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Friday, February 7, 2014

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Gorgeous Animation of Earth Takes Top Science Visual Prize

An animated film that reveals the beauty of the sun's interactions with Earth is one of the winners of an international contest in science visualization. "Dynamic Earth" took first place in the video category of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. "The winners made scientific data beautiful and brought their new ideas to life, while at the same time immersing the viewer in science," said Monica M. Bradford, executive editor of the journal Science, which sponsors the contest along with the National Science Foundation (NSF). This year's photography winners are Vicente Fernandez and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who managed to capture a mini-whirlpool created by the beating cilia of cauliflower coral (Pocillopora damicornis).

First Southern Hemisphere Storm Pattern Found

Sailors know the southern mid-latitudes experience some of the strongest storms on Earth. This pattern influences storm strength in the Southern Ocean, or the body of water surrounding Antarctica, including how much heat storms carry and how much rain and snow they drop. "This is clearly a robust phenomenon," said Steven Feldstein, a climate scientist at Penn State University, who was not involved in the study. Climate scientists already rely on well-known tropical atmospheric patterns for forecasting weather and climate change.

NASA Sun-Earth Video Wins International Science Challenge

A NASA video that shows exactly how profoundly and dramatically the sun influences Earth's climate and weather has won a high-profile international competition. Narrated by actor Liam Neeson, the NASA video "Dynamic Earth" took first prize in the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, which is sponsored jointly by the prestigious journal Science and the National Science Foundation. The four-minute animation was created by staffers at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio and their colleagues. It "depicts the vast scale of the sun's influence on the Earth, from the flowing particles of the solar wind and the fury of coronal mass ejections to the winds and currents driven by the solar heating of the atmosphere and ocean," video team member Horace Mitchell, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. [See All the Visualization Winners]

Autism Drug Shows Promise in Animal Studies

A drug aimed at eliminating symptoms in people with certain forms of autism is in the early stages of work, and animal studies show promise, researchers report. In experiments in mice and rats, the drug reversed the effects of a faulty mechanism during birth that might lead the offspring to develop autism, and alleviated the symptoms of autism that certain offspring would normally demonstrate, according to studies published today (Feb. 6) in the journal Science. "If you administer a diuretic to the mother 24 hours before delivery, the offspring is, so to speak, cured," study author Yehezkel Ben-Ari, a neurobiologist at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, told reporters. Normally, nerve signaling in a fetus is excited during early development, and then, leading up to and during birth, the hormone oxytocin causes a switch in that excitement.

New Guidelines Target Stroke Risks Unique to Women

Heart disease experts are calling more attention to women's risk factors for stroke, which can be different from men's. Experts also want to raise awareness of the periods in a woman's life when she is more vulnerable to having a stroke. Many risk factors for stroke are the same in men and women, such as age, high blood pressure, obesity, smoking, diet, an inactive lifestyle, diabetes and heart disease. But some stroke risk factors occur only in women, and new guidelines released today (Feb. 6) by the American Heart Association highlight six of them: pregnancy, pregnancy-related high blood pressure, pregnancy-related diabetes, oral contraceptive use, post-menopausal hormone therapy use and changes in hormonal status (such as starting or stopping hormone treatments). "Some of these risk factors for stroke in women have been known before, but they've never been written down in one place with treatment recommendations directly targeted at women," said guideline co-author Dr. Louise McCullough, a neurologist at The Stroke Center at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn. [5 Myths About Women's Bodies]

Young Salmon Born Knowing Migration Route

Without any prior migration experience, juvenile Chinook salmon can find their way to ancestral feeding grounds by using the Earth's magnetic field and an inherited internal map, according to a new study. Lots of migratory animals use the Earth's magnetic field to orient themselves during migrations. But in most known cases, young animals learn routes from more experienced individuals, and then internalize the magnetic fields associated with those routes for subsequent trips. But now, researchers based at Oregon State University have found that juvenile Chinook salmon — which hatch in freshwater streams and then swim to the ocean to feed within the first year of their lives — also inherit a sense of direction to their families' migration routes.

Curiosity Rover Sees Earth from Mars for 1st Time (Photos)

NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has captured its first view of Earth from the surface of the Red Planet — a striking image that shows our home planet as a bright light in the Martian sky, with the moon shining nearby. The rover apparently watched the Martian sunset, then photographed Earth in the night sky about 80 minutes later, NASA officials said in an image description. "A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright 'evening stars,'" NASA officials said in the image description. Aside from some processing to remove the effects of cosmic rays, the Curiosity photographs are unmodified, they added.

Scientists blown away by Tasmania's giant jellyfish

Residents of a sleepy hamlet in Tasmania found a previously unknown kind of giant jellyfish washed up on a beach, prompting excitement among scientists in Australia as they work to formally name and classify the creature. "There's the excitement, that it's a new species and then there's the 'Oh my God factor' that it happens to be the size of a Smart car," Lisa-ann Gershwin, a scientist at the government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, told Reuters. "It's like Disneyland for marine biologists." A family walking along the beach found the giant jellyfish in late January and sent a photo to the research organisation in Hobart, Australia's southernmost city. Gershwin and other scientists are also trying to discover why there has been an enormous rise in jellyfish populations in the waters around Tasmania this year.

Disappearance of wildflowers may have doomed Ice Age giants

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Flower power may have meant the difference between life and death for some of the extinct giants of the Ice Age, including the mighty woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. Scientists who studied DNA preserved in Arctic permafrost sediments and in the remains of such ancient animals have concluded that these Ice Age beasts relied heavily on the protein-rich wildflowers that once blanketed the region. Scientists for years have been trying to figure out what caused this mass extinction, when two-thirds of all the large-bodied mammals in the Northern Hemisphere died out. "Now we have, from my perspective at least, a very credible explanation," Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, an expert in ancient DNA who led an international team of researchers, said in a telephone interview.

NASA Astronauts Talk Space Fitness with US Olympic Bobsled Team

Two NASA astronauts on the International Space Station connected with the United States Olympic bobsled team in Sochi, Russia before the 2014 Winter Games kick off Friday (Feb. 7).

Solved? Mystery of Atacama Desert's 'White Gold'

The driest, highest desert on Earth, Chile's Atacama Desert, also holds the world's richest nitrate and iodine deposits. As such, a "white gold" rush there fueled Europe's bombs in World War I and helped raise IQs once iodine deficiency was discovered. "These are weird deposits that, from a geological perspective, shouldn't be there," said Martin Reich, a geochemist at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. "Nitrogen is abundant in the Earth's atmosphere but is highly depleted in the [Earth's] crust.

6 Winter Olympic Sports That Never Made It

The Olympics could be even more exciting if it included skiers dancing downhill or being pulled by a pack of dogs or horses. Some of the greatest winter sports never made it into the Olympic Games, or made it in, but only as demonstration sports, only to be discarded like a pair of used ski boots. From downhill ski ballet set to music, to synchronized skating, to the fastest non-motorized sport on Earth, Live Science explores the wacky and wonderful winter sports that didn't quite make the cut. The Winter Olympics featured ski ballet, now known as acroski, as a demonstration sport in the 1988 Games in Calgary, Canada, and the 1992 Games in Albertville, France.

Facebook Can Make You Look Smart

If Google is making users stupid, then social networks like Facebook may be making people seem smart without actually being so. That's the conclusion of a new study, published Tuesday (Feb. 4) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. "When we learn by observing what others do, we recognize and adopt good information and behaviors, but that does not make us any more likely to be able to arrive at the same kind of information or behavior independently," said study co-author Iyad Rahwan, a computing and information sciences researcher at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates. Past research has shown that the tendency to "Google" for information has made people less smart, or at least less able to concentrate and retain information.

Why Winter Olympics Bypass the Southern Hemisphere

Of the 22 Winter Olympics that have been held since 1924, none have been hosted in the Southern Hemisphere. A number of factors play into the Northern Hemisphere's grip on the games, including various political and socio-economic reasons: Lots of financial resources go into planning and holding the games, and many of the world's wealthiest nations are located in the Northern Hemisphere. "To have a Winter Olympics, you need a place with snow," Richard Seager, a geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York, told Live Science. "In the Southern Hemisphere, that would pretty much limit you to the Andes."

Winter Olympic Athletes: Who Is Fittest?

Olympic athletes are, as a rule, mind-bogglingly fit. Many Olympic athletes train for up to seven hours a day. But what fitness means depends on the sport. Fitness "is like art and beauty," said Carl Foster, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.

Scientists find 800,000-year-old footprints in UK

LONDON (AP) — British scientists have discovered human footprints in England that are at least 800,000 years old — the most ancient found outside Africa, and the earliest evidence of human life in northern Europe.

Shipping Snow: Could Eastern Water Ease Western Drought?

In the long history of water wars fought in America's arid West, some proposed solutions stand out for their sheer wackiness: towing icebergs from the Arctic to California, then capturing the meltwater. But with California, Oregon, Nevada and other western states reeling under a record-breaking drought, a few engineers and water policy experts are blowing the dust off these old plans and looking at pipelines, canals, dams — virtually any proposal that might break the vise-like grip the drought now has on the western United States. There's no denying that the current drought has reached devastating proportions: The California Department of Water Resources reports that many lakes and reservoirs are less than 40 percent full. Many cities on the California coast received less rain in 2013 than Death Valley, historically the driest place in North America.

Man's Nail 'Splinter' Was Really a Tumor

In this case, the tumor affected the tissue beneath the nail, known as the lunula, said Dr. Doris Day, a dermatologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who was not involved in the man's case. The lunula is the whitish, half-moon shaped region at the base of the nail, and is where new nail cells are formed.

Firstborns May Have Higher Heart Disease, Diabetes Risks

Firstborns may be at higher risk for heart disease and diabetes than their later-born counterparts, new findings suggest. In a small study from New Zealand, researchers looked at 50 overweight men ages 40 to 50, and compared the body mass indexes (BMIs) of the men who were firstborn in their family, with those who were born second. The researchers also examined the men's level of sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. They found that although the two groups of men had similar average heights, the firstborns were 15 pounds heavier on average.

Exotic Particles, Tiny Extra Dimensions May Await Discovery

LONDON — Exotic particles never before detected and possibly teensy extra dimensions may be awaiting discovery, says a physicist, adding that those searching for such newbies should keep an open mind and consider all possibilities. Such particles are thought to fill gaps in, and extend, the reigning theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, said David Charlton of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, who is also a spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment at the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and one of the experiments that pinpointed the Higgs boson particle thought to explain why other particles have mass. "The questions raised by the discovery of the Higgs boson suggest new physics, and new particles, may be near to hand, at the energies now — and soon — being probed at the LHC," he said. Such questions, he said, include: why is the Higgs boson so light;

Bottle released by Mass. scientist in 1956 found

BOSTON (AP) — A glass bottle released by a Massachusetts oceanographer in 1956 has been found off Nova Scotia.

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Thursday, February 6, 2014

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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Bionic hand allows amputee to feel again

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Dennis Aabo Sorensen lost his left hand when a firework rocket he was holding exploded during New Year's Eve celebrations 10 years ago, and he never expected to feel anything with the stump again. But for a while last year he regained his sense of touch after being attached to a "feeling" bionic hand that allowed him to grasp and identify objects even when blindfolded. There is still work to be done in miniaturizing components and tidying away trailing cables that mean the robotic hand has so far only been used in the lab, but Sorensen said the European research team behind the project had got the basics right. Alastair Ritchie, a bioengineering expert at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the research, said the device was a logical next step but more clinical trials were now needed to confirm the system's viability.

The Real Reason Shy Toddlers Speak Late

Toddlers who don't talk much may not necessarily have a language delay, new research finds. Shy kids understand words, but when spoken to, they may clam up instead of speaking up. Delayed speech is linked to social struggles later in life, so researchers wanted to understand whether shy kids can't produce language or simply don't want to. The good news is that shy kids don't show language acquisition delays, said study researcher Soo Rhee, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

DARPA Publishes Huge Online Catalog of Open Source Code

the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for developing new, cutting-edge technologies for the military — is shedding some of its secrecy by making all of its open-source code freely and easily accessible online. The catalog will function as a way for DARPA to organize and share results from the agency's research efforts, according to DARPA officials. The database will likely be of particular interest to the research and development community, and DARPA is hoping the move will spur innovation and lead to new collaborations in the future. "Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government," Chris White, DARPA program manager, said in a statement.

Woolly Mammoths and Rhinos Ate Flowers

Woolly mammoths, rhinos and other ice age beasts may have munched on high-protein wildflowers called forbs, new research suggests. The new research "paints a different picture of the Arctic," thousands of years ago, said study co-author Joseph Craine, an ecosystem ecologist at Kansas State University.

Man Gets First Prosthetic Hand That Can Feel

Nine years ago, Dennis Aabo Sørensen severely wounded his left arm in a fireworks accident, and had to have it amputated. Researchers embedded electrodes in Sørensen's arm, and touch sensors in a prosthetic hand to stimulate his remaining nerves. With the hand, Sørensen was able to recognize different objects by their feel, and grasp them appropriately, according to the study detailed online today (Feb. 5) in the journal Science Translational Medicine. "I could feel things that I hadn't been able to feel in over nine years," Sørensen, who lives in Denmark, said in a statement.

Robotic Russian Cargo Ship Docks with Space Station after Express Flight

An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station today (Feb. 5) to deliver supplies to the crewmembers manning the space laboratory after a quick trip through space.

Wobbly Alien Planet with Wild Seasons Found by NASA Telescope

Astronomers have discovered an alien planet that wobbles at such a dizzying rate that its seasons must fluctuate wildly. The warm planet is a gassy super-Neptune that orbits too close to its two parent stars to be in its system's "habitable zone," the region where temperatures would allow liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, to exist. The faraway world, which lies 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, was discovered by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Kepler was designed to detect exoplanets by noticing the dips in brightness caused when these worlds transit, or cross in front of, their parent stars.

Pow! Fresh Crater on Mars Spotted by NASA Spacecraft (Photo)

A NASA spacecraft has snapped a stunning photo of a fresh Martian crater that was gouged out of the Red Planet just in the last three years or so. "The crater spans approximately 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone," NASA officials wrote in a description of the new image. "Before-and-after imaging that brackets appearance dates of fresh craters on Mars has indicated that impacts producing craters at least 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) in diameter occur at a rate exceeding 200 per year globally," NASA officials wrote. The spacecraft has been observing the Red Planet with its suite of powerful instruments ever since, giving scientists their best-ever looks at the surface of this alien world.

Eating Yogurt May Reduce Risk of Diabetes

Eating yogurt four or five times a week may lower the risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, a new study has found. This risk reduction was seen in study participants who consumed an average of four and a half 4-ounce servings of low-fat yogurt per week, according to the study published today (Feb. 5) in the journal Diabetologia. The study found an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship between eating yogurt and lowered risk of diabetes. They found that replacing a serving of chips with a serving of yogurt reduced the risk of diabetes by 47 percent.

Spending a Week in the Dark Could Boost Hearing

"Even in adults, when you actually lose vision for a few days, you can improve auditory processing," said study co-author Hey-Kyoung Lee, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The new results suggest that sensory deprivation could be a viable way to train adults with hearing loss to better process sounds coming from cochlear implants, the researchers said. "Once you put the animals in the dark for about a week, the neurons in the auditory part of the brain start processing sound better," Lee told Live Science. Electrodes placed in the mice's auditory cortex, which processes sound, also showed stronger connections between the neurons.

Epidural May Prolong Labor More Than Thought

Using epidurals for pain relief during a baby's delivery may prolong labor more than previously thought, a new study finds. In the study, the researchers looked at more than 42,000 women in California who delivered vaginally between 1976 and 2008, and compared the length of the second stage of labor, which is the time it takes for "pushing" the baby out after the cervix has fully opened, among women who had received epidurals and those who hadn't. Although it was thought that epidurals lengthen labor by about one hour, the researchers found that women who had epidurals actually took two to three hours longer to get through the second stage of labor, compared with women who hadn't received this pain medication, according to the study, published today (Feb. 5) in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. "When epidural is used, it may be normal for labor to take two hours longer, and physicians don't necessarily have to intervene, as long as women are progressing and the baby is OK," said Dr. Yvonne Cheng, one of the researchers on the study and an obstetrician at University of California, San Francisco.

Charlemagne's Bones Are Likely Authentic, Scientists Say

The relics of Charlemagne, long on display at a treasury in Germany, are likely the real bones of the Frankish king, scientists say. Last Tuesday (Jan. 28) marked exactly 1,200 years since Charlemagne died in A.D. 814. To commemorate the occasion, a group of scientists at the Cathedral of Aachen gave a summary of the research that has been conducted on the king's bones, stretching back to 1988. Like many saints whose body parts were scattered in various reliquaries, Charlemagne was not left to rest in one piece.

Olympic Figure Skating: Human Body's Limits May Prevent Leap Forward

For a sport judged partially on style, figure skating has not changed much with the times: The billowing, sequined costumes look the same as they have for decades, the classical music never goes in or out of style, and the jumps (which actually determine the score) have more or less stayed the same. And given those limits, fans shouldn't expect moves to change much in the future either, said Tom Zakrajsek, a world and Olympic figure-skating coach based in Colorado Springs, Colo., who will head to Sochi this Thursday (Feb. 6) to coach Max Aaron, an alternate for U.S. Men's Figure Skating Singles. Skaters typically spend between 0.65 and 0.70 seconds in the air for jumps, and fitting in an extra spin would require them to extend that time to between 0.72 and 0.75 seconds, Zakrajsek said. [Winter Warriors: The Fitness Skills of 9 Olympic Sports] James Richards, a biomechanist at the University of Delaware who studies the mechanics of figure-skating jumps, does not think a quintuple is feasible for the human body.

Is the Northeast Running Out of Road Salt?

But that changed this week, as the northeastern United States got walloped with another heavy winter snowfall, and stocks of road salt hit dangerously low levels. Wednesday (Feb. 5), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency, citing a regional shortage of road salt.

Fate of a Fertilized Egg: Why Some Embryos Don't Implant

In the study, researchers found that human embryos typically produce a chemical called trypsin, which signals the womb to prepare its lining for implantation. But in embryos with significant genetic abnormalities, this chemical signal was altered, and it produced a stress response in the womb that could make implantation unlikely, the researchers said. The researchers likened this process to an "entrance exam" set by the womb — an embryo needs to pass this test in order to implant. But sometimes, the womb may make this exam too difficult or too easy, which could lead to the rejection of healthy embryos, or the implantation of embryos with development problems, the researchers said.

Bumblebees Can Fly Higher Than Mount Everest

Alpine bumblebees have the ability to fly at elevations greater than Mt. Everest, scientists have found. Bumblebees cannot survive the freezing conditions of Mt. Everest's peak. But researchers based at the University of California, Berkley simulated the low oxygen and low air density conditions of such high elevations to determine the limits of the bumblebee's flight capacity, and found the bees were capable of staying afloat at remarkably inhospitable elevations. The researchers placed the bees in clear, sealed boxes and experimentally adjusted the oxygen levels and air density using a hand pump to simulate increasing elevation, while keeping temperature constant.

Drones Enter the Battle Against Elephant, Rhino Poachers

Google gave the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) a $5 million Global Impact Award about a year ago to look for new ways to detect and deterwildlife crime. Now the conservation group and its partners in Namibia are just about ready to implement bungee-launched drones and a host of other poacher-tracking technologies in some of the country's national parks, WWF officials say. With such high profits at stake, poaching rings have adopted technologies like night vision goggles, silenced weapons and even helicopters to find and kill some of the world's most threatened mammals. This landscape is "not a level playing field" for less-equipped rangers in Namibia, some of whom are charged with managing vast protected areas, like the New Jersey-sized Etosha National Park, said Crawford Allan, who is leading the WWF's Wildlife Crime Technology Project.

Greenland's First Coral Reef Found

A cold-water coral that thrives in deep, dark water has been found growing off the shore of Greenland as a reef for the first time, scientists report. A Canadian research ship sampling water near southwest Greenland's Cape Desolation discovered the Greenland coral reef in 2012, when its equipment came back to the surface with pieces of coral attached. "At first, the researchers were swearing and cursing at the smashed equipment, and were just about to throw the pieces of coral back into the sea, when luckily, they realized what they were holding," Helle Jørgensbye, a doctoral student at the Technical University of Denmark who is studying the reef, said in a statement. Cold-water corals have been found off of Greenland's west coast before, but never the stone coral Lophelia pertusa, and never as a reef, according to a report by the researchers published in the journal ICES Insight.

Astronauts to Watch Winter Olympic Games from Space Station

The 2014 Winter Olympics are about to begin in Sochi, Russia, and astronauts will be watching the games from their vantage point high above Earth on the International Space Station. The space station currently plays host to a crew of six international astronauts and cosmonauts, a unique viewing party for one of the biggest worldwide events of the year. NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio expects that there will be some friendly international competition during the games, especially if the Russians and Americans compete against each other. You can watch the full space sports interview on Space.com, with Mastracchio also touching on the recent Super Bowl XLVIII.

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