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Monday, April 11, 2016

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See Stunning 360-Degree Views of Spectacular Victoria Falls (Video)

Now, even those who can't make it to Africa can get an unforgettable look at Victoria Falls. A new video, courtesy of National Geographic, shows the mighty Zambezi River pounding its way through stunning gorges and canyons, and then rushing over the impressive falls, which lie between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Are These 'Antiques' Imported from Syria Funding Terrorists?

"Antiques" with a declared value of $26 million have been imported to the United States from Syria since 2011, when the civil war there began, according to documents that the U.S. Census Bureau provided to Live Science. It's not clear what, exactly, the antiques actually are, nor whether the items were illegally brought here or where the money from any sales is going. The documents say that the bulk of them are brought to New York City where numerous antiquities dealers, art galleries and auction houses are based.

Ancient Bronze Shovel May Have Been Used in Jewish Cultic Rituals

An ancient bronze shovel that may have been used in Jewish cultic rituals has been unearthed in Israel. The 2,000-year-old shovel, which was unearthed near the Sea of Galilee, is similar to others used by ancient priests in the Second Temple period. "The incense shovel that was found is one of ten others that are known in the country from the Second Temple period.

Bullet Links Lawrence of Arabia to Famous Ambush

The early 20th-century British military leader T.E. Lawrence, widely known as "Lawrence of Arabia" for allying with and advising Arab forces fighting against Ottoman Turks, wrote about taking part in a train ambush in Saudi Arabia in 1917 that proved to be a pivotal skirmish during the Arab revolution. In the decades since Lawrence published the memoir "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" describing his wartime experiences, critics have accused him of exaggerating or even falsifying his participation in certain events. For instance, some biographers have said he embellished his role in the Hallat Ammar train ambush, recognized by historians as a clash that helped define tactics used in modern guerilla warfare.

Medieval Metal Whip, Used During Black Death, Found in Abbey

An ancient whip uncovered at a medieval English monastery may be one of only four metal scourges found in the country, according to the Nottinghamshire County Council, which manages the archaeological site. In England, the Black Death lasted only a year — from 1348 to 1349 — but records show that it was enough to wipe out entire families and resulted in a decline in Rufford's wool trade, which was also a primary source of income for Rufford Abbey, in the following years. During a dig underneath the meadow at Rufford Abbey in 2014, archaeologists discovered a stain of green copper coloring the soil.

Mysterious Plain of Jars Site Holds Human Remains

An ancient burial site, including an oddly shaped quartz stone covering the face of one of the newly uncovered human skeletons, has been discovered at the mysterious Plain of Jars, an archaeological site in remote central Laos littered with thousands of stone vessels. The new findings could help researchers solve the long-standing puzzle of why the stone jars were scattered across this part of Laos. When it was found, the skull beneath the quartz adornment appeared to be looking through a large hole in the stone, said Dougald O'Reilly, an archaeologist at the Australian National University (ANU), who led a team of scientists on a joint Laos-Australian expedition to the Plain of Jars in February.

Genes used to extend banana lifespan

Dr. Haya Friedman, a researcher at Israel's Volcani Institute, also known as the Agricultural Research Organization (ARO), told Reuters that the genetically-altered bananas can stay fresh for at least double the time of normal bananas. "You can see here that these are bananas that we changed the expression of the gene and which now the ripening is delayed. You have to understand that these fruits were picked more than a month ago," she said, pointing at two bunches of bananas on the table in front of her, one is obviously blackened and the second is still freshly-looking yellow." Friedman's research was initially based on previously-known findings in tomatoes.

U.N. panel to study a cap on global warming that may be out of reach

By Alister Doyle and Nina Chestney OSLO/LONDON (Reuters) - Top climate scientists will launch a study this week of how hard it would be to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), although many of them fear it might be too late to reach that level. The world's average surface temperatures reached 1C (1.8F) above pre-industrial times in a record-hot 2015. A 195-nation climate summit in Paris in December asked the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for a report in 2018 on limiting warming to just 1.5C.

'Sea Hunter': World's First Unmanned Ship Stalks Subs

A new hunter is lurking in the deep — and it's made of metal, silicon, and lots and lots of artificial intelligence. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially launched its unmanned submarine-hunting ship, holding a christening ceremony on Thursday (April 7) for the "Sea Hunter." The new vessel is part of DARPA's larger initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) for a wider array of military decisions and tasks. While the Sea Hunter, which is part of DARPA's Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program, is not helmed by a human captain, people are still in the loop (at least for now).

Panama Papers: Just How Big Is the World's Biggest Data Leak?

The leak of more than 11.5 million documents from a law firm in Panama that specializes in creating off-shore tax havens for wealthy clients around the world is being dubbed an unprecedented event — the largest leak in history. More than 100 news outlets around the world have published material based on the so-called Panama Papers. According to journalists at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, who first received the leaked documents, the 2.6 terabytes of leaked data consist of emails, photographs, PDF documents, spreadsheets and entries from a company database, some which date back to the 1970s.

Shape-Shifting Drones Could Be Made from Metal-Foam Hybrid

Designed by engineers from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and with funding from the U.S. Air Force, the composite material consists partly of silicone and partly of a metal with a melting point of 144 degrees Fahrenheit (62 degrees Celsius). "The driving vision behind this is the puffin," said study first author Ilse Van Meerbeek, a Cornell graduate student in the field of mechanical engineering.

Not So Gnarly: Skateboarding Sends 176 Kids to the ER Every Day

The growing popularity of skateboarding over the past few decades comes with an unfortunate side effect: an increase in injuries, a new study spanning nearly two decades finds. The vast majority (89 percent) of injured skateboarders were males, the researchers found. In addition, the researchers found, the most commonly injured areas of the body were the upper extremities (45 percent of injuries) and the lower extremities (32 percent of injuries).

Sleepy Teens Are More Likely to Engage in Risky Behaviors

"Insufficient sleep might cause persons to take more risks and disregard the possibility of negative consequences," the researchers, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The National Sleep Foundation recommends that teens ages 14 to 17 get 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night. Health care providers may also consider screening teens for behaviors that increase the risk for injury, and counseling them, the CDC said.

I Put on a Robotic Suit and Aged 50 Years

They say that youth is wasted on the young, but I'd like to amend that. It was heavy, largely because of the lithium-ion phosphate batteries and the cooling system in the backpack, but I stiffly plodded out of the dressing room.

Tiny Ancient Creature Carried Its Babies Like 'Kites'

A shield protected its head, which was topped by two sweeping antennalike structures, and it used its 12 pairs of legs to scuttle across the sea bottom in what is now Herefordshire in the U.K. The region looks very different today — for one, it's not underwater anymore — but fossils of numerous small creatures like A. spinosus that once inhabited the ocean are preserved in outcrops inside rocky spheres, "like baseballs," of hardened volcanic ash called concretions, which formed around their remains, said Derek Briggs, a paleontology professor at Yale University and lead author of the study. "The tendency is to think of this as Pompeii on the ocean floor," Briggs said. So Briggs turned to the only surefire way to study these tiny fossils in three dimensions: He and his colleagues split open each concretion and cut out the rock holding the fossil.

Unexplained 'Genetic Superheroes' Overcome Disease Mutations

A tiny number of people in the world carry genetic mutations that were thought to guarantee the development of severe childhood diseases, but these people do not actually have these diseases, according to a new study. The scientists found 13 adults who carried the exact genetic mutations that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis, which severely affects the lungs and digestive system, or a condition called Pfeiffer syndrome, which affects the bones of the skull. "If you want to develop therapies for prevention, if you want to come up with ways of not just finding the cause, but [also] ways of preventing the manifestations of disease," then these individuals may help find a way, Stephen Friend, a co-author of the study and a researcher at Sage Bionetworks in Seattle, said in a press briefing about the new study.

Why Neanderthals Likely Fathered Few Kids with Modern Humans

Humans today often carry around a small chunk of DNA from Neanderthals, suggesting we interbred with our closest known extinct relatives at some point in our history. Turns out, the Y chromosome may have been key in keeping the two lineages apart by creating conditions that might often have led to miscarriages if or when the two got together, researchers now say. In 2010, scientists first sequenced the Neanderthal genome.

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Saturday, April 9, 2016

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NASA: Global warming is now changing how Earth wobbles

WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis, a new NASA study finds.

No, Planet Nine Won't Kill Us All

Don't believe the doomsday hype about the putative Planet Nine. Yesterday (April 7), the New York Post published a video claiming that Planet Nine — a hypothesized world in the solar system's far outer reaches — could send asteroids and comets hurtling into Earth soon, with potentially devastating consequences. "A newly discovered planet could destroy Earth as soon as this month," the New York Post said yesterday via its Twitter account, @nypost, by way of advertising the new video.

U.S. needs up to 18 more Russian rocket engines: Pentagon

By Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon will need to buy up to 18 more Russian-built RD-180 engines to power rockets carrying U.S. military satellites into space over the next six years or so, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said in an interview on Friday. Congress banned use of the Russian RD-180 rocket engines for military use after 2019, following Russia's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014. Work said the United States needed to ensure there were at least "two affordable and reliable means into space." He added the RD-180 would be needed only during what he described as a transition period of new domestic rocket engine development.

SpaceX rocket booster makes breakthrough landing at sea

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida on a NASA cargo run to the International Space Station on Friday, and its reusable main-stage booster landed on an ocean platform minutes later in a dramatic spaceflight first. The successful autonomous touchdown of the booster at sea marked another milestone for billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and his privately owned Space Exploration Technologies in the quest to develop a cheap, reusable rocket, expanding his edge in the burgeoning commercial space launch industry.

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Friday, April 8, 2016

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Scientists Nuke a Fake Comet to Create Ingredients for Life

By cooking up a faux comet, scientists have produced the first formation of a key sugar required for life as we know it. By creating ices similar to those detected by the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which made the first landing on a comet, scientists were able to produce ribose, a sugar that serves as an important ingredient in RNA, an essential ingredient for life. "There is evidence for an 'RNA world' — an episode of life on Earth during which RNA was the only genetic material," Cornelia Meinert, an associate scientist at the University Nice Sophia Antipolis, told Space.com by email.

New Bizarre State of Matter Seems to Split Fundamental Particles

A bizarre new state of matter has been discovered — one in which electrons that usually are indivisible seem to break apart. The new state of matter, which had been predicted but never spotted in real life before, forms when the electrons in an exotic material enter into a type of "quantum dance," in which the spins of the electrons interact in a particular way, said Arnab Banerjee, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The findings could pave the way for better quantum computers, Banerjee said.

Ancient Water Bird Survived Attack by Short-Necked 'Sea Monster'

Scientists have found what may be the world's luckiest Hesperornis — an ancient water bird that escaped the snapping jaws of a plesiosaur about 70 million years ago in prehistoric South Dakota. Still, the plesiosaur got a good bite out of the Hesperornis, a large, flightless diving bird that lived during the late Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the world. "Basically, the plesiosaur came in from the side," said study co-author Bruce Rothschild, a professor of medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University.

Here's How Money Could Actually Buy Happiness

Money really can buy happiness — if you buy things that "match" your personality, a new study from the United Kingdom suggests. Researchers analyzed more than 76,000 purchases that 625 people made over a six-month period, and grouped the purchases into categories based on how they might be tied to a personality trait. For example, purchases involving "eating out in pubs" were tied to the personality trait of extroversion (a person who is sociable and outgoing), while purchases involving "charities" and "pets" were tied to the personality trait of agreeableness (a person who is compassionate and friendly).

Even Babies Will 'Sell Out' for a Price

"It's a study I like to call 'the deal with the devil,'" said study researcher Arber Tasimi, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Tasimi and Yale psychologist Karen Wynn were interested in finding out the age at which kids will avoid a wrongdoer, even if it comes at a cost to the kids themselves. So Tasimi and Wynn decided to look at this moral dilemma in children on both sides of that age cutoff.

Injection of Tiny Beads Could Curb Hunger, Promote Weight Loss

A small injection could lead to decreased feelings of hunger as well as major weight loss, a small new study finds. The procedure, known as bariatric arterial embolization, has only been tested in seven patients, and much more research will be needed in order to confirm its safety and effectiveness. However, the doctors who completed the study are "excited about the possibility of adding [the procedure] as another tool for health care providers to offer patients in the effort to curb" the obesity epidemic, said Dr. Clifford Weiss, the director of interventional radiology research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the leader of the study, in a statement.

From Shredded C-Notes to Corn: Weird Materials Make Their Way into Cars

Nikhil Gupta is an associate professor, and Steven Zeltmann is a student researcher, in the Composite Materials and Mechanics Laboratory of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering. The 2016 New York International Auto Show opened to the public on March 25 with exciting displays of expensive and exotic cars that defy the imagination with high speed and high technology.

Clearing the Air, China Now Leads World in Clean Energy (Op-Ed)

Lynn Scarlett, is a former deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the U.S. Department of the Interior and currently is global managing director of policy at The Nature Conservancy. Scarlett contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. China is embracing this change as it is poised to move from leading emitter of greenhouse gasses to leader in renewable energy investments.

Suit that mimics life at age 85 has no creases, just creaks

By Barbara Goldberg JERSEY CITY, N.J. (Reuters) - With the push of a button, a perfectly healthy 34-year-old museum-goer named Ugo Dumont was transformed into a confused 85-year-old man with cataracts, glaucoma and a ringing in his ears known as tinnitus. Dumont had volunteered at Liberty Science Center on Tuesday to don a computer-controlled exoskeleton that can be remotely manipulated to debilitate joints, vision and hearing and shared with the crowd what aging feels like decades before his time. Headphones muffled his hearing while goggles left him with only peripheral vision due to macular degeneration while the suit's joints were adjusted to simulate the stiffness of rheumatoid arthritis.

Inflatable habitat heading for test run on space station

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - An inflatable human habitat was scheduled for launch to the International Space Station on Friday for a two-year test to see how the lightweight, fabric module compares with traditional orbiting enclosures made from metal, NASA said. The prototype habitat, built by Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace, was packed inside a capsule slated for liftoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 4:43 p.m. (2043 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The scheduled launch marks the fourth mission for high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's privately owned Space Exploration Technologies since a rocket failure last June destroyed a cargo ship being carried on a resupply mission bound for the space station.

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