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Sunday, March 29, 2015

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Kitty Litter to Blame for Nuclear Waste Leak

If you're trying to stabilize nuclear waste, don't use organic kitty litter.

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Saturday, March 28, 2015

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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Cosmic Traditions: One-Year Space Crew Marks Flight with Russian Spaceflight Customs

Kelly and Kornienko, together with cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, are set to launch to the International Space Station on Friday (March 27) from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia. After a four-orbit, six-hour flight, they will take up residency on board the outpost, with Kelly and Kornienko beginning the space station's first yearlong mission. On March 6, prior to departing the training center at Star City, located just outside of Moscow, Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka visited the office of the first person to fly in space, the late Yuri Gagarin, which has been preserved as part of the center's cosmonaut memorial museum. There, they sat at Gagarin's desk and, following tradition, signed a guest book that has been autographed by the crews that have preceded them to space.

Liftoff! US, Russia Launch Historic One-Year Space Mission

An American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut launched into space Friday to attempt something their two countries have never done together before: a one-year mission on the International Space Station that could help one day send humans to Mars. The epic one-year space mission launched NASA's Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko into orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule at 3:42 p.m. EDT (1942 GMT) today (March 27) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where it was early Saturday morning local time. "A year in space starts now," NASA spokesperson Dan Huot said at launch. You can check out a video of the history-making launch as well. It should take Padalka, Kelly and Kornienko about 6 hours to reach the space station.

U.S., Russian crew blasts off for year-long stay on space station

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, sending a U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts on their way to the International Space Station, a NASA Television broadcast showed. Two of the men, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, 51, and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, 54, will stay aboard the station for a year, twice as long as previous crews. Also aboard the Soyuz capsule was veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, 56, who will return to Earth in September after racking up 878 days in space, more than any other person. Four Soviet-era cosmonauts lived on the now-defunct Mir space station for a year or longer, but the missions, which concluded in 1999, did not have the sophisticated medical equipment that will be used during International Space Station investigations, NASA said.

Environmental group seeks greater protection for USDA scientists

An environmental activist group has filed a legal petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeking new rules that would enhance job protection for government scientists whose research questions the safety of farm chemicals. The action filed on Thursday by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group for local, state and federal researchers, came less than a week after a World Health Organization group found the active ingredient in Roundup, the world's best selling weed killer, is "probably carcinogenic to humans." Roundup is made by Monsanto Co. The petition to the USDA presses the agency to adopt policies to prevent "political suppression or alteration of studies and to lay out clear procedures for investigating allegations of scientific misconduct." According to the petition, some scientists working for the federal government are finding their research restricted or censored when it conflicts with agribusiness industry interests.

Primordial sea creature with spiky claws unearthed in Canada

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fossil site in the Canadian Rockies that provides a wondrous peek into life on Earth more than half a billion years ago has offered up the remains of an intriguing sea creature, a four-eyed arthropod predator that wielded a pair of spiky claws. Scientists said on Friday they unearthed nicely preserved fossils in British Columbia of the 508 million-year-old animal, named Yawunik kootenayi, that looked like a big shrimp with a bad attitude and was one of the largest predators of its time. The fossil beds in Kootenay National Park where it was found were in a previously unexplored area of the Burgess Shale rock formation that for more than a century has yielded exceptional remains from the Cambrian Period, when many of the major animal groups first appeared. Yawunik, whose name honors a mythical sea monster in the native Ktunaxa people's creation story, was a primitive arthropod, the highly successful group that includes shrimps, lobsters, crabs, insects, spiders, scorpions, centipedes and millipedes.

Environmental group seeks greater protection for USDA scientists

One-Year Crew Begins Epic Trip on International Space Station

Three new crewmembers just arrived at the International Space Station, and two of them won't be leaving for about one year. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are expected to spend about 342 days living and working on the International Space Station — marking the orbiting outpost's first yearlong space mission. Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka also joined Kornienko and Kelly on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that docked with the space station at 8:33 p.m. EDT (0033 GMT). Padalka will stay on the space station for about six months, the usual amount of time people live on the space laboratory.

U.S.-Russian crew reaches space station for year-long stay

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, sending a U.S.-Russia crew to the International Space Station for a year-long flight, a NASA Television broadcast showed. Four Soviet-era cosmonauts lived on the now-defunct Mir space station for a year or longer, but the missions, which concluded in 1999, did not have the sophisticated medical equipment that will be used during International Space Station investigations, NASA said.

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Friday, March 27, 2015

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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U.S. Air Force overstepped bounds in SpaceX certification: report

By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force overstepped its bounds as it worked to certify privately held SpaceX to launch military satellites, undermining the benefit of working with a commercial provider, an independent review showed on Thursday. The report cited a "stark disconnect" between the Air Force and SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, about the purpose of the certification process and recommended changes. Air Force Secretary Deborah James ordered the review after the service missed a December deadline for certifying SpaceX to compete for some launches now carried out solely by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co. The Pentagon is eager to certify SpaceX as a second launch provider, given mounting concerns in Congress about ULA's use of a Russian-built engine to power its Atlas 5 rocket.

Meet the Leading Space Rock Target for NASA's Asteroid-Capture Mission

The big asteroid 2008 EV5 may end up giving a piece of itself in the name of science and exploration. NASA intends to pluck a boulder off a near-Earth asteroid and haul it into orbit around the moon, where astronauts could visit and study the rock beginning in 2025. NASA announced the boulder plan on Wednesday (March 25), and unveiled a new video of how astronauts would fly the asteroid mission. Agency officials haven't decided upon the target asteroid yet, but the leading contender at the moment is the 1,300-foot-wide (400 meters) 2008 EV5.

Proving Einstein Wrong with 'Spooky' Quantum Experiment

Quantum mechanics is one of the best-tested theories in science, and it's one of the few where physicists get to do experiments proving that Einstein was wrong. That's what a team at Griffith University and the University of Tokyo in Japan did this week, showing that a weird phenomenon — in which the measurement of a particle actually affects its location — is real. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Albert Einstein said he couldn't support this idea, which he called "spooky action at a distance," in which a particle can be in two places at once and it's not until one measures the state of that particle that it takes a definite position, seemingly with no signal transmitted to it and at a speed faster than light. When the particle takes its definite position, physicists refer to this as its wave function collapsing.

Antarctica's Supersized Icebergs Shut Down Currents

Unleashed by fracturing glaciers, they interfere with the Antarctic Ocean's sea-ice factories, called polynyas, according to the study. The scientists studied the recent history of one of the Antarctic Bottom Current's most important polynyas, near East Antarctica's Mertz Glacier. Mertz Glacier stretches far out into the sea, and helps protect the polynya against surface currents with a long, floating tongue of ice. In the past 250 years, similar-size icebergs have launched from Mertz Glacier about every 70 years, the researchers discovered.

One-Year Space Station Mission Launches Today: Watch It Live

A three-person crew will blast off to the International Space Station today (March 27), and two of them won't be coming back to Earth for a full year. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka will fly to the station atop a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia. Kelly and Kornienko will participate in the yearlong mission aboard the orbiting outpost, while Padalka spends six months on the station before flying home. Watch the one-year space crew launch live on Space.com starting at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) via NASA TV.

One Year in Space: A History of Ultra-Long Missions Off Planet Earth

An American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut are set to make history as the first crewmembers to spend a year onboard the International Space Station, but the two are not the first to log 12 months off the planet. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will lift off to the space station on Friday (March 27) to begin the yearlong expedition. Joining them on Russia's Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft for the 6-hour trip to the orbiting outpost is cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who will stay on the station for the more usual six months. Twenty-two other cosmonauts and four NASA astronauts have to date accumulated 365 days or more over the course of two or more space missions.

Deadly Oklahoma Twister Ends Slow Start to Tornado Season

A damaging tornado touched down outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, last night (March 25). A small twister was also reported in Moore, the Oklahoma City suburb that has been repeatedly ravaged by deadly twisters this decade. The two weak tornadoes ended a long dry streak for the 2015 tornado season. For only the second time since the 1950s — when good record keeping began — the first three weeks of March were tornado-free throughout the United States, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

Valeo's self-driving car systems learn from Safran drones

By Laurence Frost and Gilles Guillaume PARIS (Reuters) - French auto parts maker Valeo plans to draw on drone software and other military technologies from partner Safran to offer self-driving vehicle platforms to carmakers by the end of the decade. While demonstrating an autonomous car and other prototype systems jointly developed with Safran, the French defense and aerospace group, Valeo said on Friday the first applications may reach carmaker clients within three years. "We realized very quickly that we had much more in common than we'd expected," Valeo innovation chief Guillaume Devauchelle told Reuters. "It turns out that an autonomous vehicle is really a terrestrial drone." Cars that complete whole journeys without human input are still many years away, but creeping automation is well underway, with models already on sale that can pilot themselves through slow traffic and hit the brakes when a pedestrian steps out.

Grants help level the playing field for young moms in science

By Randi Belisomo (Reuters Health) - Thanks to a generous benefactor, young mothers doing laboratory research at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston can receive major grants to keep them from falling behind while they raise their children. Since 1993, the Claflin Distinguished Scholar Awards at MGH have helped junior female faculty with young children keep pace with their male peers, who don't face the same challenges to research productivity that women do during their child-rearing years. Every year, five women are awarded $100,000 Claflin grants - named for benefactor Jane D. Claflin - to fund a research assistant for two years.

Kelly Astronaut Twins Meet on Eve of 1-Year Mission Launch (Photo)

NASA's Kelly astronaut twins met up for a photo Thursday (March 26), just a day before one of them was scheduled to launch toward the International Space Station on an epic and unprecedented yearlong mission. Scott Kelly is slated to launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome along with two Russian spaceflyers, Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, today (March 27) at 3:42 p.m. EDT (1942 GMT).

Ancient 4-Eyed Predator Wielded Wicked Toothy Claws

It is the first new species reported from a stunning fossil find in Marble Canyon in British Columbia's Kootenay National Park. The Marble Canyon fossil beds, located in 2012, rival the iconic Burgess Shale for their diversity of soft-bodied fossils and exquisite preservation, scientists said. Yawunik is one of the most abundant species at the Marble Canyon site, and so, as a predator, likely held a key position in the food chain, said lead study author Cédric Aria, a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Toronto in Canada. The animal was named Yawunik kootenayi after the Ktunaxa people who have long inhabited the Kootenay area where the Marble Canyon locality was found.

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