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Monday, February 10, 2014

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Ancient star helps scientists understand universe's origins

Australian astronomers have found the oldest known star in the universe, a discovery that may help to resolve a long-standing discrepancy between observations and predictions of the Big Bang billions of years ago. Dr Stefan Keller, lead researcher at the Australian National University Research School, told Reuters his team had seen the chemical fingerprint of the "first star". "It's giving us insight into our fundamental place in the universe. What we're seeing is the origin of where all the material around us that we need to survive came from." Simply put, the Big Bang was the inception of the universe, he said, with nothing before that event.

Ancient star helps scientists understand universe's origins

8 Best Jobs for Retirees

Americans may be able to start collecting retirement benefits at age 62, but in today's world, many workers are continuing to stay employed well beyond retirement age. Whether they want to earn some extra cash, continue using their career skills, or try their hand at something new, more and more senior citizens are choosing to take a part-time job after retirement. Here are eight opportunities you can pursue as a retired worker. Whether it's with a day care or nursery school, or an independent child care service, watching children for busy parents during the work day or weekends is a great gig for a retired worker.

Depression in Space: How Computer Software Could Help Astronauts Cope

Astronauts on a deep-space mission will be much too far removed to make an office call to a specialist who could help handle depression and other psychosocial issues. Now, a set of self-directed modules could help astronauts work through these issues on their own while on a deep-space mission. James Cartreine, a licensed clinical psychologist and a researcher in the Brigham and Women's Hospital's (BWH) Program on Behavioral Informatics and eHealth, also produces interactive media and videos. (BWH is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School.) That melding of psychology and media led the researcher to create a suite of interactive media programs to help astronauts manage the pressure-cooker environment of lengthy space travel.

Meteor Shower Cameras Scan Night Sky to Study Near-Earth Objects

The cameras are part of a project to monitor the night sky for meteors, buts of space dust and debris that ignite as dazzling streaks as they hit Earth's upper atmosphere. Meteor showers are produced when dust or particles from comets or asteroids burn up in the atmosphere. The meteor-watching team, led by meteorite expert Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., observed 42 showers during January and February 2012, 16 of which were new. "That leaves us with 41 parent bodies out there that cross Earth's orbit at some point, and we don't know where they are," said study researcher Beth Johnson, a physics student at San Jose State University, who presented the results of the project in January at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C.

Is the Loch Ness Monster Dead?

A veteran custodian of Loch Ness monster sightings is concerned that Nessie has not been seen in well over a year, and may be gone, according to a news report. Gary Campbell, who lives in Inverness in the United Kingdom has been keeping records of Loch Ness monster sightings for the past 17 years and has put together a list of sightings that goes back some 1,500 years, according to the BBC News. "The number of sightings has been reducing since the turn of the century but this is the first time in almost 90 years that Nessie wasn't seen at all." (Apparently three reports of possible Nessie sightings in 2013 were discredited after closer scrutiny, The Inverness Courier reported.) The Loch Ness monster first achieved notoriety in 1933 after a story was published in a local newspaper describing not a monstrous head or hump but instead a splashing in the water that appeared to be caused "by two ducks fighting." A famous photograph showing a mysterious head and neck brought Nessie international fame, but was revealed to be hoax decades later.

Hark, Quarks! Strange Tiny Particles Loom Large in New Study

The most precise measurement yet of a fundamental property of quarks — one of the building blocks of matter — brings scientists closer to finding new exotic particles. At the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists fired a beam of electrons at an atom of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which consists of one proton and one neutron. They looked at the way the electrons scattered after hitting the nucleus of the atom, and used that pattern to find out more about quarks, which make up protons and neutrons. The experiment is similar to one done in the late 1970s, which helped confirm that the Standard Model successfully explained the behavior of tiny particles.

Oversized Rats Could Take Over Earth After Next Mass Extinction

In the event of a future mass extinction, rats may be the animals best suited to repopulate the world, some scientists say. And if rats did "take over" after such a wipeout, they'd likely balloon in size, scientists also say. Some researchers think the Earth is on the brink of its next mass extinction that could hit within the next several centuries, as a result of human-induced habitat destruction and environmental degradation, said Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom who studies Earth history. Zalasiewicz and colleagues have developed a thought experiment in which they consider which animal might be the most likely to survive and repopulate the world if this purported mass extinction were to take place — and they concluded that rats may be the best candidates.

Female Mice Choose Mates That Don't Sing Like Dad

In the study, the researchers raised female mice with either their biological father, an unrelated father or no father at all. The female mice raised with their biological father spent most of their time in rooms playing the songs of males that were unrelated to them, the researchers found.

Birds Give Evil Eye to Ward Off Intruders

Unlike their dark-eyed relatives, rooks and crows, "jackdaw eyes are almost white, and their striking pale irises are very conspicuous against their dark feathers," Gabrielle Davidson, lead author of the study, detailed Tuesday (Feb. 4) in the journal Biology Letters, said in a statement. But do jackdaws use their bright eyes for communication? One was solid black, one had just a pair of jackdaw eyes, one had a jackdaw's face with jackdaw eyes and one had a jackdaw's face with black rook eyes. The trouble often starts when jackdaws approach nests belonging to other birds.

Microwaving Your Meals: Skipping 1 Step Can Make You Sick

During the outbreak, which occurred in summer 2010, people in 18 states fell ill with a type of bacteria called Salmonella enterica. Most of the people who fell ill in the outbreak reported cooking their meal in the microwave, but not all of them let the meal stand for the recommended time in the microwave before they dug in, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Consumers should not only follow instructions for microwaving, but should also allow the product to stand for the recommended time before consuming," the CDC said. A common feature of foodborne-illness outbreaks linked with frozen meals is the misconception that these foods are ready to eat, and just need to be reheated, the CDC said.

Sochi Olympics: Which Winter Sports Burn the Most Calories?

Regardless of whether they win gold, athletes at this year's Winter Olympics will no doubt expend a significant number of calories as they try to ski, jump and skate their way past the competition. An elite racer who weighs 220 lbs. (100 kilograms) would burn about 260 calories during 10 minutes of cross-country skiing at a pace of at least 8 mph (13 km/h), according to the Compendium. Cross-country skiing, figure skating and speed skating are aerobic activities that require a significant amount of oxygen consumption, so they burn more calories, said Richard Cotton, an exercise physiologist and national director of certification at the American College of Sports Medicine.

3 Things to Know About Your Food's Nutrition Label

Food manufacturers label foods in a way that makes foods more appealing, so you buy them — that's their job. But your job is to make healthy choices for yourself and your family. For example, a 2012 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that college students who checked food labels were more likely to consume less fast food and added sugar, and more fiber, than those who were not in the habit of checking labels. It's easy to quickly scan a food label and miss important facts that could sabotage an otherwise healthy diet.

To the Powerless, World Weighs Heavier

The effect may be evolution's quirky way of preventing the socially powerless from exhausting their resources, said study researcher Eun Hee Lee, a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. "Powerful people know they have control of resources for themselves, and even others' [resources]," Lee told Live Science. Power dynamics are a fact of living as a social organism — any time there is more than one person, power dynamics exist, she said.

Gladiator Heads? Mystery of Trove of British Skulls Solved

A trove of skulls and other body parts unearthed in the heart of London may have once belonged to Roman gladiators, war captives or criminals, a new study suggests. The remains, described in the January issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, belonged to about 40 men, mostly ages 25 to 35, and were marred by violence: cheek fractures, blunt-force trauma to the head, decapitation and injuries from sharp weapons, said study co-author Rebecca Redfern, a curator and bioarchaeologist at the Museum of London.

February Stargazing: Planets, Comets and Constellations Shine in Night Sky

The constellation Orion also takes a prominent position in the winter sky, and Jupiter can be seen after sunset during February. "After the sun sets on these cold February days, look for a bright 'star' blazing high over head," officials with the Hubble Space Telescope's Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) said in a video about February skywatching. "This is actually not a star at all, but the planet Jupiter. Uranus and Neptune can be spotted through binoculars or a telescope, Jane Houston Jones said in a NASA skywatching video.

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Sunday, February 9, 2014

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Want to See the Northern Lights? There's an App for That

ATLANTA - The Fairbanks North Star Borough, the area around Fairbanks, Alaska, has about 85,000 people in it. But the area more than doubles its population when all of the tourists who come to see the spectacle of the northern lights are factored in, says Don Hampton, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. So to bring the auroras to the rest of the world, and to get people interested in space weather, Hampton has helped maintain a set of cameras at the Poker Flat Research Range (originally a sounding rocket research site) focused on providing real-time images of the ebb and flow of the aurora borealis.

Stargazing Duo Snaps Gorgeous Photo of Triangulum Galaxy

Two astrophotographers teamed up to take this stunning image of one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye: the Triangulum Galaxy. Based in the Netherlands, André van der Hoeven joined Michael van Doorn to create this stunning image of the Triangulum Galaxy, a spiral galaxy located approximately 3 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. Catalogued as Messier 33 or NGC 598, the Triangulum Galaxy is the third largest member the Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and about 30 other smaller galaxies. Van Doorn used a Celestron C11 with Hyperstar at f/2 to take his portion of the imaging.

Stronger Pacific winds explain global warming hiatus: study

Last year, scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the pace of temperature rise at the Earth's surface had slowed over the past 15 years, even though greenhouse gas emissions, widely blamed for causing climate change, have risen steadily. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday said stronger Pacific trade winds - a pattern of easterly winds spanning the tropics - over the past two decades had made ocean circulation at the Equator speed up, moving heat deeper into the ocean and bringing cooler water to the surface. "We show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming," said the study, led by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Australia. "The net effect of these anomalous winds is a cooling in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1-0.2 degrees Celsius, which can account for much of the hiatus in surface warming since 2001." COOLING DOWN The study's authors, including scientists from other research centers and universities in the United States, Hawaii and Australia, used weather forecasting and satellite data and climate models to make their conclusions.

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Saturday, February 8, 2014

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Guggenheim Painting Proven to Be a Fake

A painting in the Guggenheim collection initially attributed to French modern artist Fernand Léger has languished out of view for decades after it was suspected to be a fake. The influential American art patron Peggy Guggenheim bought the painting, believing it to be part of Léger's "Contraste de Formes" (Contrasts of Forms), an abstract series created between 1913 and 1914 that breaks up figures into schematic units. (Léger was a contemporary of Pablo Picasso.) In the 1970s, Léger scholar Douglas Cooper voiced serious skepticism about its authenticity. Without any consensus from experts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the current steward of the painting, has never exhibited nor catalogued the artwork.

Astronaut Hall of Fame to Add Two Record-Setting Space Shuttle Fliers

A spacewalker who flew a record seven times into orbit and the first American woman to complete a long-duration space station mission will be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut of Hall of Fame, officials announced on Friday (Feb. 7). Former NASA astronauts Jerry Ross and Shannon Lucid were revealed as the Astronaut Hall of Fame's 2014 honorees during a ceremony held Friday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. "[Lucid and Ross] are extraordinary astronauts who made history as important and frequent crewmembers on shuttle missions," Dan Brandenstein, a four-time shuttle flier and 2003 Astronaut Hall of Fame inductee, remarked. Ross and Lucid were chosen through a selection process overseen by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which Brandenstein heads as chair.

Mysterious 'Boom' Rattles Maryland

At around Noon on Thursday (Feb. 6), firefighter Michael Maykrantz was on duty in Ocean City, Md., when the doors of the firehouse started rattling and the floor vibrated and shook. Was it an earthquake, a sonic boom or some other mysterious phenomenon? Despite a number of official investigations, some frazzled Maryland residents still aren't sure what happened. In 2011, a 5.8-magnitude temblor with an epicenter in Virginia shook the surrounding area, including Maryland and Washington, D.C.

Hubble Telescope Helps Solve Mystery of Universe's Massive Galactic Burnouts

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories, astronomers are learning why some massive galaxies hit their peak young and quit making stars when the universe was less than a quarter of its current age. These burnouts are sometimes nicknamed "red and dead" galaxies because of their reddish color, compared to the blue hues of star-making galaxies, according to NASA. Strangely, these dead galaxies are just as massive as today's large spiral galaxies, but with stars squeezed into an area three times smaller. "This means that the density of stars was 10 times greater," Sune Toft, an astrophysics and cosmology professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, explained in a statement.

NASA Satellite Sees Sochi Winter Olympics Venues from Space (Photos)

The 2014 Winter Olympics officially began with an extravagant opening ceremony in Sochi, Russia, today (Feb. 7), and even NASA has embraced the spirit of the games with striking new satellite views of Olympic sites from orbit. The newly released photos of Sochi Winter Olympics venues from space were captured by a NASA instrument on the Earth-watching Terra satellite on Jan. 4. NASA unveiled the images on Thursday, with one photo revealing a view of Sochi Olympic Park Coastal Cluster, on the coast of the Black Sea, as it appears from orbit. "The Olympic Park Coastal Cluster for indoor sports appears as a circular area on the shoreline in the bottom center of the image," NASA officials wrote in an image description.

Winter Stargazing: Skywatching Tips and Tricks for Cold Northern Nights

Such conditions might make even the most committed stargazer think twice before venturing outdoors. The end of winter is in sight though.

Sochi Winter Olympics Launch with Space-Flown Torch, Cosmonaut Flag-Bearers

The 22nd Winter Olympic Games were launched in Sochi, Russia on Friday (Feb. 7) using a torch that flew to the International Space Station and back. The space-themed Olympic spectacle, which took place as part of an elaborate opening ceremony, also featured cosmonauts helping to raise the Russian and Olympic flags in the Fisht Olympic Stadium and the projection of recorded scenes from the historic spacewalk that carried the Olympic torch into open outer space for the first time. (In the U.S., NBC, which has exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics, will air the opening ceremony on tape delay beginning at 7:30 p.m. EST.) The lighting of the stadium's Olympic Cauldron by Russian star athletes Irina Rodnina and Vladislav Tretiak using the space station flown torch signaled the ceremonial start of the Winter Games and the end of the longest torch relay in Olympic history.

University studies if quakes in North Texas linked to fracking

By Jana Pruet DALLAS (Reuters) - A team of scientists has launched a study of seismic activity in North Texas to determine if fracking may be the cause of a series of earthquakes that have rattled two towns in the region since November. The seismic activity in Azle and Reno, northwest of Fort Worth, has national implications, with opponents of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, saying what is happening in the towns points to the dangers of the energy source extraction method. "It's important that we don't rush to conclusions," Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics at Southern Methodist University and leader of the research team, told a news conference in Dallas on Friday. DeShon said the start of the earthquake series has coincided with start of injection wells used for fracking in the area.

Job Tenure: Men Leaving Sooner, Women Staying Longer

Specifically, men and never-married women have seen declines in job tenure, while job stability has increased sharply for married women. "That decrease may not seem dramatic, but it marks a broad and significant trend," said Matissa Hollister, a sociologist from McGill University and one of the study's authors.

Unsettled Science Behind Proposal to Lift Gray Wolf Protections, Panel Says

The drawn-out battle over the fate of gray wolves in the United States continues. An independent panel of experts said Friday (Feb. 7) there is wide disagreement about some of the science the Fish and Wildlife Service used to make its case for ousting gray wolves from the Endangered Species list. The review could hinder the FWS proposal to lift federal protections for the animals throughout much of the United States. "It was a very clean process and we got a unanimous result," said Steven Courtney, one of the scientists charged with setting up the independent panel at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Europe's Oldest Human Footprints Found

Footprints pressed into the mud of modern-day England more than 800,000 years ago might represent the oldest-known human tracks ever found in Europe, archaeologists say. A storm exposed the footprints at the archaeologically rich coastal site of Happisburgh in Norfolk in May 2013. "They're without doubt the oldest human footprints in Europe and some of the oldest in the world," Simon Parfitt, an archaeologist with the Natural History Museum, said in a video explaining the finds. Scientists had already suspected humans lived at Happisburgh more than 800,000 years ago, because of stone tools found at the site.

Female Spiders Judge Mates by Their Gift Wrap

"Females evaluate the physical condition of a male based on his silk wrapping performance, and how the gifts he brings look," study researcher Mariana Trillo, of Uruguay's Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, said in a statement. "Also, silk wrapping is a condition dependent trait and most probably allows a Paratrechalea ornata female to acquire information about her potential mate, including body condition and quality." Because this species is most active during sunset and at night, white silk is easier to see over long distances. What's more, males in better physical shape produced whiter gifts because they used more silk in their wrapping, while the poor wrapping job of less healthy males resulted in a duller package.

Ariane 5 Rocket Blasts Off on 250th Launch with 2 Satellites

Dual payloads to broadcast television and broadband signals for Asia Broadcast Satellite and French and Italian security forces rocketed into orbit on an Ariane 5 rocket Thursday on Arianespace's landmark 250th launch. The fiery evening liftoff from the frontier of the Amazon jungle began a half-hour ascent, with the Ariane 5's twin solid rocket boosters expending more than a million pounds of pre-packed powder propellant, and the launcher's hydrogen-fueled first and second stages thrusting toward an orbit reaching as high as 22,330 miles above Earth. The launch occurred at 2130 GMT (4:30 p.m. EST), one hour later than planned as ground teams waited for stormy weather to pass over the space base in Kourou, French Guiana. Stephàne Israël, Arianespace's chairman and CEO, hailed the launch as a success in remarks to VIPs inside the Guiana Space Center's Jupiter control center.

NASA Spacecraft Snaps More than 200,000 Photos of Mercury (Image)

A probe orbiting Mercury has beamed more than 200,000 images to ground controllers on Earth, and it's still going strong. NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has been in orbit around Mercury since 2011. Originally, scientists only expected the probe to beam 1,000 or 2,000 images of Mercury home during the life of its mission, but the spacecraft surpassed that goal long ago. "Returning over 200,000 images from orbit about Mercury is an impressive accomplishment for the mission, and one I've been personally counting down for the last few months," Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab's Nancy Chabot, instrument scientist for the Mercury Dual Imaging System on MESSENGER, said in a statement.

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