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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Freshwater Fish are Disappearing: Where is the Global Response? (Op-Ed) Sue Nichols is the assistant director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University. Freshwater fish are global assets — like the waters they swim, they're practically everywhere. To millions of people in the developing world, they're a crucial source of food, often caught one line or net at a time. Yet freshwater fish are shy on lobbyists. Read More » Will Enormous Galactic Bubbles Expose Dark Matter? (Kavli Q+A) Compared to other galaxies, the Milky Way is relatively peaceful. Unlike in other galaxies, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way doesn't ravenously suck in huge meals of gas or spit out enormous jets of radiation and light. Read More » Google Lunar XPrize Milestone Awards Announced Andrew Barton, director of technical operations, Google Lunar XPrize contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Astrobotic, Hakuto, Moon Express, Part-Time Scientists and Team Indus have spent the past year putting their hardware and software through a series of rigorous tests and technical reviews monitored by a judging panel of leading space, science and engineering experts. Tonight, they will be awarded a combined $5.25 million in Milestone Prizes in recognition of key technological advancements toward their quest to land a private spacecraft on the surface of the moon. To win the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize, teams are required to land a robot on the moon. Read More » Found! 5 Ancient Alien Planets Nearly As Old As the Universe Five rocky alien worlds that are 80 percent as old as the universe itself have been discovered, suggesting that Earth-size planets have been a feature of the Milky Way galaxy almost since its beginning. The newfound exoplanets circle Kepler-444, an 11.2-billion-year-old star about 25 percent smaller than the sun that lies 117 light-years from Earth. "We now know that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the universe's 13.8-billion-year history, which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy," lead study author Tiago Campante, of the University of Birmingham in England, said in a statement. Read More » Asteroid that buzzed Earth has a plus one, NASA says By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The mountain-sized asteroid that made a close pass by Earth on Monday has a small moon in tow, radar images released by NASA show. Asteroid 2004 BL86 flew about 745,000 miles (1.2 million km) from Earth, about three times farther than the moon, with closest approach coming at 11:19 a.m. EST (1619 GMT) on Monday. While it posed no threat to Earth, the flyby did provide astronomers an opportunity for some close-up studies without having to launch and operate a robotic probe. Radar images taken by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, California, show the 1,100-foot (325 meter) wide asteroid has a small moon in orbit, NASA said. Read More » How these energy geeks are re-imagining an old school utility By Nichola Groom Orange County, Ca (Reuters) - Welcome to the utility industry's future - or at least that's what Southern California Edison is hoping. Here in a non-descript, 53,500-square-foot building, the $12 billion utility's research team is testing everything from charging electronic vehicles via cell phone to devices that smooth out the power created by rooftop solar panels. Those are some of the roughly 60 projects in the works at Edison's Advanced Technology division. The engineers from California's largest utility are hatching plans to insure its survival - and maybe even the survival of the nation's other big utilities, which are watching the project closely. Read More » Sugary Drinks Linked with Earlier Menstruation in Girls Girls who drink a lot of soda and other sugary drinks may get their first menstrual periods earlier than girls who don't often consume these drinks, a new study suggests. Girls who drank more than 1.5 servings of sugary drinks daily started their menstrual periods nearly three months earlier than those who consumed two or fewer sugary drinks per week, the study found. Read More » Obama's 'precision medicine' plan to boost research, but faces hurdles By Sharon Begley and Toni Clarke NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's plan to put the United States at the forefront of individually tailored medical treatment should give a much-needed boost to research in the field but experts say it won't work without reforms to healthcare, including drug testing and insurance. The administration is expected to give the first details this week on the "precision medicine" initiative that Obama announced in his Jan. 20 State of the Union address. Obama said he wanted the United States to "lead a new era of medicine, one that delivers the right treatment at the right time." Precision medicine seeks to identify and treat the exact form of disease in patients based on their genome - the precise order of molecules in their DNA - as well as other factors such as the interaction of genes and environment, and the microbes in their body. We are very, very far from doing that, but the payoff would be fantastic," said biologist Keith Yamamoto, vice chancellor of research at the University of California, San Francisco, medical school. Read More » Dwarf Planet Ceres Reveals Tantalizing Details in Best Photos Yet Tantalizing new images of Ceres, the nearest dwarf planet to Earth, are revealing never-before-seen surface features of the mysterious space rock. The new images of Ceres were taken at a distance of 147,000 miles (237,000 kilometers) on Jan. 25 by NASA's Dawn space probe. The images hint at the presence of craters and other surface features that telescopes have never been able to resolve on Ceres before. For instance, there are several dark features in the southern hemisphere that might be craters within a region that is darker overall," Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator of the Dawn mission at JPL, said in a statement. Read More » Ex-Los Alamos scientist to be sentenced in nuke spy sting ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who pleaded guilty to trying to help Venezuela develop a nuclear weapon is set to be sentenced. Read More » Medieval Skulls Reveal Long-Term Risk of Brain Injuries Skull fractures can lead to an early death, even if the victims initially survived the injuries, according to a new study that looked at skulls from three Danish cemeteries with funeral plots dating from the 12th to the 17th centuries. The study showed that these men were 6.2 times more likely to die an early death compared with men living during that time without skull fractures. "Their treatment then would have been pretty much go home, lie down and hope for the best," said study researcher George Milner, a professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Read More » What Facebook Addiction Looks Like in the Brain As it turns out, this type of "Facebook addiction" may show up in the brain: A new study found that the brains of people who report compulsive urges to use the social networking site show some brain patterns similar to those found in drug addicts. One possibility is that, in cases of Facebook addiction, people are sensitized to respond strongly to positive triggers associated with the site, said study co-author Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton. Several studies have suggested that Facebook and other social networking sites have a profound impact on people. In recent years, researchers have coined the term "Facebook addiction" to describe people with an unhealthy desire to spend hours checking the social networking site. Read More » DARPA Overhauls 'Atlas' Robot Ahead of Competition This Summer The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense charged with developing new technologies for the military, recently upgraded its Atlas robot in preparation for the final round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). Seven of the teams that made it to the final round of the DRC will be using the DARPA-developed Atlas robot, which has been significantly upgraded for this final test of its abilities. The rest of the bot has been totally revamped, according to DARPA officials. Read More » Insects Wear Tiny Spacesuits, for Science Scanning electron microscopes (SEM) provide incredibly detailed images of biological specimens, but the instruments have not been able to image living organisms because of the powerful vacuum environment required. But now, a team of researchers has developed a way to image mosquitoes and other insects in an SEM, by wrapping them in a substance that keeps the organisms alive, without interfering with the imaging process. Read More » Ex-Los Alamos scientist to be sentenced in nuke spy sting ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who pleaded guilty to trying to help Venezuela develop a nuclear weapon is set to be sentenced. Read More » NASA Launching Satellite Thursday to Track Earth's Dirt from Space NASA's next Earth-observing satellite is ready to launch Thursday (Jan. 29), and it could vastly improve the way scientists monitor droughts around the world. The space agency's Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite (SMAP) is scheduled to launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force base atop a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket at 9:20 a.m. EST (1420 GMT) on Jan. 29, and at the moment, weather is looking good ahead of liftoff. The SMAP satellite is designed to measure the moisture of Earth's dirt more accurately than ever before, according to NASA. This measurement is important because it can help scientists create more accurate weather models, learn more about drought conditions and even predict floods, NASA officials have said. Read More » NASA Marks Space Disaster Anniversaries with Day of Remembrance NASA is honoring its fallen astronauts with a special day of remembrance Wednesday (Jan. 28), the 29th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy. "NASA's Day of Remembrance honors members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery," agency officials said in a statement. Various NASA centers are also hosting their own observances, officials added. Read More » Oldest Known Snake Fossils Identified The fossilized remains of four ancient snake species were found in England, Portugal and the United States, and date back to about 143 and 167 million years ago, the researchers said. In contrast, the new study suggests that "the skull evolved first, and the legless thing followed," said study author Michael Caldwell, a professor and chair in the department of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. Caldwell identified the first of the four ancient snake species by chance, when he opened a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London in 2004. "When I looked at this specimen … with my snake-comparative-anatomy hat on, it was really very, very obvious that it was a snake maxilla," Caldwell told Live Science. Read More » Remote European Ice Now Racing into the Sea A remote ice cap in northern Europe, above the Arctic Circle, is shedding so much weight that it now races toward the sea 25 times faster than it did in 1995, a new study finds. The Austfonna ice cap, which hugs an island offshore northeastern Norway in the Svalbard archipelago, holds about 600 cubic miles of ice (2,500 cubic kilometers) — a volume bigger than most glaciers but smaller than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. "What we see here is unusual because it has developed over such a long period of time, and appears to have started when ice began to thin and accelerate at the coast," Andrew Shepherd, a study co-author and a professor at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. The most significant changes were seen in the past five years in a glacier called Basin-3 within the eastern ice cap, the researchers said. Read More » Blackbeard's Booty: Pirate Ship Yields Medical Supplies Archaeologists are excavating the vessel that served as the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard, and the medical equipment they have recovered from the shipwreck suggests the notorious buccaneer had to toil to keep his crew healthy. His real name was Edward Teach (or possibly Thatch), and his flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, was formerly a French slave vessel named La Concorde de Nantesthat Blackbeard captured in November 1717. A few months into 1718, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground on a sandbar at Topsail Inlet in North Carolina. The wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge was rediscovered in 1996 and has been under excavation by the Queen Anne's Revenge Project. Read More » No Yolk! Scientists Unboil an Egg Without Defying Physics The finding could dramatically reduce the cost of cancer treatments and food production, the scientists reported yesterday (Jan. 27) in the journal ChemBioChem. "Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," study co-author Gregory Weiss, a biochemist at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. In their experiment, Weiss and his colleagues started with an egg white that had been boiled for 20 minutes at 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius), until its proteins became tangled clumps. Next, they used a machine called a vortex fluid device, designed by Weiss' colleagues at Flinders University in Australia, which used the shearing forces  in thin, microfluidic films to shape the egg white proteins back into their untangled form. Read More » Fresh Ink: Mummified Iceman Has New Tattoo Four thin, black lines, stacked on top of each other, bring the total number of tattoos on Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummified iceman, to 61, according to an exhaustive new study. Finding the new body art, located on the lower side of Ötzi's right ribcage, "was a big surprise because we didn't expect to see a new tattoo," said Albert Zink, the study's senior researcher and head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Research Academy in Italy. Ötzi's tattoos are no secret: Even the hikers who discovered him in the Italian Alps in 1991 noticed he had markings on his skin. Read More »
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The upper hand: study points to early tool use by human ancestors

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	The upper hand: study points to early tool use by human ancestors Scientists said on Thursday an analysis of fossil hand bones of the species Australopithecus africanus that lived in southern Africa about 3 million to 2 million years ago indicated this human forerunner could use its hands in ways very much like modern people. "Forceful precision grips have been linked specifically to stone tool use and tool making, and so it is possible that Australopithecus africanus was using stone tools as well," said Tracy Kivell of Britain's University of Kent, who helped lead the study published in the journal Science with fellow University of Kent paleoanthropologist Matthew Skinner. This species appeared roughly a half million years before the first evidence of stone tools. The traditional view of scientists is that a species called Homo habilis that appeared about 2.4 million years ago was the pioneer in stone tool use in the human lineage. Read More » Mountain-Size Asteroid to Fly by Earth Monday: How NASA Will Watch A mountain-size asteroid will zoom past Earth Monday (Jan. 26), marking the closest pass by such a large space rock until 2027. Asteroid 2004 BL86, which is about 1,800 feet (550 meters) wide, will come within 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) of our planet Monday — about three times the distance between Earth and the moon. While this flyby poses no threat to Earth, it does present a rare opportunity to get a good look at a near-Earth asteroid, NASA officials say. The plan is to track the fast-moving asteroid using the 230-foot (70 m) dish-shaped Goldstone antenna at NASA's Deep Space Network in California, as well as the 1,000-foot (305 m) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Read More » In a first, sea otter pup conceived in wild born in California lab A baby sea otter has made history as the first pup born in captivity to a mother impregnated in the wild, and is healthy and developing normally, researchers in California said on Friday. The bundle of joy was born in November at the Long Marine Laboratory on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said Nicole Thometz, a researcher in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. To better the otter's chance of survival off the Central California shoreline, researchers are limiting their interaction with the pup, who was not named and whose sex is not known, she said. Read More » Football Physics: Why Deflated Balls Are Easier to Catch After an inspection revealed that some of the footballs used during Sunday's NFL playoff game were slightly deflated, many people are asking whether the balls gave the New England Patriots an unfair advantage over the Indianapolis Colts. Last Sunday (Jan. 18), the Patriots landed a spot at the Super Bowl after beating the Colts 45 to 7. A ball that is less inflated is easier to deform and grip, said Miguel Morales, an associate professor of physics at the University of Washington. "Ideally, the way people are taught to catch it is to put their hands around the nose of the ball," Morales told Live Science. Read More » Google Maps Takes Landlubbers on a Visit to Old Ironsides Now, users can tour the USS Constitution using Google Maps' Street View. Google published the 360-degree virtual tour Tuesday (Jan. 20), using pictures taken in the fall of 2014. The ship, nicknamed Old Ironsides, launched in 1797 and was named by President George Washington himself. The USS Constitution became famous during the War of 1812, when it defeated the British ship HMS Guerriere. Read More » Why Your Next Fitness Tracker Will Be Smarter The newest fitness trackers are going beyond just a simple accelerometer to carry a host of new sensors, from devices that measure the electrical properties of your skin to optical sensors that can measure your heartbeat. The new devices do provide an incremental improvement over the earlier ones, but the real breakthroughs are still a few years off, said Jason Heikenfeld, an electrical engineer and the director of the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. Most of the new devices still don't go beyond providing raw data for users to interpret, and are still far from making health predictions and prescriptions, said Dan Ledger, who researches wearables and health technologies at Endeavour Partners, a digital technology consulting company in Massachusetts. The new devices, however, are increasingly packed with much more sophisticated sensors. Read More »