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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Antarctic Explorer Shackleton Hindered by Heart Defect, Docs Say It's been a century since Sir Ernest Shackleton led some of the first major expeditions to Antarctica, but today, medical sleuths suggest Shackleton might have had a hole in his heart, possibly explaining the health problems he had all his life. A famed explorer, Shackleton led the Nimrod Expedition of 1907 to 1909, members of which were the first people to climb Mount Erebus in Antarctica, the southernmost active volcano on Earth. The Endurance expedition was the third of four Antarctic expeditions that Shackleton undertook. Read More » Parents' Financial Debt Linked to Behavioral Problems in Their Kids Children whose parents have certain kinds of financial debt may be more likely to have behavioral problems, a new study suggests. The researchers found that the children in the study whose parents had "unsecured debt," such as credit card debt or unpaid medical bills, were more likely to experience behavioral difficulties than kids whose parents did not have this type of debt. Unsecured debt tends to be more expensive than secured debt, such as a mortgage or a car loan, because people generally pay higher interest rates for unsecured debt, and "it is expected to be paid off over a shorter period of time," compared with other types of debt, said study author Lawrence M. Berger, a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Read More » What Is Prediabetes? New Quiz Reveals Your Risk By taking a 1-minute quiz, you can find out if you're at risk for prediabetes. The quiz is part of a new public service campaign that aims to increase awareness of the condition. The goal is to give people an idea of their prediabetes risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put together the campaign in partnership with the American Diabetes Association, the American Medical Association, and the Ad Council. Read More » Mini T. Rex: 'Welsh Dragon' May Be Earliest Jurassic Dinosaur Two brothers hunting for ichthyosaur fossils along the coast of the United Kingdom came across something far more astounding: The bones of what may be the earliest known dinosaur from the Jurassic period in the U.K., and possibly even the world, a new study finds. After finding the bones in 2014, Rob Hanigan contacted his brother, Nick. Later, they reached out to paleontologists at the University of Portsmouth, who confirmed that the bones belonged to a theropod, a group of mostly meat-eating dinosaurs. Read More » What's Cookin'? Earth, Basically. But It's Not El Niño's Fault Scientists have analyzed the balmy trend, and El Niño is just part of the story, they say. Temperatures for December 2015 were especially unusual, with the highest average temperatures on land and sea surface recorded for any single month during 136 years of record keeping, according to a Jan. 20 statement by NASA and a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Part of the explanation for the heat spike toward the year's end lies in 2015's strong El Niño, a cyclical event that moves warm water along the equatorial Pacific from west to east, triggering climate activity that can drive temperatures upward in parts of the world and contribute to some extreme weather episodes. Read More » Walrus's Runny Nose Had Surprising Source (It Wasn't the Common Cold) No one likes a runny nose. But for one stuffed-up walrus, rivers of snot signaled a rare ailment. Read More » Metal 'Snow' May Power Earth's Magnetic Field The power source for Earth's magnetic field may be magnesium that has been trapped in the core since our planet's violent birth, a new model suggests. Magnesium is the fourth most common element in the Earth's outer layers, but previously, scientists thought there was almost no magnesium in the core. Iron and magnesium don't easily mix, and researchers thought that the Earth's core was mostly iron. Read More » Booze Buzz: Insect Guts Serve as Love Nests for Brewer's Yeast The yeast behind wine, beer and bread has sex in wasp intestines, researchers say. Bread, wine and beer depend on a single species of of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae — bread gets its spongy texture from bubbles of carbon dioxide released by this yeast, while wine and beer depend on this yeast for their intoxicating qualities. Despite the importance of S. cerevisiae, much remains unknown about how it behaves in the wild, such as how and where it breeds. Read More » Ligers and Tigons, Oh My! Cat Lineage Littered with Interbreeding Different species of cats mated with each other at several points in history, a new genetic study of felines reveals. The new cat family tree could also help explain many of the mysteries of cat evolution that have emerged in recent years, scientists added. When creating family trees of species, researchers can discover how closely related two species are by looking at the level of similarity between their DNA. Read More » Record hot years almost certainly caused by man-made warming By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - A record-breaking string of hot years since 2000 is almost certainly a sign of man-made global warming, with vanishingly small chances that it was caused by random, natural swings, a study showed on Monday. Last year was the hottest since records began in the 19th century in a trend that almost all scientists blame on greenhouse gases from burning of fossil fuels, stoking heat waves, droughts, downpours and rising sea levels. "Recent observed runs of record temperatures are extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused global warming," a U.S.-led team of experts wrote in the journal Scientific Reports. Read More » Spider Shows Off His Big Paddle to Woo Mates Males of the human variety may spend hours at the gym bulking up to attract the ladies, but that's nothing compared to the efforts of a new spider species from Australia. This little brown spider sports a massive, paddlelike appendage on its legs that it flashes at females to woo mates, new research has revealed. The paddle seems to be a way of separating the fertile females from those that have no interest in mating, said Jürgen Otto, the biologist who discovered the oddball spider. Read More » Migrating Storks Can't Resist a Garbage Dump Feast Garbage dumps may be such attractive pit stops for some storks that they shorten their migration routes to pay a visit, a new study suggests. A few years ago, Andrea Flack, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, was tracking the path of white storks from Germany, trying to get close enough to the birds to download flight data from the GPS trackers attached to their backs. Flack eventually found herself standing in an open garbage dump in Morocco, staring at her research subjects. Read More » US Military Wants Smaller and More Stable Atomic Clocks The U.S. military wants you … to design a better atomic clock. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense tasked with developing new technologies for the military, recently announced a new program called Atomic Clocks with Enhanced Stability (ACES). Atomic clocks are used to keep track of time in places where a tiny fraction of a second makes a huge difference. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Jeff Bezos' space company successfully re-flies, lands rocket By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - - Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space transportation company, Blue Origin, successfully launched and landed a suborbital rocket for a second time, a key step in its quest to develop reusable boosters, the company said on Friday. The rocket that flew on Friday was the same vehicle that made a successful test launch and landing two months ago, demonstrating reuse, Bezos said in a statement posted on Blue Origin's website 10 hours after the flight. "I'm a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing," Bezos wrote. Read More » Bad Omen: How Full Moon Could Worsen Winter Storm Jonas The first full moon of January will rise this weekend, coinciding with a massive winter storm that is expected to wallop parts of the U.S. East Coast with snow and ice. Full moons can incite a whole host of fears and superstitions, but tomorrow's full moon will have one real effect: It will bring with it high tides that could exacerbate the impending blizzard. A full moon occurs when the Earth, sun and moon form one straight line, with the Earth in between, so that the moon is fully illuminated by the sun. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Researchers find possible ninth planet beyond Neptune By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The solar system may host a ninth planet that is about 10 times bigger than Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune, according to research published on Wednesday. Computer simulations show that the mystery planet, if it exists, would orbit between about 200 and 1,000 times farther from the sun than Earth, astronomers with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said. "It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting," said astronomer Mike Brown, whose discovery was published in this week's Astronomical Journal. Read More » Hiding in Plain Sight: 24 New Beetle Species Discovered in Australia Most of the beetles were collected almost 30 years ago, but they remained unnamed until Alexander Riedel, a curator at the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe, and Rene Tänzler, a biologist at the Zoological State Collection in Munich, both in Germany, started cataloging them and stumbled across 24 new species that have now been added to the weevil genus Trigonopterus. All of the newly described weevils are restricted to small areas of tropical rainforests along the east coast of northern Queensland, Australia. The new beetle species are also easily overlooked because they live on fallen leaves and dead wood, feeding on leaf litter, bits of palm fronds and other rainforest plants, basically recycling plant material, the scientists added. Read More » NASA Sees Massive Winter Storm Moving East A massive winter storm that is expected to bring snow and ice to the eastern United States in the next 48 hours dwarfs the central part of the country in a new satellite image. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-West satellite spotted this cloudy view of the large storm near the Gulf Coast today (Jan. 21) at 10 a.m. EST. The NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite captured another view of the looming winter storm yesterday (Jan. 20) at 2:30 p.m. EST, showing clouds and snow cover stretching from northern Texas into the Great Lakes states. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) Baking-Soda Ingredient May Lower Risk of Premature Death Older people may be at increased risk of premature death if they have low levels of bicarbonate, a main ingredient in baking soda, in their blood, a new study suggests. The reason for the link isn't exactly clear, but it may have to do with the ill effects of having slightly acidic blood, the researchers said. Bicarbonate, a base, is a natural byproduct of metabolism that the body uses to regulate the pH level of the blood. Read More » Don't Blame Pot for Teens' IQ Drop, Study Says Instead, the results suggest that if teens experience a cognitive decline, other factors, such as genetics or that young person's family environment, are more likely to be responsible for the drop, the researchers said. The implications of the new findings are that "it is unlikely that the exposure to marijuana itself is causing children to show intellectual change," Isen told Live Science. Previous research on marijuana use during adolescence has yielded mixed results. Read More » 10,000-Year-Old Battered Bones May Be Oldest Evidence of Human Warfare The skeletons of 27 people who died about 10,000 years ago bear marks of blunt force trauma and projectile wounds, the researchers said in the study. The victims included men, women and children. "That scale of death — it can't be an individual murder or homicide amongst families," said study co-author Robert Foley, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in England. Read More » Prehistoric massacre in Kenya called oldest evidence of warfare By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Man's inhumanity to man, as 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, is no recent development. Scientists said on Wednesday they had found the oldest evidence of human warfare, fossils of a band of people massacred by a troop of attackers with weapons including arrows, clubs and stone blades on the shores of a lagoon in Kenya about 10,000 years ago. The remains of 27 people from a Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture were unearthed at a site called Nataruk roughly 20 miles (30 km) west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. Read More » 'Dragon thief' dinosaur thrived after primordial calamity By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the early years of the Jurassic Period, when the world was recovering from one of the worst mass extinctions on record, a modest meat-eating dinosaur from Wales helped pave the way for some of the most fearsome predators ever to stalk the Earth. Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of fossil remains of a two-legged dinosaur called Dracoraptor that lived 200 million years ago and was a forerunner of much later colossal carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus and Spinosaurus. The fossil is of a 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) juvenile, with adults reaching perhaps 10 feet (3 meters), said paleontologist Steven Vidovic of Britain's University of Portsmouth. Read More » From sawdust to petrol By Jim Drury As world governments mull over global emission targets agreed at last December's United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), attention is turning to which new technologies can help them achieve this. Researchers at the University of Leuven say they have part of the answer, having devised a way to convert sawdust into valuable chemicals and the building blocks for gasoline. By developing a unique chemical process in their laboratory at the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, outside Brussels, they can convert the lignin in sawdust into aromatic chemicals and the cellulose into hydrocarbon chains. Read More » Even Centenarians Are Living Longer In recent years, the death rate among American centenarians — people who have lived to age 100 or older — has decreased, dropping 14 percent for women and 20 percent for men from 2008 to 2014, according to the report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, "the risk of dying for centenarians decreased" over this period, study author Dr. Jiaquan Xu, of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, told Live Science. In 2000, the top five causes of death for centenarians were heart disease, stroke, influenza and pneumonia (the two conditions are grouped together), cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Read More » Eating Healthy Fats May Reduce Deaths from Heart Disease Encouraging people to eat healthy fats such as those found in olive oil or fish could help prevent more than a million deaths from heart disease worldwide each year, according to a new study. In fact, the number of deaths from heart disease due to insufficient intake of healthy fats is almost three times' greater than the number of deaths due to excessive intake of saturated fats, according to the researchers. "Policies for decades have focused on saturated fats as the priority for preventing heart disease, but we found that in most countries, a too-little intake of healthy fats was the big problem, bigger than saturated fat," said study author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. Read More » Low-Fiber Diet May Change Gut Microbes for Generations Diets that are low in fiber may cause irreversible changes to populations of gut bacteria, and those changes may be passed on over generations, new research suggests. What's more, the depleted microbial community, called the microbiome, was passed on from parent to offspring, and worsened over time: After four generations of mice had eaten a low-fiber diet, most of the bacteria species normally found in the animals' gut microbiome were completely missing, the researchers found. The study, which was published Wednesday (Jan. 13) in the journal Nature, may have implications for humans, said study lead author Erica Sonnenburg, a microbiome researcher at Stanford University in California. Read More » New Seafloor Map Reveals Secrets of Ancient Continents' Shoving Match Tectonic plates may have inched across the Earth's surface to where they are now over the course of billions of years, but they left behind traces of this movement in bumps and gashes under the sea. Now, a new topographic map of the seafloor has helped researchers chronicle when the Indian-Eurasian continent formed as well as find a previously undiscovered microplate that broke off as a result of the event. Read More » Racing Pigeons Fly Home Faster in Polluted Air, Scientists Find China currently has an air pollution problem so severe that smog is occasionally dense enough to be visible from space. Using publicly available data gathered from environmental and pigeon racing agencies, scientists analyzed pigeon performance in 415 races that took place on the North China Plain, where concentrations of air pollution are higher than anywhere else in the country, the scientists reported. By comparing the pigeons' racing times to records of pollution levels on race days, the researchers hoped to learn whether air pollution might affect how well the pigeons performed during the races, the scientists said. Read More » State of play of Virtual Reality Valkyrie, a new action-packed space adventure developed by game company CCP, was designed to harness the latest in virtual reality technology. Tomorrow we want to change the dynamic around immersive, advanced, virtual reality," said JP Nauseef, the founder of Krush technologies, a company starting to develop virtual reality hardware.  Major advances in virtual reality are starting to take shape. Read More »
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