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Sunday, February 22, 2015

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Astronauts Complete First of Three Spacewalks

Two NASA astronauts are safely back inside the International Space Station today (Feb. 20) after successfully completing the first of three scheduled spacewalks planned to prep the outpost for the arrivals of commercial spacecraft carrying astronauts in the coming years. Barry "Butch" Wilmore, commander of Expedition 42, and flight engineer Terry Virts successfully completed three scheduled tasks and an extra "get ahead" task during today's spacewalk, with no problems. Today's excursion was Virt's first career spacewalk, and Wilmore's second. Just over an hour into the spacewalk Virts noted to Wilmore, "I feel great man, I feel good! Definitely easier than the pool." (Virts is referring to the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) at Johnson Space Center: a massive swimming pool where astronauts train for work in microgravity). The spacewalk was predicted to take around six-and-a-half hours.

Attention Bradley Cooper: Oscar-Nominated Guys Face Divorce Risk

Sure, it's the most prestigious award that Hollywood has to offer, but that coveted Oscar statue might also be a bad omen for some of the actors who receive it, a new study suggests. Male Oscar winners are three times as likely as other actors to get a divorce during their first year of marriage, the study found. "We always think about status and moving up as something good, but we also observed all the misery that comes with certain dramatic increases in status," Michael Jensen, a strategy professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and the study's lead author, told Live Science. For decades, there's been a superstition circulating around Hollywood that winning an Oscar can actually destroy an actor or actress's career.

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Saturday, February 21, 2015

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Drunk on YouTube: Funny Videos Don't Tell the Whole Story

Videos of people falling over drunk are popular on YouTube, but such glimpses of inebriation do not show the negative consequences of drinking too much alcohol, a new study finds. In the study, the researchers watched 70 popular videos of drunkenness on YouTube, which had more than 300 million views combined. In addition, only 7 percent referred to alcohol dependence (such as withdrawal symptoms), but alcohol dependence is common among frequent heavy drinkers, the researchers said. "This is important because brand-name references are known to be particularly potent in terms of encouraging drinking," Dr. Brian Primack, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement.

Swamps, Simulations and Mad Drone Skills: Filming 'LIGO: Generations'

In 1915, Albert Einstein presented his theory of general relativity. He predicted that massive, compact, accelerating objects would cause ripples in the fabric of space-time — gravitational waves. One hundred years later, following more than two decades effort, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is nearly ready to come on-line in its search for cataclysmic events in distant galaxies. As a filmmaker, I have had the great fortune of producing two films about LIGO, and through those projects, come to a much deeper understanding of the science and human drive required to undertake such an effort.

Planck Satellite Brings Early Universe into Focus (Kavli Hangout)

Kelen Tuttle, writer and editor for the Kavli Foundation, contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. From its orbit 930,000 miles above Earth, the Planck satellite spent more than four years detecting the oldest light in the universe: the cosmic microwave background radiation. Just last week, Planck released new maps of the cosmic microwave background supporting the theory of cosmic inflation, which posits that the universe underwent a monumental expansion in the moments following the Big Bang. On Feb. 18 from 2:30 to 3:15 p.m. EST, George Efstathiou, Clement Pryke and Paul Steinhardt will answer your questions in a Google Hangout about the earliest light in the universe, what it can tell us about the theory of inflation, and what we can expect to learn about the very early universe in the coming decade.

Could This 'Thinking Cap' Help You Learn?

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. Woodman approached NSF, and with their support, Woodman and his team at the university's Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory tested their theory that electrical stimulation of the brain's medial-frontal cortex can boost learning and improve decision-making. NSF: What is the medial-frontal cortex and how does this thinking cap affect its function? Geoffrey Woodman: The cortex is the outer layer of the brain.

Anthony Anderson on the Power of Portrayals (Video)

It is tough to have a conversation about the importance of a support system. At the 2014 awards, Anderson was sporting a green ribbon pin, clearly visible in the video, created by Each Mind Matters and the California Mental Health Services Authority to further awareness of those issues.

It's Not Just Ice: 10 Tips to Avoid a Bad Fall

So many older adults are falling that it's now the leading cause of accidental death among the elderly. Nationally in 2012, 2.4 million non-fatal falls among older adults were treated in emergency rooms and more than 722,000 of these patients were hospitalized, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, I've seen that patients who have fallen before often develop a fear of falling, which puts them at an even higher risk of falling again.

Mars on Earth? What Life Is Like on the 'Red Planet'

Kellie Gerardi is the business development specialist for aerospace firm Masten Space Systems and the media specialist for the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a U.S. trade association advancing commercial human spaceflight. As a member of Mars Desert Research Station Crew 149, Gerardi contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. This is the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), one of the world's few analog Martian habitats, where a variety of national space agencies and scientists can simulate in situ resource utilization and analog Martian field research. Most recently, the prototype laboratory has brought together me, Belgian NASA Ames researcher Ann-Sofie Schreurs, Canadian educator Pamela Nicoletatos, American Medevac pilot Ken Sullivan, German trauma surgeon Dr. Elena Miscodan, American lawyer and locally-elected public official Paul Bakken, and Japanese microbiologist Takeshi Naganuma.

ADHD is the New Normal (Op-Ed)

In sparkly letters, the title read, "ADHD." The child by the poster, a cute, freckled redhead, was telling anyone and everyone about her ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). As a neurologist, I see my share of ADHD, as well as the purely attentional version, ADD (attention deficit disorder). Validated scales (such as Conners' scale and the Child Behavior Checklist) exist to help guide the evaluation and treatment of ADHD. Then what happens to their ADHD?

Throat-Closing Ailment EoE is a Mystery That Must Be Solved (Op-Ed)

The condition is called eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), and while physicians like myself are learning more about it everyday, the cause remains unknown, and incidence continues to increase in the United States. Although no one is exactly sure what triggers EoE, the condition causes immune cells called eosinophils to inflame the esophagus. Most cases of EoE are connected to food allergies, so treatment and management includes tests to identify the allergen, elimination diets (where all foods suspected of causing problems are excluded and then reintroduced in a controlled manner), and medications. In most cases, the problems are triggered by the eight foods that cause about 90 percent of all food allergies in the United States: peanuts, tree nuts, cow's milk, eggs, wheat, soy, fish and shellfish.

Space Station Astronauts Taking Spacewalk Today: Watch It Live

Two NASA astronauts will perform a spacewalk outside the International Space Station today (Feb. 21) to begin outfitting the orbiting lab's docking ports to receive future private space taxis and people on Earth can watch the spacewalk live online. Barry Wilmore, commander of Expedition 42, and flight engineer Terry Virts are scheduled to exit the space station at about 7:10 a.m. EST (1210 GMT). Today's spacewalk is the first of three for Wilmore and Virts to prepare the station for the installation of new docking stations, which will allow the station to link up with future space taxis ferrying new crews to the orbiting lab. Today's excursion will mark Wilmore's second spacewalk and a career first for Virts.

Arctic Blast Blankets Eastern US in Ice and Snow (Photo)

An Arctic blast sweeping across the East Coast, from Canada south to Florida, left much of the country blanketed in ice and snow this week.

Rise of the Fembots: Why Artificial Intelligence Is Often Female

From Apple's iPhone assistant Siri to the mechanized attendants at Japan's first robot-staffed hotel, a seemingly disproportionate percentage of artificial intelligence systems have female personas. "I think there is a pattern here," said Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist and expert in human-computer interaction at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. One reason for the glut of female artificial intelligences (AIs) and androids (robots designed to look or act like humans) may be that these machines tend to perform jobs that have traditionally been associated with women. For example, many robots are designed to function as maids, personal assistants or museum guides, MacDorman said.

History Repeats Itself: Ancient Cities Grew Much Like Modern Ones

Before Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés destroyed the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1521, he marveled at its impressive size and wealth. Tenochtitlan had boulevards, bustling markets, canals, courthouses and temples. Using archaeological data from the ruins of Tenochtitlan and thousands of other sites around it in Mexico, researchers found that private houses and public monuments were built in predictable ways. "We build cities in ways that create what I like to call social reactors," said Luis Bettencourt, who studies complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

Spacewalking astronauts rigging station for new U.S. space taxis

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A pair of U.S. astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Saturday to begin rigging parking spots for two commercial space taxis. Station commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, 52, and flight engineer Terry Virts, 47, left the station's Quest airlock shortly before 8 a.m. EST to begin a planned 6-1/2-hour spacewalk, the first of three outings over the next eight days. The work will prepare docking ports for upcoming flights by Boeing Co and privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which are developing capsules to ferry crew to and from the station, which flies about 260 miles (418 km) above the Earth. The United States has been dependent on Russia for station crew transportation since the space shuttle were retired in 2011.

Exclusive: Orbital explosion probe said to find debris in engine: sources

By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last October's explosion of Orbital ATK Inc's Antares rocket may have been triggered when debris inadvertently left in a fuel tank traveled into the booster's main engine, two people familiar with investigations into the accident told Reuters. The sources said the preliminary findings suggest that a simple assembly mistake by Orbital ATK could have caused the explosion, which destroyed a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station. Orbital ATK on Friday acknowledged that so-called "foreign object debris" was one of more than a half dozen credible causes of the explosion, but said it was not "a leading candidate as the most probable cause of the failure." Orbital spokesman Barry Beneski said the company-led "accident investigation board," which includes officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, had not identified any evidence of mishandling of the flight hardware by Orbital.

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Friday, February 20, 2015

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Monster Black Hole's Mighty Belch Could Transform Entire Galaxy

A ravenous, giant black hole has belched up a bubble of cosmic wind so powerful that it could change the fate of an entire galaxy, according to new observations. The wind could have big implications for the future of the galaxy: It will cut down on the black hole's food supply, and slow star formation in the rest of the galaxy, the researchers said. The supermassive black hole at the center of PDS 456 is currently gobbling up a substantial amount of food: A smorgasbord of gas and dust surrounds the black hole and is falling into the gravitational sinkhole. The black hole at the center of PDS 456 is devouring so much matter, that the resulting radiation outshines every star in the galaxy.

Google Doodle Rings in Chinese Lunar New Year

Today is the start of the Chinese New Year, an event that is determined by the cycles of the moon. The folks at Google decided to celebrate the occasion with a special Google doodle animation. The celebratory Google doodle features an animated ram enjoying a fireworks display. Fireworks are a traditional part of Chinese New Year celebrations, and according to Chinese astrology, 2015 will be the year of the ram — or the goat, sheep the antelope or another horned animal, depending on who you ask.

Sunbathers take heed: skin damage continues hours after exposure

Scientists have found that the skin damage caused by UV rays does not stop once you get out of the sun. Researchers said on Thursday much of the potentially cancer-causing damage wrought by ultraviolet radiation from sunlight or tanning beds occurs up to three to four hours after exposure thanks to chemical changes involving the pigment melanin. Melanoma, closely linked to UV exposure, accounts for most skin cancer deaths. The role of melanin, responsible for our skin, eye and hair color, in promoting DNA damage was a surprise because melanin was previously known to play a protective role by absorbing much of the UV energy before it penetrates the skin.

Great White Sharks Are Late Bloomers

If you thought humans were late bloomers, consider the great white shark. Male great white sharks take 26 years to reach sexual maturity, and females take a whopping 33 years to be ready to have baby sharks, according to a new study.

See the Demon Star Algol 'Wink' in the Night Sky

The so-called "demon star" of Algol is the most prominent eclipsing variable star in the night sky, and if you know when and where to look, you can see the star appear to wink as it is eclipsed by another, dimmer star. The lower arm of the K points at the Pleiades star cluster, but it upper arm ends at the star Algol, which has a long and venerable history.

Why It's So Freakin' Cold: Here's the Science

As if the outdoors weren't harsh enough with Boston buried under ungodly amounts of snow and the rest of the Northeast unable to shake the bitter cold, more winter weather is on the way. Parts of the United States are expected to have historic lows this week, as temperatures in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and central Appalachians may drop to the coldest they've been since the mid-1990s, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). "Get ready for an even more impressive surge of Arctic air later this week as another cold front drops south from Canada," the NWS said in a statement. That Arctic air in the form of a polar vortex eddy is dropping temperatures with a burst of bitterly cold air, the NWS said.

U.S. FDA approves 23andMe's genetic screening test for rare disorder

By Toni Clarke WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google-backed 23andMe won U.S. approval on Thursday to market the first direct-to-consumer genetic test for a mutation that can cause children to inherit Bloom syndrome, a rare disorder that leads to short height, an increased risk of cancer and unusual facial features. The Food and Drug Administration said it plans to issue a notice to exempt this and other carrier screening tests from the need to win FDA review before being sold. "This action creates the least burdensome regulatory path for autosomal recessive carrier screening tests with similar uses to enter the market," the agency said in a statement, referring to genetic mutations carried by two unaffected parents. The FDA previously barred Mountain View, California-based 23andMe from marketing a saliva collection kit and personal genome service designed to identify a range of health risks including cancer and heart disease, saying it had not received marketing clearance.

U.S. FDA approves 23andMe's genetic screening test for rare disorder

NASCAR effort focuses on math, science for kids

WASHINGTON (AP) — It takes a lot of geometry and physics to get a race car to go 200 laps at speeds that can top 200 mph.

Ancient Shrines Used for Predicting the Future Discovered

Three shrines, dating back about 3,300 years, have been discovered within a hilltop fortress at Gegharot, in Armenia. Local rulers at the time likely used the shrines for divination, a practice aimed at predicting the future, the archaeologists involved in the discovery say. "The logic of divination presumes that variable pathways articulate the past, present and future, opening the possibility that the link between a current situation and an eventual outcome might be altered," write Adam Smith and Jeffrey Leon, in an article published recently in the American Journal of Archaeology. The fortress at Gegharot is one of several strongholds built at around this time in Armenia.

Bright and Stormy Night: Clouds Make Cities Lighter

The last time anyone in a big city saw a dark and stormy night was when winds knocked out the power grid. Storm clouds looming over skyscrapers now glow orange with light pollution instead of providing the cover of darkness, a new study confirms.

Out of the Sun? Ultraviolet Rays Can Harm Skin Hours Later

Ultraviolet rays can continue to harm skin even in the dark, inflicting cancer-causing DNA damage hours after people have left the sunshine or tanning bed, researchers say. In experiments on skin cells from mice and humans, the researchers found that the cells experienced a certain type of DNA damage not only immediately after exposure to ultraviolet A rays, but for hours after the UVA lamps were turned off. UVA rays make up about 95 percent of the ultraviolet radiation that penetrates Earth's atmosphere. "The idea of damage occurring to DNA for hours after exposure to UV rays was an urban legend in the field of DNA damage and repair — people saw it occasionally, but no one could reproduce it, so they gave up on it," study co-author Douglas Brash, a biophysicist at the Yale University School of Medicine, told Live Science. To the researchers' surprise, they found that the reason for this continuing damage is that melanin — the pigment that gives skin and hair their color, and is usually thought of as a protective molecule because it blocks the ultraviolet rays that damage DNA — can itself cause damage to DNA.

Hookah Myth Debunked: They Don't Filter Out Toxic Chemicals

There's a common belief that smoking from a hookah is less harmful than smoking tobacco in other ways because the hookah's water-filled pipe filters out toxic chemicals. In the study, researchers at German Jordanian University in Jordan analyzed four tobacco samples purchased at local markets that represented the most popular brands and flavors in the country. They looked at the amount of heavy metals in the tobacco itself, as well as the amount of heavy metals that made their way into hookah smoke.

Hold the Sugar, US Nutrition Panel Recommends

Americans should limit the amount of added sugar they consume to no more than 10 percent of their daily calories, or about 200 calories a day for most people, say new recommendations from a government-appointed panel of nutrition experts. If upcoming federal diet guidelines adopt this recommendation, it would be the first time those guidelines set a strict limit on the amount of added sugar that Americans are advised to consume. Previous versions of the guidelines have advised Americans to cut down on added sugar, but have not set a specific limit. Consuming too much added sugar has been linked with negative health outcomes, such as obesity and death from heart disease.

Fire Ants Hitched Ride Around Globe on 16th-Century Ships

Spanish ships spread tropical fire ants around the globe in the 16th century, according to new research about one of the first worldwide invasive species. Tropical fire ants (Solenopsis geminata) originally hail from the Americas, but are now found almost anywhere with a tropical climate, including Australia, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. The tiny ants defend their nests aggressively, and their stings leave painful white pustules on the skin, according to the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. "A lot of these ships, particularly if they were going somewhere to pick up commerce, would fill their ballast with soil and then they would dump the soil out in a new port and replace it with cargo," study researcher Andrew Suarez, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, said in a statement.

US National Parks Set Attendance Record in 2014

America's national parks offer breathtaking scenery and affordable vacations — two of the reasons why record numbers of people enjoyed the parks in 2014, according to the U.S National Park Service (NPS).

Maya Mural Reveals Ancient 'Photobomb'

An ancient Maya mural found in the Guatemalan rainforest may depict a group portrait of advisers to the Maya royalty, a new study finds. Behind him, an attendant, almost hidden behind the king's massive headdress, adds a unique photobomb to the mural, said Bill Saturno, the study's lead researcher and an assistant professor of archaeology at Boston University. "It's really our first good look at what scholars in the eighth-century Maya lowlands are doing," Saturno said. It's possible the man once lived in the room, which later became his final resting place, Saturno said.

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