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Wednesday, April 15, 2015

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Orbital says report on October rocket explosion nearly done

By Andrea Shalal COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - The October 28 explosion of an Orbital ATK Inc Antares rocket bound for the International Space Station was most likely caused by excessive wear of the bearings inside one of the rocket's GenCorp Inc engines, Orbital said on Tuesday, citing a nearly finished report. Ronald Grabe, Orbital's executive vice president and president of its flight systems group, told the annual Space Symposium conference the company would submit its final report in coming days to the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been overseeing the company-led accident investigation board.

SpaceX rocket blasts off, then lands - too hard - on ocean barge

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - An unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida on Tuesday to send a cargo ship to the International Space Station, then flipped around and made a hard landing on a platform in the ocean. "This might change completely how we approach transportation to space," SpaceX Vice President Hans Koenigsman told reporters during a prelaunch press conference. The 208-foot (63-meter) tall Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a Dragon capsule, thundered off its seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:10 p.m. A launch attempt on Monday was delayed by poor weather. After sending the capsule on its way to orbit, the rocket's first stage flipped around, fired engines to guide its descent, deployed steering fins and landing legs and touched down on a customized barge stationed about 200 miles off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.

SpaceX Narrowly Misses Rocket Landing After Dragon Spaceship Launch Success

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the company's Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station today, then turned around and nearly pulled off a soft landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The unmanned Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:10 p.m. EDT (2010 GMT) today (April 14), sending Dragon to orbit on a resupply mission for NASA. SpaceX then attempted to bring the rocket's first stage back down for a vertical landing on an "autonomous spaceport drone ship," in a highly anticipated reusable-rocket test.

Heart chip beats toward better drug screening, personalized medicine

By Ben Gruber BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA - Bioengineers in California have developed a system that allows human heart cells to function outside the body, a development that could potentially prove a powerful tool for drug development as well as pave the way toward personalizing treatments for patients with heart conditions. "It is the first demonstration of an actual human heart which is based in a system that is mimicking the physiology as close as possible," said Anurag Mathur, a principle scientist involved in the research. The device has been named a "heart-on-a-chip" and it is comprised of cell layers derived from IPS stem cells that form heart tissue which is housed on a small slab of silicon. The fluid that we are interested in comes across this tissue and then it bathes it with the drug," said Kevin Healy, a professor of bioengineering and material science at the University of California Berkeley. "We give it caffeine, heart-on-a-chip beats and accelerates its heart rate.

Gray Whale Breaks Mammal Migration Record

The western gray whale now holds the record as the mammal with the longest known migration, researchers say. A female western gray whale swam from Russia to Mexico and back again — a total of 13,988 miles (22,511 kilometers) — in 172 days, according to a new report. Until now, the title of the longest-migrating mammal belonged to the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), which migrates up to 10,190 miles (16,400 km) round trip as it travels between its breeding grounds near the equator and the food-rich waters of the Arctic and Antarctic, according to Guinness World Records. But the new report shows that a female western gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) named Vavara (the Russian equivalent of the name Barbara), has stolen the record.

Holy Flying Fish! Why Jumping Asian Carp Bombard Rowers

A gang of jumping Asian carp recently leapt out of the water and flung themselves at students rowing in a boat — an encounter that was captured on video. Though it may look like a coordinated attack by an underwater army, the behavior seen in the flying-carp video was likely unintentional, a result of the fish getting spooked, according to a fish and wildlife expert. Bighead and Silver varieties of Asian carp can jump up to 10 feet (3 meters) out of the water when frightened, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Some carp can also grow to the size of the typical 12-year-old kid, so being hit is no laughing matter. "Collisions between boaters and jumping silver carp have the potential to cause human fatalities," according to an FWS fact sheet on Asian carp.

Boneworms Dined on Ancient Sea Serpents

Paleontologist Silvia Danise hunted through gnarly bones in the drawers and displays of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge to find fossils gnawed by Osedax. How the worms eat remains a mystery, but scientists think the creatures extend fleshy tendrils laced with symbiotic bacteria into the bone. Danise hit pay dirt with several old bones from the end of the Mesozoic era, before the Cretaceous mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs and the plesiosaurs 65 million years ago. With co-author Nicholas Higgs, Danise scanned the fossils with micro-CT (similar to a medical imager) to confirm each bone carried the worm's characteristic cavity.

IRS in Space: How Will We Tax a Mars Mission?

Taxes are going to play a big role in a Mars mission, both in getting there and upon arrival, Adam Chodorow, a law professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, said April 9 at an event hosted by Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the nonprofit New America Foundation and Arizona State University. "Taxes matter, and the way we colonize space will probably be driven by the tax system," Chodorow told the audience. "To get [to Mars], we're probably going to be giving tax incentives to ships," Chodorow told Space.com in an interview. A tax deduction offers indirect relief by reducing the amount of taxable income, whereas a tax credit directly reduces the amount of tax owed, Chodorow explained.

Comet Comes to Life in Amazing Rosetta Spacecraft Photo Montage

The heat is on for the Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it sails ever closer to the sun, with the European Rosetta spacecraft snapping a stunning set of photos that the buzzing activity of the icy wanderer. A new montage of comet photos by Rosetta shows gas and dust erupting from Comet 67P as the icy object continues its approach to perihelion, its closest approach to the sun, later this year in August. The Rosetta image series, which the European Space Agency unveiled Monday (April 13), shows the comet's activity between Jan. 31 (top left) and March 25 (bottom right). In August, Comet 67P will make its closest approach to the sun as it passes between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

AstraZeneca science is on the move, one year on from Pfizer bid

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Having seen off a hostile $118 billion bid launched a year ago by U.S. rival Pfizer, Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca is on the move -- quite literally. Chief Executive Pascal Soriot is making AstraZeneca more nimble as hopes build for its cancer pipeline, but he still has his work cut out to keep 2015 earnings above the floor needed to protect his bonus. Investors must balance the short-term challenges posed by a massive "cliff" of patent expiries for older drugs against AstraZeneca's long-term promise that sales can reach $45 billion in 2023 from $26 billion last year. So far, Frenchman Soriot has played his hand well, given the inevitable disappointment among some shareholders at the rejection of Pfizer's final 55 pound-a-share offer last year.

Why Humans Have Chins

Compared with other human relatives such as Neanderthals, modern Homo sapiens have particularly prominent chins. Some researchers have hypothesized that the modern human chin helps the jaw stand up to the forces generated by chewing, said Nathan Holton, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa. To determine whether chin prominence protects the jaw from bending while chewing, Holton and his colleagues examined X-ray images from the Iowa Facial Growth Study, which tracked children's skull development from age 3 into adulthood.

1st Color Image of Pluto Snapped by Approaching NASA Probe (Photo)

NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto has returned its first color image of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon. The new photo, taken on April 9 from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers), is already revealing insights about Pluto and Charon, as well as suggestions of the science to come when New Horizons flies by the Pluto system on July 14, NASA officials said. The image reveals "tantalizing glimpses of this system," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said during a news conference Tuesday (April 14), the day the photo was released. "You can immediately see a number of differences" between Pluto and Charon, Green added.

Early Earth May Have Absorbed Mercury-like Object

A key ingredient of the early Earth may have been a chunk of rock much like Mercury, scientists say. Earth's magnetic field results from churning metal in the planet's outer core, but it was uncertain how Earth's core could have remained molten for so long.

Gestational Diabetes May Be Tied to Autism in Children

Women who develop gestational diabetes early in their pregnancy have a higher chance of having a child with autism than women who don't develop the condition, a new study suggests. Researchers found that mothers-to-be who developed gestational diabetes — high blood sugar during pregnancy in women who have never had diabetes — by their 26th week of pregnancy were 63 percent more likely to have a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared with women who did not have gestational diabetes at any point during their pregnancy (and who also did not have type 2 diabetes prior to pregnancy). The finding does not mean that autism is common among children born to women who had gestational diabetes.

Are Health Apps Harmful or Helpful? Experts Debate

Health apps are ubiquitous, but do they do more harm than good? Health apps have a range of goals — some simply encourage people to adopt healthy behaviors, while others actually help people manage conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure. These researchers cited numerous examples of manufacturers recalling their own apps for gross failure, such as miscalculating insulin doses for people with diabetes.

Is Marijuana Good Medicine or Dangerous? Poll Reveals What the US Thinks

Americans are almost evenly split on the question of whether marijuana should be legalized, and a new poll shows that people's opinions line up with whether they think the health benefits of marijuana outweigh its harms. A slim majority (53 percent) of Americans now favor the legalization of marijuana, according to a poll published today (April 14) by the Pew Research Center. The poll also found that people who support marijuana legalization cite its possible health benefits and say it is not more dangerous than other drugs. In contrast, opponents of marijuana legalization say the drug is dangerous for both individuals and society, according to the new study.

Pop! Knuckle-Cracking Noise Finally Explained

What do you get when you combine the "Wayne Gretzky of knuckle cracking" with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine? By using MRI to video-record knuckle cracking in action, researchers have discovered that the unsettling "pop" made by cracking one's knuckles results from the rapid creation of a cavity in the fluid inside the joints. "It's a little bit like forming a vacuum," study researcher Greg Kawchuk, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a statement. Chiropractor Jerome Fryer, of Nanaimo, Canada, got the ball rolling when he approached Kawchuck with a new hypothesis explaining why knuckle cracking makes a popping sound.

U.S. study calls into question tests that sequence tumor genes

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - New cancer tests that sequence only a patient's tumor and not normal tissue could result in a significant number of false positive results, potentially leading doctors to prescribe treatments that might not work, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The tests take advantage of new treatments that target changes in the DNA of tumor cells that are important for their survival. The issue is that few of these tests look at DNA from healthy cells to compare which mutations patients were born with and which are unique to the cancer, said Dr. Victor Velculescu of Johns Hopkins and a principal in Personal Genome Diagnostics, a company co-founded by the researchers.

NASA probe nearing close encounter with unexplored Pluto

By Irene and Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The first spacecraft to visit distant Pluto, a dwarf planet in the solar system's frozen backyard, is still three months away from a close encounter, but already in viewing range, newly released photos show. The New Horizons probe blasted off from Florida in January 2006 for a 3-billion-mile (5-billion-km) journey to the Kuiper Belt region of the solar system located beyond Neptune. During that time, Pluto once known as the ninth planet in the solar system, was demoted to dwarf planet status after the discovery of similar icy bodies in eccentric, distant orbits around the sun. New Horizons will pass will pass about 7,750 miles(12,500 km) from Pluto's surface on July 14.

Orbital, GenCorp spar over cause of October rocket crash

By Andrea Shalal COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - Orbital ATK Inc and engine maker GenCorp Inc on Tuesday offered competing explanations for what caused the Oct. 28 explosion of Orbital's Antares rocket, bound for the International Space Station. Ronald Grabe, Orbital's executive vice president and president of its flight systems group, told the annual Space Symposium conference that an investigation led by his company had concluded the explosion was caused by excessive wear in the bearings of the GenCorp engine. GenCorp said its own probe showed that the wear in the bearings was likely caused by debris in the engine. GenCorp spokesman Glenn Mahone said the company's independent investigation would be completed in about three weeks, but the bulk of the work had been done.

Snap, crackle, pop: study reveals secret behind knuckle-cracking

Researchers said on Wednesday they have settled the issue of what occurs inside knuckles to trigger the familiar popping sound, thanks to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiments that they jokingly dubbed the "pull my finger study." It turns out the cracking is caused by the rapid formation of a gas-filled cavity within a slippery substance called synovial fluid that lubricates the space between the finger bones, they said. "I quite like the sound, but that's my inner nerd talking," said Greg Kawchuk, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who led the study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. The first scientific study on this topic, in 1947, suggested - quite correctly, as it turns out - the sound came from formation of a gas cavity inside the joint. Fryer was so adept that Kawchuk called him "the Wayne Gretzky of knuckle-cracking." "Rapid imaging with MRI was ideal for these studies because it allowed clear visualization of the bones and fluids surrounding them, and critically, the formation of the air cavity," added University of Alberta biomedical engineering professor Richard Thompson.

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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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Bad Weather Delays SpaceX Rocket Landing Attempt, Dragon Launch

Bad weather forced private spaceflight company SpaceX to postpone a daring reusable rocket landing test on Monday (April 13) by at least 24 hours, a delay that also pushed back the delivery of fresh cargo to the International Space Station for NASA.

U.S. satellite launcher gets first Vulcan rocket request - change the name

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - Hours after unveiling its next-generation "Vulcan" rocket, the company that launches most of America's satellites, United Launch Alliance (ULA), ran into its first problem - the rocket's name. "Vulcan is a trademark of Vulcan Inc. and we have informed ULA of our trademark rights," Chuck Beames, president of the Paul Allen-backed Vulcan Aerospace, told Reuters. "Paul Allen and Vulcan were early leaders within space exploration with the launch of SpaceShipOne more than a decade ago. We are flattered by ULA's tribute to our legacy by naming their new rocket 'Vulcan'," Beames said.

NASA Scientists Cook Up Building Blocks of Life in Lab

Many of the chemical ingredients necessary for life as we know it were available on the early Earth, and should be present on exoplanets as well, new research suggests. Researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center in California generated three key components of RNA (ribonucleic acid) and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in the lab, by exposing commonly occurring ring-shaped molecules of carbon and nitrogen to radiation under spacelike conditions. "Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth," Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames, said in a statement. The rings hold carbon atoms, but the presence of nitrogen makes pyrimidine less stable than other carbon-rich compounds, researchers said.

Battered Remains of Medieval Knight Discovered in UK Cathedral

Archaeologists uncovered the man's skeleton, along with about 2,500 others — including a person who had leprosy and a woman with a severed hand — buried at Hereford Cathedral in the United Kingdom. The cathedral was built in the 12th century and served as a place of worship and a burial ground in the following centuries, said Andy Boucher, a regional manager at Headland Archaeology, a commercial archaeology company that works with construction companies in the United Kingdom. A few years ago, the Heritage Lottery Fund, which is financed by the national lottery in the United Kingdom, awarded money to the cathedral for the landscaping and restoration of its grounds. "By church law, anybody who died in the parish had to be buried in the cathedral burial ground," almost continuously from the time the cathedral was built until the early 19th century, Boucher told Live Science.

How to Avoid a Shark Attack

The seventh fatal shark attack in four years struck this past weekend at a surfer's paradise in the Indian Ocean. Yet teaching people when and where to swim to avoid sharks, and improving the emergency response to shark bites, can significantly reduce the number of deaths due to shark attacks, according to shark-attack statistics. The 13-year-old boy killed this past weekend was surfing in an off-limits area at La Reunion Island, located east of Madagascar, according to news reports. There have been 16 shark attacks and seven deaths since 2011 off La Reunion Island.

Robot chef serves up the future of home cooking

The system was created by UK-based Moley Robotics, which aims to develop a consumer version with an affordable price tag within two years, supported by an iTunes-style library of recipes that can downloaded for the robo-chef to cook in the home. It features two fully articulated hands, made by the Shadow Robot Company, whose products are used in the nuclear industry and by NASA. The dextrous hands are able to faithfully reproduce the movements of a human hand, cooking up Michelin-starred delicacies with all the skill and flair of a master chef. Key to the robot's kitchen prowess is the way its movements have been 3D-mapped to those of professional chef Tim Anderson.

Woman's 'Burning Mouth Syndrome' Had Strange Cause

The woman had a case of a condition called "burning mouth syndrome," which is a chronic, burning sensation inside the mouth, usually in the lips, tongue or palate, according to the study, published April 1 in the journal BMJ Case Reports. "It's common in postmenopausal women, and affects up to 7 percent of the general population," said study co-author Dr. Maria Nagel, a neurovirologist and professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora. Nagel compared the feeling to a "sunburn inside the mouth," adding that it feels similar to the pain caused by a tooth infection or a root canal. The virus commonly causes cold sores around the mouth and lips, but the woman didn't have any cold sores.

Man Tears Tendon After Playing 'Candy Crush' for Weeks

A California man tore a tendon in his thumb after playing a puzzle game on his smartphone too much, according to a new report of the case. The case shows that, in a sense, video games may numb people's pain and contribute to video game addiction, they said. "We need to be aware that certain video games can act like digital painkillers," said Dr. Andrew Doan, a co-author of the case report and head of addictions research at the Naval Medical Center San Diego.

Marijuana Extract May Help Reduce Epilepsy Seizures

A medicine made from marijuana may provide some relief to people with severe epilepsy who don't get better after trying other treatments, according to a new study. In the study, researchers examined 137 people, ranging in age from toddlers to adults, who all had severe epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures. The researchers noted that the participants knew they were receiving the extract, and that the study did not include a comparison group of people with severe epilepsy who were not given the marijuana drug or who were given a placebo instead. "While the findings are promising, more research is needed, such as randomized-controlled trials to help eliminate the possibility of a placebo effect," said study author Dr. Orrin Devinsky, director of New York University Langone Comprehensive Epilepsy Center.

Screwing Up Artificial Intelligence Could Be Disastrous, Experts Say

From smartphone apps like Siri to features like facial recognition of photos, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a part of everyday life. Science and tech heavyweights Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking have warned that intelligent machines could be one of humanity's biggest existential threats. "With fire, it was OK that we screwed up a bunch of times," Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said April 10 on the radio show Science Friday. "This technology could save thousands of lives," whether by preventing car accidents or avoiding errors in medicine, Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research lab in Seattle, said on the show.

Ebola Vaccine Starts Testing in Sierra Leone

A new Ebola vaccine study starting in Sierra Leone will test the vaccine in thousands of people who are working to fight the epidemic, health officials said today. For the study, called STRIVE, researchers will enroll about 6,000 people — all of them health care workers or others who are on the front lines, such as cleaning staff at clinics and burial workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants will receive the Ebola vaccine either right away or six months later (as part of a control group). "I'm hopeful that what we learn from this clinical trial will help us get closer to finding a safe and effective tool" to protect people against Ebola during the current outbreak and future ones, Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at a news conference today (April 14).

Rocket startup unveils battery-powered engine for small satellite launches

By Andrea Shalal COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - Rocket Lab, a privately-held company financed by weapons maker Lockheed Martin Corp and other high-tech investors, on Tuesday said its low-cost Electron launch system for small satellites will be the first rocket powered by batteries. Chief Executive Peter Beck said the company founded in 2008 to help commercialize the space business, expected to carry out the first flight of its all-composite Electron launch vehicle and the new Rutherford engine before the end of the year. Rocket Lab, which is based in Los Angeles and has a launch site in New Zealand, says the two-stage Electron rocket will make it cheaper and quicker to launch small 100-kilogram payloads into low-earth orbit. The company expects to start launching satellites for customers in 2016, and eventually aims to launch a satellite a week.

Dark Matter Illuminated in New High-Resolution Maps

In the universe, dark and light tend to cluster together, according to new maps that chart the location of dark matter over a large portion of the sky. The new maps show that in some places there are large amounts of dark matter, while in others it is almost entirely absent. The map, produced from data taken by the Dark Energy Survey, was released yesterday (April 13) here at the April 2015 meeting of the American Physical Society. The new map is in agreement with current theories, which suggest that the enormous gravitational pull of dark matter would pull regular matter toward it -- bringing the dark universe and light universe together.

Giant Atom Smasher Revs up: Physicists Reveal What They're Looking For

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground ring in Geneva, Switzerland, revved up again last week at double its previous power. The humongous particle collider will now begin searching for elusive subatomic particles at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV). The first run of the LHC had a single overarching goal: finding the Higgs boson, the particle that explains how other particles get their mass. Scientists know there is more out there than can be explained by the Standard Model, the reigning physics paradigm describing subatomic particles.

It's a Girl! Healthy Giraffe Born at Dallas Zoo

The giraffe born at the Dallas Zoo last week is a healthy baby girl, according to a zoo spokeswoman. The spindly-legged bundle of joy weighs 139 lbs. (63 kilograms) and stands 5 feet 10 inches (1.8 meters) tall, said Laurie Holloway, the Dallas Zoo's director of communications and social media. The zoo is holding a public vote to name the calf later this week, Holloway told Live Science. Animal Planet installed 10 cameras in the zoo's maternity barn to give at-home viewers a chance to witness the remarkable event live and learn about the state of these animals in the wild.

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