|  Rare Hybrid Solar Eclipse Occurs Today: Watch It Live Online  | The moon and sun will team up to create a rare event Sunday (Nov. 3): a hybrid solar eclipse that could amaze eclipse chasers across eastern North America, the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. The online Slooh community observatory will provide a free webcast of Sunday's hybrid solar eclipse beginning at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT). Slooh host Paul Cox will provide live views of the eclipse from the Kenya countryside in Africa, with other feeds expected from Gabon, Africa, and the Canary Islands off Africa's western coast. Meanwhile, a partial solar eclipse will be visible from the U.S. East Coast and parts of Canada, as well as southern Europe and most of Africa, weather permitting.
| Read More » Rare Solar Eclipse Wows Skywatchers Across Atlantic, Africa (Photos)  | A rare solar eclipse that began as a "ring of fire" and transformed into a spectacular total eclipse of the sun amazed skywatchers from North America to Africa today (Nov. 3), and they captured the photos to prove it. The Sunday eclipse was a rare hybrid solar eclipse, which began over the Atlantic Ocean as an annular eclipse and transitioned into a full total solar eclipse for observers along the narrow path of totality in the eastern Atlantic and over parts of Africa. Observers along the U.S. East Coast and parts of Canada, meanwhile, awoke to a partial solar eclipse at sunrise. "We witnessed totality here, and it was stunning," said Paul Cox, who hosted a live webcast of the solar eclipse from Kenya for the online community observatory Slooh.com.
| Read More » Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter Remembered at Colorado Funeral  | The second American astronaut to orbit the Earth was remembered by family and friends at a funeral service in his Colorado hometown. On Saturday (Nov. 2), a private family funeral was followed by a public memorial held at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder. "It's fitting we say goodbye to Scott in Boulder," said Tom Stoever, Carpenter's son-in-law, as reported by The Daily Camera newspaper. John Glenn, who preceded Carpenter into orbit by several months in 1962, delivered a eulogy for his fellow Mercury astronaut.
| Read More » HPV Vaccine: One Dose May Be Enough A single dose of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may be enough to protect women against infection with the virus over the long-term, a new study from Costa Rica suggests. In the study, women who received one, two, or the standard three doses of the HPV vaccine all produced antibodies against the virus that remained at stable levels in their bodies for four years after vaccination. In addition, women who received one dose of the vaccine had an immune response that was five to nine times stronger than that seen in women who were infected with HPV naturally. However, women who received only one vaccine dose produced antibodies at levels lower than those of women given two or three doses. Read More » Girls Reaching Puberty Earlier, Study Finds Many girls in the U.S. may be entering puberty at younger ages now than in previous decades, and obesity appears to be the major factor contributing to this shift, a new study finds. Today's children may be less active, and consume fewer fruits and vegetables than those born in the previous decades. Read More » Origins of Syphilis Still a Mystery, Researchers Say  | Syphilis has been infecting people for centuries, and many researchers have tried to pinpoint the part of the world where the bacterium that causes the disease first appeared, before spreading across the globe and becoming the international disease that it is today. Yet, despite researchers delving into studying the disease — looking at it from the angles of history, politics, paleopathology and molecular chemistry — the origin of syphilis remains an enigma, say researchers who recently reviewed the literature about syphilis. The main hypotheses about the origin of syphilis revolve around the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World. Not long afterward, the first recorded epidemic of syphilis happened, during the French invasion of the Italian city of Naples in 1495.
| Read More » Flying Foxes (Actually Bats) on Remote Island Studied for First Time  | Flying foxes are the largest bats on Earth, and consist of more than 60 species that live throughout remote islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well is in parts of continental Asia and Australia. Pteropus pelagicus — a relatively small species of flying fox with a wingspan of about 2 feet (61 centimeters) — inhabits the western Pacific Mortlock Islands within the Federated States of Micronesia. A team of naturalists based at the College of Micronesia has now conducted the first-ever field study of the Mortlock Islands flying fox population in an effort to catalog more details about how this enigmatic creature lives. "We knew virtually nothing about it in terms of ecology other than the fact that it lived on this small set of atolls," study co-author Gary Wiles, a researcher with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
| Read More » Extinct 'Megamouth' Shark Species Finally Identified  | LOS ANGELES — Scientists have finally identified a new species of megamouth shark that prowled the oceans about 23 million years ago, nearly 50 years after the first teeth were discovered and then forgotten. "It was a species that was known to be a new species for a long time," said study co-author Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago. Scientists first found shark teeth from the species in the 1960s, but at the time, there were no similar living creatures, so scientists didn't quite know what to make of the find. Then in 1976, scientists discovered the modern megamouth shark, dubbed Megachasma pelagios, which feeds exclusively on shrimplike creatures called plankton.
| Read More » Fewer Millennials Look to Cars for Mobility (Op-Ed)  | Lucian Go is a program assistant for transportation at the NRDC. This Op-Ed is adapted from a post on the NRDC blog Switchboard. Go contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. It no longer takes a transportation planner to see the shift occurring in the travel habits of the millennial generation, which is the largest and most diverse in American history.
| Read More » After Sandy, Lessons from Historic 1993 Flood Resurface (Op-Ed)  | Moore contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. While the nation's attention is riveted on the one-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the record-breaking 1993 flood that inundated homes and farmland across 30,000 square miles of the Mississippi and Missouri River Basins. The massive, 500-year flood inundated parts of the Midwest throughout that summer, and I played a small role in the response while serving in the Illinois National Guard. Since the Great Flood of 1993, the United States has experienced floods that caused tens of billions of dollars of damages — from the Mississippi River (2002, 2008, 2011);
| Read More » Palm-Size Drones Buzz Over Battlefield  | Weighing only 2.1 ounces (16 grams), the Black Hornet looks like a tiny toy helicopter. The PD-100 Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance System, unveiled to the American public for the first time last week at the Association of the United States Army Expo in Washington, D.C., is a drone (actually, a pair of them) that a soldier can carry and operate as easily as he or she would a radio. Since last year, the British infantrymen in Afghanistan have been using the new Black Hornets on a variety of missions — from scouting routes for possible enemy ambushes to peeking over the walls of a nearby compound. The unmanned air vehicle was designed for small units that required a quick, tactical "stealth" camera in the sky, said Ole Aguirre, vice president of sales and marketing for Prox Dynamics AS, the Norwegian company that produces the Black Hornet.
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