Green Comet Lovejoy Keeps Wowing Amateur Astronomers (Video, Photos)

	Green Comet Lovejoy Keeps Wowing Amateur Astronomers (Video, Photos) Amateur astronomers and astrophotographers around the globe have been keeping their eyes on the distinctly green glow of Comet Lovejoy, a cosmic object discovered last year that continues to amaze in telescope views. New images (and a short movie) of Comet Lovejoy as it makes a close pass by the Earth. On Jan. 10, amateur astronomer Steve Siedentop took a series of 100 images of Comet C/2014 Q2, also known as Comet Lovejoy, as it passed over Grayson, Georgia. Siedentop then compiled the images into an aweseom time-lapse video of Comet Lovejoy showing the icy wanderer move across the night sky. Read More » For Alien Planets, Atmosphere May Be Key to Day-Night Cycle Alien planets that orbit close to their parent stars may be at high risk of the ultimate hot-cold scenario, with one side stuck in permanent daylight while the other shrouded in everlasting night. Earth's moon experiences this "synchronous rotation," which is why only one side of the moon ever faces the Earth. Some researchers fear that many of the new exoplanets being discovered around other stars are at risk of experiencing this synchronous rotation, which might lower the odds that those planets support life. However, new research by scientists at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) shows that exoplanets with Earth-like atmospheres may have the right ingredients to avoid the fate of synchronous rotation. Read More » NASA Pluto Probe Begins Science Observations Ahead of Epic Flyby A NASA spacecraft's epic Pluto encounter is officially underway. NASA's New Horizons probe today (Jan. 15) began its six-month approach to Pluto, which will culminate with the first-ever close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14. "We really are on Pluto's doorstep," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said last month during a news conference at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. "In a very real sense, this is the Everest of planetary exploration," Stern said of New Horizons. Read More » Humans push planet beyond boundaries towards "danger zone": study By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Human activity has pushed the planet across four of nine environmental boundaries, sending the world towards a "danger zone", according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science. Climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in land use, and altered biogeochemical cycles due in part to fertilizer use have fundamentally changed how the planet functions, the study said. Passing the boundaries makes the planet less hospitable, damaging efforts to reduce poverty or improve quality of life. "For the first time in human history, we need to relate to the risk of destabilizing the entire planet," Johan Rockstrom, one of the study's authors and an environmental science professor at Stockholm University told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Read More » Climate change, extinctions signal Earth in danger zone: study By Alister Doyle OSLO, Jan 15 (Reuters) - - Climate change and high rates of extinctions of animals and plants are pushing the Earth into a danger zone for humanity, a scientific report card about mankind's impact on nature said on Thursday. An international team of 18 experts, expanding on a 2009 report about "planetary boundaries" for safe human use, also sounded the alarm about clearance of forests and pollution from nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers. "I don't think we've broken the planet but we are creating a much more difficult world," Sarah Cornell, one of the authors at the Stockholm Resilience Centre which led the project as a guide to human exploitation of the Earth, told Reuters. "Four boundaries are assessed to have been crossed, placing humanity in a danger zone," a statement said of the study in the journal Science, pointing to climate change, species loss, land-use change and fertilizer pollution. Read More » In U.S. academia, fields that cherish sheer genius shun women By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For academic fields whose members revere a "spark of genius" above all other qualities, there is a disquieting message at U.S. colleges and universities: women need not apply. The researchers surveyed 1,820 graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members in 30 academic disciplines at public and private institutions around the United States. They were asked to identify the attributes needed to succeed in their academic fields, which spanned natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, engineering and others. The disciplines in which the "spark of genius" was least emphasized such as education, psychology and anthropology had greater numbers of women. Read More » In U.S. academia, fields that cherish sheer genius shun women By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For academic fields whose members revere a "spark of genius" above all other qualities, there is a disquieting message at U.S. colleges and universities: Women need not apply. The researchers surveyed 1,820 graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty members in 30 academic disciplines at public and private institutions around the United States. They were asked to identify the attributes needed to succeed in their academic fields, which spanned natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, engineering and others. The disciplines in which the "spark of genius" was least emphasized such as education, psychology and anthropology had greater numbers of women. Read More » 2014 Hottest Year Ever? Scientists Unveil Data Today Even though winter is pummeling the United States with full force, expect today's (Jan. 16) weather news to focus on record heat. The temperature data will be released by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at 10:30 a.m. EST (3:30 p.m. GMT). A news conference with NASA and NOAA scientists will be held at 11 a.m. EST. NASA will stream live audio and graphics from the briefing at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio. Read More » The Beagle has landed: Britain's missing spacecraft found on Mars By Kate Kelland LONDON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Britain's infamous "Beagle 2" spacecraft, once dubbed "a heroic failure" by the nation's Astronomer Royal, has been found on Mars -- 11 years after it went missing searching for extraterrestrial life. Beagle 2, part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, had been due to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, but went missing on December 19, 2003. Read More » Scientists raise alarm on China's fishy aqua farms By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Fish farmers in China have been increasingly harvesting wild stocks in order to feed their caged varieties, putting new strains on the world's oceans, said new research from scientists at Stanford University. China is the world's largest producer and consumer of fish, contributing about one third of the global supply. Its production has tripled in the last 20 years, with about 75 percent coming from fish farms, according to the study published this week in the journal Science. If the industry used more waste from caught fish, along with plant proteins like algae or ethanol yeast to feed farmed fish, then aquaculture could become more sustainable, the study said. Read More » 3,000-Mile Run Across US Has Scientists Following Marathoners "The core team runners will experience a variety of obstacles throughout the Race Across USA, and our research program is positioned to examine how they respond and how the body and mind adapts," said research director Bryce Carlson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He added that significant benefits in heart health can be realized with 10 or 15 minutes of exercise a few times a week, at an intensity that leaves you speaking in broken sentences. Read More » Women Can't Be Geniuses? Stereotypes May Explain Gender Gap Indeed, fields that emphasized brilliance and had lower female participation were not necessarily more difficult to gain entry into, compared with other disciplines, said study author Sarah-Jane Leslie, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Cultural associations link men, but not women, with raw intellectual brilliance," Leslie said. Read More » New Trackers Claim to Measure Your Stress, But Do They Work? The goal is to help people identify the things that trigger their stress, so they can avoid them if possible. Most of the devices that offer such stress detection measure the change in the interval between heartbeats — a measure known as heart rate variability. For instance, the Tinké by Zensorium, which costs $119, plugs into a phone and measures heart rate variability from the thumb. HeartMath's Inner Balance sensor, which costs $129, uses an earlobe clip and a plug-in phone sensor to measure heart rate variability. Read More » Scientists raise alarm on China's fishy aqua farms - TRFN By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Fish farmers in China have been increasingly harvesting wild stocks in order to feed their caged varieties, putting new strains on the world's oceans, said new research from scientists at Stanford University. China is the world's largest producer and consumer of fish, contributing about one third of the global supply. Its production has tripled in the last 20 years, with about 75 percent coming from fish farms, according to the study published this week in the journal Science. If the industry used more waste from caught fish, along with plant proteins like algae or ethanol yeast to feed farmed fish, then aquaculture could become more sustainable, the study said. Read More » U.S. scientists call 2014 Earth's hottest year on record By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Last year was Earth's warmest on record, bolstering the argument that people are altering the planet's climate by relentlessly burning fuels that belch greenhouse gases into the air, two major U.S. government agencies said on Friday. Separate studies by the U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that the 10 warmest years on record have taken place since 1997. The scientists said the record temperatures were spread around the globe, including most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, the western United States, far eastern Russia into western Alaska, parts of interior South America, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia and elsewhere. "While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. Read More » National Geographic: First Glimpse of the Hidden Cosmos These images appeared in the January 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. In conjunction with the release of National Geographic's January 2015 issue of its magazine, Timothy Ferris discusses the hunt for dark matter and dark energy in this Q+A tied to his feature "A First Glimpse of the Hidden Cosmos"from that issue. Space.com: Why do dark matter and dark energy so easily capture the imagination? Dark matter and dark energy certainly seem significant: Scientists estimate that they amount to 95 percent of all the matter and energy in the observable universe. Read More » Is 'Nano' Living Up to the Hype? (Kavli Roundtable) Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Read More » Painting Our Way to the Moon (Op-Ed) Edward Belbruno is a mathematician and an artist. His paintings are in major collections and exhibited throughout the United States, and he regularly consults with NASA from his position as a cosmology researcher at Princeton University. He is also author of "Fly Me to the Moon" (Princeton University Press, 2007). Can a painting reveal a significant new scientific discovery? Read More » Can Crowdfunded Astronomy Work? (Op-Ed) The U.S. budget crises over the last decade have been particularly harsh to physics and astronomy. In 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope was nearly defunded until public outcry ensured its continuing operation. In 2011, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee tried to cancel NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, only for it to be saved by the U.S. Senate at the last moment. That same year, the NASA Constellation Program was not so lucky. Read More » How Congress is Cutting Science Out of Science Policy (Op-Ed) Celia Wexler is a senior Washington Representative for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), where she focuses on food and drug safety, protections for scientist whistle-blowers and government transparency and accountability. She is the author of "Out of the News: Former Journalists Discuss a Profession in Crisis" (McFarland, 2012). She contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. You can say one thing about the U.S. House of Representatives leadership. The bill would take a sledge hammer to science-informed policymaking at federal agencies. Because instead of science informing the decisions our government makes about protecting our environment, public health and safety, those decisions would be driven by the wants of regulated industries, putting average Americans in jeopardy. Read More » Will Warming Surge as Arctic Microbes Feast on Defrosting Carbon? Charlie Heck, multimedia news editor at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Since the last ice age, plants in the Alaskan Arctic have been taking carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it away in the soil. So, for thousands of years, the soil microbes in this region of the world have subsisted on a limited carbon diet because much of the organic matter is frozen into the permafrost layer, which starts about a foot underground. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, ecologist Matthew Wallenstein and a team from Colorado State University have come to the Toolik Field Station, deep inside the Arctic Circle, to drill soil cores for study. Read More »

The developmental origins of spatial navigation: Are we headed in the right direction?

	The developmental origins of spatial navigation: Are we headed in the right direction? Navigation depends upon neural systems that monitor spatial location and head orientation. Recent developmental findings have led some to conclude that these systems are innate. Such claims are premature. But also, there are more meaningful ways to arrive at answers about developmental origins than by invoking the outdated nature-nurture dichotomy. Read More »

Barren Deserts Can Host Complex Ecosystems

	Digging for Space History in Surplus Sale of NASA-Flown Gold A government surplus auction is selling a NASA space artifact that may be worth its weight in gold. As of Thursday (Jan. 15), the gold plates had attracted seven bids totaling almost $160,000. They are currently the only lot listed under the website's "Shuttle/Hubble" category and originate from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The GSA auction site offers surplus property from many federal agencies, NASA included. Read More » Barren Deserts Can Host Complex Ecosystems Life forms including bacteria, algae, fungi and lichens, as well as plants such as mosses and liverworts, can band together to create biological soil crusts in dry, nutrient-starved environments. "These are incredibly diverse microbial communities with hundreds of different organisms," said Jason Raymond, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. Raymond is the senior author of three new papers in the scientific journal Genome Association, which shed light on the microbes that commonly set up shop in biological soil crusts in Utah's Moab Desert. Figuring out how life thrives in biological soil crusts, in conditions that would fell most other life on the planet, will help in gauging the habitability of other worlds. Read More » 2014 Was Earth's Hottest Year On Record Global temperatures in 2014 shattered earlier records, making 2014 the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880, U.S. scientists reported today (Jan. 16). Every continent set heat records last year, and the Pacific Ocean was unusually warm despite a no-show El Niño. The warmth on land and in the oceans broke previous temperature records set in 2005 and 2010, the scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced. Five months set new heat records: May, June, August, September and December. Read More » Risky Cocktail: Many Americans May Mix Alcohol with Medications More than 40 percent of Americans who drink alcohol also take medications that may interact with their booze, a new study finds. Medications ranging from sleeping pills to blood pressure drugs can cause problems when taken with alcohol, such as nausea, headaches, loss of coordination, internal bleeding, heart problems and difficulties in breathing, said study co-author Rosalind Breslow, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the study, Breslow and her colleagues looked at the results of surveys from nearly 27,000 men and women ages 20 and over that were conducted between 1999 and 2010. The participants reported how much alcohol they drank during the past year, and which medications they used over the past month. Read More » Last year was Earth's hottest on record, U.S. scientists say By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Last year was Earth's hottest on record in new evidence that people are disrupting the climate by burning fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the air, two U.S. government agencies said on Friday. The White House said the studies, by the U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), showed climate change was happening now and that action was needed to cut rising world greenhouse gas emissions. Last year was the warmest, ahead of 2010, undermining claims by some skeptics that global warming has stopped in recent years. Read More » Treasure Hunters Find Mysterious Shipwreck in Lake Michigan Beneath the cold waves of Lake Michigan rests an aging shipwreck, its wooden planks encrusted with brown-and-gray zebra mussels, that may be the remnants of a 17th-century ship called the Griffin, two Michigan-based treasure hunters say. French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle built the Griffin in 1679, but it was lost in Lake Michigan the same year. In 2011, Michigan-based treasure hunters Kevin Dykstra and Frederick Monroe found a shipwreck as they were searching for the $2 million in gold that, according to local legend, fell from a ferry crossing Lake Michigan in the 1800s, they told WZZM, a western Michigan news station. "I didn't go down there with the expectation of seeing a shipwreck — I can tell you that," Dykstra told Live Science. Read More » 'Smart Shoe' Devices Could Charge Up as You Walk One of the devices, the "shock harvester," generates power when the heel of your shoe hits the ground. The harvesters can be connected to electronics inside your shoe that track things like speed, movement and temperature. "Both [devices] are based on the same principle — electromagnetic induction," said Klevis Ylli, a doctoral student at the Hahn-Schickard-Gesellschaft Institute of Micromachining and Information Technology in Germany, and lead author of the paper outlining the new energy harvesting devices. Read More » A Bit of Walking Takes Strain Out of Running a Marathon Think that slowing down and walking a little during a marathon will ruin your time? Maybe not: A new study finds that among amateur runners, those who walked for part of a marathon had similar times compared with those who ran the whole way. The participants underwent three months of training to prepare for the marathon (which is 26.2 miles, or 42.2 km) in Kassel, Germany, in May 2013. The participants were divided into two groups: a "running-only" group, who ran the full marathon, and a "run/walk" group, who stopped and walked for 1 minute every 1.5 miles. Read More »