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Thursday, March 26, 2015

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Delta rocket blasts off from Florida with improved GPS satellite

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - An unmanned Delta 4 rocket blasted off from Florida on Wednesday to deliver the ninth of 12 next-generation Global Positioning System satellites into orbit. The 207-foot (63 meter) booster, built and flown by United Launch Alliance, bolted off its seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 2:36 p.m. EDT, the third launch in 25 days from the nation's busiest spaceport. ULA is a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co. ...

For Asteroid-Capture Mission, NASA Picks 'Option B' for Boulder

NASA's bold asteroid-capture mission will pluck a boulder off a big space rock rather than grab an entire near-Earth object, agency officials announced today (March 25). NASA intends to drag the boulder to lunar orbit, where astronauts will visit it beginning in 2025. The space agency decided on the boulder snatch — "Option B," as opposed to the whole-asteroid "Option A" — Tuesday (March 24) during the mission concept review of the asteroid-redirect effort, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot told reporters during a teleconference today. Option B will probably cost about $100 million more than Option A would have, but its advantages are worth the price-tag bump, Lightfoot said.

The Surprising Story Behind 1-Year-Mission Astronaut Scott Kelly's Space Patches

Scott Kelly's astronaut name tags were supposed to be aboard the International Space Station by now. In fact, the pair of name tags had been packed aboard a U.S. commercial cargo freighter that was on its way to the space station last October.

NASA picks an asteroid rock to pave the road to Mars

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A NASA robot ship will pluck a large boulder off an asteroid and sling it around the moon, becoming an ad hoc destination to prepare for future human missions to Mars, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday. It would be followed five years later by a human expedition to the space rock, a modification of a plan proposed by President Barack Obama in 2010. NASA also considered bagging a smaller asteroid and relocating the entire body into a high orbit around the moon. After extensive studies, NASA opted to collect and move a boulder, a mission that will cost about $100 million more, but which better prepares the agency for the ultimate goal of landing astronauts on Mars.

Ebola Death Rates Vary Widely by Age Group

Young children who are infected with Ebola may be more likely to die from the virus than older children or adults who are infected, according to a new study. In the study, researchers examined Ebola cases in children younger than 16 during the current outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and compared them with adult cases. Among children older than 15 and adults, the mortality rate was 65 percent. "The very youngest of children — neonates —appear to have the worst outcomes from Ebola," study co-author Dr. Robert Fowler, an associate professor of critical-care medicine at the University of Toronto, said in a statement.

More Infidelity Uncovered in King Richard III's Family Tree

The remains of Richard III may be locked away in a coffin to be reburied this week, but the 15th-century king's genome is still offering scientists a chance to unravel royal mysteries. "Having worked in the world of genetic genealogy for years, this is not at all surprising to me," said Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester. In the general population, false paternities occur in about 1 percent to 2 percent of births, King said. They found a match between Richard's mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down only through the mother) and the mitochondrial DNA from two living female-line descendants of Richard's sister Anne of York: Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig.

Snow Melting 16 Days Earlier in Wyoming Mountains

The spring snowmelt now comes more than two weeks earlier than it did in the 1970s in Wyoming's Wind River Range, a new study finds. Several independent studies have found the spring snowmelt starts up to 20 days earlier in the West than in the past because there's less snow falling each winter and warmer spring weather means the snow that does fall melts earlier. The double whammy is hurting water resources in states, such as Wyoming, that rely on snowmelt. "Earlier snowmelt impacts the water resources of most of the state of Wyoming, which has been undergoing a drought since 1999," Dorothy Hall, lead author of the study and a senior research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

Gorgeous Satellite Image Reveals Galloping Antarctic Glacier

One of West Antarctica's largest glaciers surged a staggering 325 feet (about 100 meters) in less than two weeks this month, the European Space Agency reports.

How Real-Life AI Rivals 'Terminator': Robots Take the Shot

From the Turing-bashing "Ex Machina" to old friends R2-D2 and C-3PO, and new enemies like the Avengers' Ultron, sentient robots will demonstrate a number of human and superhuman traits on-screen. In this five-part series Live Science looks at these made-for-the-movies advances in machine intelligence. As he's so often promised, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back, once again taking on his iconic killer-robot role in July's "Terminator Genisys." While no Skynet-like AI has sent red-eyed robots after humanity (thankfully), the prospect of weaponized AI has gotten much more likely in the years since the first "Terminator" film in 1984. Autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are now "an integral part of military operations," said drone historian Richard Whittle, as reported by CNET.

US Air Force Launches Advanced GPS Satellite into Orbit

The U.S. Air Force has launched an advanced new satellite to help upgrade the nation's Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation. The GPS IIF-9 satellite blasted off atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Wednesday (March 25) at 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT). "I'm elated with today's successful launch," Brig. Gen. Bill Cooley, director of the Global Positioning System Directorate at the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said in a statement. The IIF-9 spacecraft joins 30 other operational GPS satellites in Earth orbit.

Get Amazing Views of the First-Quarter Moon This Week

When you look at the moon with binoculars or a small telescope, the first thing you notice is that not all parts of the moon look the same. Without any optical aid at all, you can see the patterns formed by gray maria and white highlands, the familiar shapes known as "the man in the moon," but also seen as different shapes by different cultures.

5 Human Body Questions the 1-Year Space Station Mission May Answer

NASA has a lot of questions about what happens to people who live in space for long periods of time, and it's almost time to get some answers. When NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russia's Mikhail Kornienko fly up to the International Space Station Friday (March 27) for a yearlong stay on the orbiting outpost, space agency scientists will get to work on experiments that could help get people to Mars one day. Officials have a lot of information about what happens to a body in weightlessness for six months, but the 12-month space mission will mark the first time researchers can gather data about what happens to people in space for longer periods of time. It takes more than one year to get to Mars using currently understood propulsion methods, so learning more about the ways long spaceflight affects humans is key to one of NASA's main future goals: getting people to the Red Planet.

Are Smart Pills & Brain Zapping Risky? Bioethicists Weigh In

Now, bioethicists are weighing in, saying that while such cognitive enhancement is neither bad nor good, it deserves more research. In the past, "there have been many arguments that suggest one should take an ethical stance for or against cognitive enhancement" of healthy individuals, said Amy Gutmann, chairwoman of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which released the second part of a report today (March 26) on ethics in neuroscience research, commissioned by President Barack Obama as part of the BRAIN Initiative, a collaborative effort to develop tools to study the human brain. "We as a commission recommend there is no bright line to be drawn here," Gutmann told Live Science during a news conference yesterday. The new report focused on three main areas: cognitive enhancement, informed consent in mentally impaired individuals and the use of neuroscience in the legal system.

Jockey motion tracking reveals racing prowess

By Matthew Stock A research team from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) is using motion tracking technology to try to establish the optimal riding position for jockeys, as well as enhance the performance of racehorses and reduce the risk of injury to both horse and jockey. The project, entitled "Apprentice to Journeyman: the influence of jockey technique on thoroughbred racehorse locomotion", is analyzing the riding style of more experienced jockeys compared with novice riders to try to determine if the technique differs significantly between the two skill levels. They wanted to see how more experienced jockeys' movement, stability and positioning differed from the novice. RVC researcher Dr Anna Walker explained that more experienced jockeys commented on how different the experience was on a simulator compared to a real horse.

Scientist defends WHO group report linking herbicide to cancer

A World Health Organization group's controversial finding that the world's most popular herbicide "probably is carcinogenic to humans" was based on a thorough scientific review and is a key marker in ongoing evaluations of the product, the scientist who led the study said Thursday. There was sufficient evidence in animals, limited evidence in humans and strong supporting evidence showing DNA mutations ... and damaged chromosomes," Aaron Blair, a scientist emeritus at the National Cancer Institute, said in an interview. Blair chaired the 17-member working group of the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which rocked the agricultural industry on March 20 by classifying glyphosate as "probably" cancer-causing. Monsanto Co , which has built a $15 billion company on sales of glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and crops genetically engineered to tolerate being sprayed with Roundup, has demanded a retraction and explanation from WHO.

EU to resume Galileo satellite launch program

By Francesco Guarascio BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is set to send two navigation satellites into orbit on Friday aboard a Russian rocket, in its first launch since a botched deployment in August that cost several million euros to fix. The Galileo project to set up an EU alternative to the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) is obliged to use the Russian Soyuz system until a development of Arianespace's European Ariane 5 rocket is ready around the end of the year, despite strained relations with Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine. An official at the European Commission, which oversees the program, said the EU executive was tendering for insurance cover for future satellites and had set up an insurance scheme for the launches. The two launched in August have since been nudged into viable orbits and are fit for use, a spokesman for the European Space Agency said.

Ebola 'Supervirus' Is Unlikely, Experts Say

The Ebola virus that is causing the current outbreak in West Africa is not mutating as quickly as earlier reports had suggested, a new study finds. In the study, published online today (March 26) in the journal Science, researchers compared virus samples from people in Africa who became infected with Ebola up to nine months apart. "We do not see any evidence that the virus is mutating any more rapidly than has been reported in previous outbreaks," said Thomas Hoenen, a postdoctoral fellow in virology at the National Institutes of Health and one of the researchers on the study. In a 2014 study published in the journal Science, researchers had suggested that the Ebola virus in the West African epidemic was mutating twice as fast as other Ebola virus strains.

Richard III Gets a Regal Tomb 530 Years After His Death

One of history's most infamous kings, Richard III, was reburied today (March 26) in a lavish ceremony in Leicester, England, 530 years after his violent death in battle. Capping a week of events and processions celebrating the medieval monarch, Richard's stark oak casket was lowered into a brick-lined vault near the altar at Leicester Cathedral in front of hundreds of people today. In 2012, archaeologists seeking Richard's lost grave amazingly found the king's battle-scarred bones under a parking lot in Leicester. When Richard's skeleton was discovered in the ruins of Grey Friars, it provided scientists a rare opportunity to intimately examine the body of a historical figure.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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Oldest evidence of breast cancer found in Egyptian skeleton

A team from a Spanish university has discovered what Egyptian authorities are calling the world's oldest evidence of breast cancer in the 4,200-year-old skeleton of an adult woman. Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said the bones of the woman, who lived at the end of the 6th Pharaonic Dynasty, showed "an extraordinary deterioration". "The study of her remains shows the typical destructive damage provoked by the extension of a breast cancer as a metastasis," he said in a statement on Tuesday. Despite being one of the world's leading causes of death today, cancer is virtually absent in archaeological records compared to other diseases - which has given rise to the idea that cancers are mainly attributable to modern lifestyles and to people living for longer.

Angelina Jolie Pitt's Surgery: Why She Had Her Ovaries Removed

Angelina Jolie Pitt underwent preventative surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes, according to the Op-Ed in the New York Times today that the actress, director and United Nations envoy wrote. Two years ago, Jolie Pitt elected to have a preventative double mastectomy after learning that she had a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, a gene that codes for tumor-suppressing proteins, which normally repair damaged DNA. "When someone has a harmful mutation in that gene, it no longer allows the cell to repair itself, and then the cells can go awry and become cancerous," said Dr. Marleen Meyers, the director of the Survivorship Program at the New York University Perlmutter Cancer Center, who was not involved with Jolie Pitt's medical care. Breast and ovarian cancer are more prevalent among women with the harmful BRCA1 mutation.

Thirty new bean varieties bred to beat baking climate

By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Scientists have bred 30 new varieties of "heat-beating" beans designed to provide protein for the world's poor in the face of global warming, researchers announced on Wednesday. Described as "meat of the poor", beans are a key food source for more than 400 million people across the developing world, but the area suitable for growing them could drop 50 percent by 2050 because of global warming, endangering tens of millions of lives, scientists said. "Small farmers around the world are living on the edge even during the best situation," Steve Beebe, a senior bean researcher told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Climate change will force many to go hungry, or throw in the towel, sell their land and move into urban slums if they don't get support." Many of the new varieties, bred to resist droughts and higher temperatures, put traits from less popular strains, such as the tepary bean, into pinto, black, white and kidney beans.

Shape-Shifting Frog Can Change Its Skin Texture

A fingernail-size frog that can morph its skin texture from spiny to smooth in just minutes is the first shape-shifting amphibian ever found, according to a new report. A new glass frog species, the Las Gralarias glass frog, was reported there in 2012. Scientists from Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Metroparks found the shape shifter during their annual survey of the reserve's amphibian population. For the past 10 years, Katherine Krynak, a biologist and Case Western graduate student, and Tim Krynak, a naturalist and Metroparks project manager, have walked the reserve trails together at night, listening for frog calls and scanning for rare species.

Sci-Fi Cloaking Device Could Protect Soldiers from Shock Waves

The just-issued patent (No. 8,981,261) to Boeing envisions stopping shock waves using a veil of heated, ionized air. It doesn't build an invisible wall of force, but rather makes shock waves bend around objects, just as some high-tech materials bend light and make things invisible. Brian J. Tillotson, a senior research fellow at Boeing, said the idea occurred to him after noticing the kinds of injuries suffered by soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We were doing a much better job of stopping shrapnel," Tillotson told Live Science.

Smartphone use changing our brain and thumb interaction, say researchers

Dr Arko Ghosh, of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, led the research which involved using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the cortical brain activity in 37 right-handed people, 26 of whom were touchscreen Smartphone users and 11 users of old-fashioned cellphones. Brain activity was then compared with the individual commands recorded by each individuals' phone logs. "We measured people's brain activity using a bunch of electrodes on the scalp and what these maps indicate is essentially how much of the variance between people we could explain by just looking at the phone logs, so how much brain activity can be explained by looking at people's history of use on the phones alone," said Ghosh.

How Real-Life AI Rivals 'Ultron': Computers Learn to Learn

Artificial Intelligence will rule Hollywood (intelligently) in 2015, with a slew of both iconic and new robots hitting the screen. From the Turing-bashing "Ex Machina" to old friends R2-D2 and C-3PO, and new enemies like the Avengers' Ultron, sentient robots will demonstrate a number of human and superhuman traits on-screen. When Iron Man and friends regroup in May to battle the titular robot in "Avengers: Age of Ultron," they won't square off against the same old Hollywood droid. Ultron will be a different sort of mechanical man, director Joss Whedon told Yahoo! Movies— because this robot is "bonkers." That craziness, in part, results from learning capacity, a rapidly advancing component of real-life AI.

Puzzling Layer of 'Stiff' Rock May Lurk Deep Inside Earth

Earth is made up of a core of metal, an overlying mantle layer of hot rock and a thin crust on top. Oceanic plates collide with continental plates in areas such as the Pacific Rim, triggering earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Subduction is a slow process, with a slab taking about 300 million years on average to descend, said study co-author Lowell Miyagi, a mineral physicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Mysteriously, prior research that scanned Earth's interior found that many slabs appear to slow down and pool together in the upper part of the lower mantle, at depths of about 930 miles (1,500 km).

Repeated Use of Antibiotics May Raise Diabetes Risk

People who have taken certain antibiotics repeatedly may be at an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study. Researchers found that people in the study who had ever been prescribed two or more courses of specific types of antibiotics were more likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than people who had never been prescribed these antibiotics, or had taken just one course. The antibiotics in the study came from one of four categories: penicillins, cephalosporins, quinolones and macrolides. The study "raises a red flag about the overuse of antibiotics, and it should make us much more concerned about this overuse," said Dr. Raphael Kellman, a New York City internist who was not involved in the study.

Angelina Jolie Pitt's Decision: What Are the Options?

Angelina Jolie Pitt has revealed she underwent surgery to prevent ovarian cancer, and is encouraging women to explore their options. In a New York Times Op-Ed article, Jolie Pitt said today that she had surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes to prevent ovarian cancer. Last year, the actress disclosed that she carries a genetic mutation in the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases her risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and she had undergone a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. But in this latest Op-Ed, Jolie Pitt writes that "a positive BRCA test does not mean a leap to surgery.

'MIND' Your Diet, and Protect Against Alzheimer's

In a decade-long study of about 1,000 people, those who followed this diet reduced their risk of Alzheimer's disease by 53 percent, compared with people who did not follow it, according to the researchers. Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, affects more than 40 million people globally, according to Alzheimer's Disease International. Doctors believe that Alzheimer's disease is caused by a mix of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. Previous studies have found that Alzheimer's disease is associated with obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

A Year in Space: The Science Behind the Epic Space Station Voyage

Science experiments conducted on the International Space Station during the orbiting outpost's first yearlong mission could help open the door to deep space for NASA. Officials hope that one-year stint on the space station by astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will provide them with valuable health data that may help when the space agency decides to send humans to Mars sometime in the future, a major goal for NASA. Scientists have collected a lot of data about how the human body behaves after six months in orbit on the space station, but what happens to a person after a year in space? When NASA's Kelly and Russia's Kornienko launch to space on March 27 for their yearlong stay in space, researchers will get one of their first chances to answer this question.

Hubble Space Telescope Successor on Track for 2018 Launch, NASA Tells Congress

NASA's successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is on schedule and budget for now, space agency officials told members of Congress today (March 24). The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — scheduled to launch to space in three years — is expected to peer deep into the universe to help scientists learn more about the mechanics of the cosmos. Due to replace the Hubble telescope, the JWST will also beam back amazing images of the cosmos from its place in space, about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. The JWST will even help scientists hunt for alien planets that are relatively near Earth.

Supermassive backhole detector ready for business

By Ben Gruber The Sierra Negra volcano in the central Mexican state of Puebla is the site of an ambitious astrophysical project which houses the largest gamma ray observatory ever built on the planet. After five years of construction, scientists in Mexico say the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Experiment or HAWC, is operating at full capacity. Funded by both public and private money from Mexico and the United States, HAWC hopes to trap gamma ray particles coming from space. The observatory is made up of 300 tanks each holding 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of pure water, as well as detectors capable of sensing and recording Chernakov radiation, a flash of light made up of charged particles produced when they impact the tanks after coming through Earth atmosphere slightly faster than the speed of light.

Black Hole Winds Quench Star Formation in Entire Galaxies

Giant winds from black holes can blast gas through galaxies at extraordinary speeds, pulling the plug on star formation, researchers say. "As they do that, the material is also crushed and squeezed in a sort of vortex that astrophysicists call an accretion disk," said lead study author Francesco Tombesi, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior research suggested there was a close link between the size of active galactic nuclei and the size of the galaxies they dwell in. Scientists had suspected that these active galactic nuclei could drive giant winds of gas and dust through their galaxies that could blow away massive amounts of raw star-building material, quench star formation and influence the evolution of the black holes' galaxies.

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