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Tuesday, July 19, 2016

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Zika Virus Mystery: New Utah Case Stumps Researchers

In a puzzling case, a person in Utah became infected with the Zika virus, but health officials can't figure out how the person contracted it. "Zika continues to surprise us," and there's still a lot we don't know about the virus, Dr. Satish Pillai, incident manager for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Zika response, said at a news conference today (July 18).

8-Year-Old's Fossil Discovery Explains Why Turtles Have Shells

The turtle's shell may serve as a protective shield nowadays, but ancient turtles actually developed shells for an entirely different reason, a new study finds. "Why the turtle shell evolved is a very Dr. Seuss-like question, and the answer seems pretty obvious — it was for protection," lead study author Tyler Lyson, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, said in a statement. The evolutionary history of the turtle shell has long mystified scientists, largely because of "the scarcity of critical fossils," the researchers wrote in the study.

Ancient Logbook Documenting Great Pyramid's Construction Unveiled

A logbook that contains records detailing the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza has been put on public display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in honor of the pharaoh Khufu (reign ca. 2551 B.C.-2528 B.C.) and is the largest of the three pyramids constructed on the Giza plateau in Egypt.

Why Florida's Recent Earthquake Is So Rare

The 3.7-magnitude quake had an epicenter that was 104 miles (168 kilometers) east-northeast of Daytona Beach, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). According to the USGS ShakeMap, some weak tremors were reported and picked up by scientific instruments on the mainland, but the quake was too weak to cause any damage. Earthquakes are rare in Florida, and the reason for the relative peace has to do with Florida's position on the North American plate.

Tiny 'Atomic Memory' Device Could Store All Books Ever Written

"You would need just the area of a postage stamp to write out all books ever written," said study senior author Sander Otte, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology's Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. All in all, this orderly system of markers could help atomic memory scale up to very large sizes, even if the copper surface the data is encoded on is not entirely perfect, they said.

Solar Plane Zooms Over Egypt's Pyramids on Historic Flight

A solar-powered airplane buzzed the pyramids in Egypt, flying over the iconic, haze-cloaked monuments, during the most recent leg of its historic journey around the world. The dramatic photos of Solar Impulse 2 soaring over the pyramids offer a striking contrast between ancient and futuristic technology, with the solar-powered aircraft representing a way that some machines, including airplanes, could be powered one day. "This was an emotional and meaningful leg for me, being able to enjoy once more the incredible sensation of flying day and night thanks only to the energy of the sun and enjoying fully the present moment," pilot André Borschberg, Solar Impulse's co-founder and CEO, who flew the plane from Spain to Egypt, said in a statement.

Living Near a Fracking Site May Increase Your Risk of Asthma

Living close to a site used for hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, may increase a person's risk of developing asthma, a new study finds. "Fracking" is a shorthand term often used to refer to an unconventional way of getting natural gas out of the ground.

Stem Cells Could Replace Hip Replacements

This is a major step toward being able one day to use a patient's own cells to repair a damaged joint, thus avoiding the need for extensive joint-replacement surgery. The new technique may be ready to test in humans within three to five years and may ultimately work with other joints, such as knees, said Farshid Guilak, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who co-led the project. The work, a collaboration between researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and researchers from Cytex Therapeutics, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina, appears today (June 18) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pediatricians Should Discuss Sexuality with Kids, Group Says

Pediatricians should help educate their patients about sex and help parents learn how best to talk to their kids about sexuality, advised a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics. By acting as an additional source for trustworthy information about sex and sexuality, pediatricians could complement the education that kids may receive at school or at home, the authors of the report said. "Research has conclusively demonstrated that programs promoting abstinence-only [behavior] until heterosexual marriage occurs are ineffective," the lead author of the report, Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a chairperson of the AAP Committee on Adolescence, said in a statement.

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Monday, July 18, 2016

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SpaceX rocket lifts off on cargo run, then lands at launch site

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - An unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early on Monday to send a cargo ship to the International Space Station, then turned around and landed itself back at the launch site. The 23-story-tall Falcon 9 rocket, built and flown by Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT). Also aboard the capsule was a metal docking ring of diameter 7.8 feet (2.4 m), that will be attached to the station, letting commercial spaceships under development by SpaceX and Boeing Co. ferry astronauts to the station, a $100-billion laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

Man Gets Zika from Sex with Female Partner, in First

A woman in New York City who was infected with Zika passed the virus to her male partner during sex, marking the first report of female-to-male sexual transmission of this virus. Previously, all reports of sexual transmission of the Zika virus have been cases of men passing it to their sexual partners, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The new report "adds to the growing body of knowledge about the sexual transmission of Zika," the CDC said.

Prince Harry Checks HIV: Who Else Should Get Tested?

Member of the British royal family Prince Harry took an HIV test this week, with the goal of destigmatizing testing for the virus. "If you're a man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, whatever — even ginger — why wouldn't you come and have a test?" Prince Harry said. About one in eight people with HIV in the U.S. don't know they're infected with the virus, according to the CDC.

Shoe-Wearing Robot's No Flatfoot — It Walks Like a Person

A bipedal robot can now put its best foot forward, stepping with a heel-toe motion that copies human locomotion more closely than flat-footed robot walkers can. By rocking its "feet" forward from the heel and pushing off at the toe, the DURUS robot closely imitates the walking motion of people, making it more energy-efficient and better at navigating uneven terrain, according to Christian Hubicki, a postdoctoral fellow in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the researchers who helped DURUS find its footing. Enhanced walking capabilities could help robots navigate environments that people move around in, and could improve the performance of bots created for disaster response, Hubicki told Live Science.

2,000-Year-Old Dog Graveyard Discovered in Siberia

The carefully buried remains of five dogs were recently found in a 2,000-year-old doggy graveyard near the Arctic Circle in Siberia, according to archaeologists. This discovery at the Ust-Polui archaeological site, in Salekhard, Russia, reveals close relationships between the region's people and their animal "best friends" two millennia B.C. The dogs likely served as pets, workers and sources of food — and possibly as sacrificial offerings in religious ceremonies, the researchers said. "The role of dogs at Ust-Polui is really complex and variable," Robert Losey, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, wrote in an email to Live Science from Salekhard, where he is carrying out fieldwork at Ust-Polui.

'Dragon Silk' Armor Could Protect US Troops

Genetically modified silkworms that spin special fibers, known as "Dragon Silk," could soon be used to protect soldiers in the U.S. Army, its manufacturer, Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, announced this week. The U.S. Army recently awarded the Michigan-based company a contract to test its silk products, Kraig Biocraft Laboratories announced on Tuesday (July 12). "Dragon Silk scores very highly in tensile strength and elasticity," which makes is one of the toughest fibers known to man, Jon Rice, the chief operations officer at Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, said in a statement.

U.N. tombstone listing celebrated as rare joint success in Balkans

A World Heritage listing for 70,000 medieval tombstones spread across four countries that emerged from Yugoslavia's bloody break up in the 1990s was praised on Monday as a rare example of successful cooperation between the former foes. Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, whose neighbourly relations often suffer over disputes dating back to the war, spent six years persuading the United Nations to protect the graveyards as part of their shared heritage. Bosnia's Civil Affairs Minister Adil Osmanovic announced on Monday that a committee of the U.N. Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) had recognised the unique and universal cultural value of the tombstones, known as stecci.

Ancient Bug Jumped Out of Its Skin to Escape Gooey Trap

An ancient event preserved in a piece of amber reads from left to right like an enigmatic story told in three mysterious emojis: a strand of hair followed by an insect exoskeleton next to a single mushroom.

'Primitive Machine' Within Great Pyramid of Giza Reconstructed

The ancient Egyptians created a simple yet elaborate system of blocks and grooves within the Great Pyramid of Giza to protect the King's Chamber from tomb robbers. In an upcoming episode of the Science Channel's "Unearthed," that system comes to life via computer animations. In the episode, Egyptologist Mark Lehner describes the system for viewers, calling it a "very primitive machine." Lehner leads Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), a team that has been excavating at Giza for about 30 years.

Ancient Roman Soldier with Ornate Belt Discovered in UK Grave

The 1,600-year-old remains of a middle-age man buried alongside an ornate belt decorated with images of dolphins and dogs have been found in a grave in Leicester, England, archaeologists report. The belt's style suggests that its owner worked as a solider or civil servant during the Late Roman period, during the second half of the fourth century A.D or the early fifth century A.D., the archaeologists, from the University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), said on July 7. The team made the discovery during an excavation in which they dug up 83 skeletons from a Late Roman cemetery in Leicester's West End.

Kickstarter Project Aims to 'Back Up Humanity' in Cosmic Cloud

"We sometimes use the phrase, 'We want to back up humanity,' which is not a joke — we want to do this," project co-founder Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Space.com. Indeed, Lubin, co-founder Travis Brashears (a physics undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley) and their colleagues are looking to the masses for funding, via a Kickstarter campaign that launched today (July 18). This money will be used to launch a "humanity chip" full of images and other data provided by Kickstarter contributors to low-Earth orbit, likely in mid-2017, project team members said.

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Sunday, July 17, 2016

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SpaceX to try again to send docking ring for space taxis to station

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX will make a second attempt on Monday to deliver one of two docking rings to the International Space Station, a crucial step in enabling U.S. commercial space taxis to ferry astronauts to the orbiting lab, NASA said on Sunday. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, tried last year to deliver a ring for the first time, but the equipment was destroyed during a launch accident. "I know how critical this is for NASA," Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president for mission assurance, said during a press conference on Saturday.

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