tuesday, Nov. 26, will be the last chance to spot Comet ISON streaking above the horizon before it makes its Thanksgiving Day slingshot around the sun, according to NASA. Comet ISON can be spotted near the southeast horizon to the right of Saturn and Mercury about an hour before dawn, space agency officials said. From very dark locations free of light pollution, Comet ISON should be visible to the naked eye early Tuesday, though it will be more clearly visible with binoculars and telescopes. For novice skywatchers who need help finding the planets to guide their eyes to ISON, NASA recommends using a stargazing app.

Shrine Found at Buddha's Birthplace dates to 6th Century B.C.

An ancient timber structure that may have once marked Buddha's birthplace has been unearthed in Nepal. Charcoal and grains of sand from a timber structure at the Maya Devi Temple in Lumbini, Nepal, date to the sixth century B.C., according to the a study published in the December issue of the journal Antiquity. The ancient building may have been a shrine built to enclose a tree that the Buddha's mother clung to during the birth of her son. Previously, the site, which was widely believed to be Buddha's birthplace, contained evidence going back just to the third century B.C. [In Photos: An Ancient Buddhist Monastery]

Dead Bird Drift Hints at Disease Outbreak

That somebody is Karl von Ellenrieder, an associate professor of ocean and mechanical engineering at Florida Atlantic University. Von Ellenrieder and his colleagues' new work contributes to simulations of how deceased birds move as they float along lakes and other bodies of water. "If the die-off resulted from some sort of man-made problem, like maybe dumping or just runoff from crops, it would help them understand what the source was and then maybe mitigate it or clean it up," von Ellenrieder said of the U.S. Geological Survey scientists who will use this research. in 2007, 10,000 more birds died than in 1963 from the effects of the toxin.

Mushrooms 'Make Wind' to Spread Spores

But new research shows mushrooms take a more active role in spreading their seed: They "make wind" to carry their spores about, said UCLA researcher Marcus Roper. This study by Roper and Dressaire presents another example of how "fungi are actively manipulating their environment," said Pringle, who wasn't involved in the study.

SpaceX to Launch Landmark Commercial Satellite Mission Today: Watch It Live

The private spaceflight company SpaceX is counting down to a critical commercial satellite launch in Florida today (Nov. 25), and you can watch the launch attempt live online. SpaceX's upgraded Falcon 9 rocket will blast off from a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 5:37 p.m. EST (0037 Nov. 26 GMT) carrying the SES-8 satellite into orbit for the communications satellite company SES. The mission will mark several big firsts for SpaceX, including the company's first launch of its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, its first launch of a huge commercial satellite and its first flight to a high geostationary transfer orbit needed for commercial satellites. Today's launch will be the second flight of SpaceX's upgraded Falcon 9 rocket, known as the Falcon 9 Version 1.1.

Seeking a Russian Silicon Valley (Op-Ed)

Nikolai Nikiforov, minister of Communications and Mass Media for the Russian Federation, contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. With more Internet users than anyplace else in Europe, Russia is not exactly a newcomer to the digital superhighway. But a new information technology (IT) roadmap approved by the Russian government in July 2013 is eliminating speed bumps as never before, with the potential to drive growth rates comparable to the expansion of the oil, gas and natural resources sectors a generation ago. Venture capital investment into the IT sector in the next five years is expected to multiply by a factor of five, reaching $1.2 billion, and this should be accompanied by a doubling of the export of IT products and services to $9 billion, according to estimates compiled by the Russia Ministry of Telecommunications and Mass Media.

Baby Dinosaur Skeleton Unearthed in Canada

The toddler was just 3 years old and 5 feet (1.5 meters) long when it wandered into a river near Alberta, Canada, and drowned about 70 million years ago. The fossil is the smallest intact skeleton ever found from a group of horned, plant-eating dinosaurs known as ceratopsids, a group that includes the iconic Triceratops. "The big ones just preserve better: They don't get eaten, they don't get destroyed by animals," said study co-author Philip Currie, a paleobiologist at the University of Alberta. Paleontologists had unearthed a few individual bones from smaller ceratopsids in the past.

Scientists Explore New Zealand s Deep Sea (Part I)

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