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	(Sponsor this newsletter) Oldest Animal Jonathan the Tortoise Is Going Strong at 183 A caloric increase is helping the oldest known living terrestrial animal in the world — a giant tortoise — reclaim his health and vigor, a veterinarian reports. At 183 years old, Jonathan, who resides on the tiny Atlantic island of St. Helena, is now eating like a king. Before the diet change, Jonathan's keratin beak was blunt and soft, making him an inefficient grazer, Dr. Joe Hollins, the veterinarian who cares for Jonathan, said in a 2012 report in the journal Veterinary Record. Read More » Fowl Play: Diverse Parasites Infest Backyard Chickens Chickens that live in backyards are exposed to a wider range of ectoparasites — parasites that live on the skin — than their commercial counterparts. In a study published online Jan. 11 in the Journal of Medical Entomology, scientists investigated 100 hens from 20 flocks in Southern California, and found a number of parasites in the coops and on the birds that are typically absent in commercial farms. Many of the urban chickens were playing host to a diverse group of parasites, which included fleas, mites and six species of lice: Menopon gallinae, Menacanthus cornutus, Menacanthus stramineus, Goniocotes gallinae, Lipeurus caponis and Cuclotogaster heterographus. Read More » Warmer Indian Ocean could be 'ecological desert', scientists warn By Amantha Perera NEGOMBO, Sri Lanka (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Anslem Silva has fished for four decades from this popular harbor on Sri Lanka's west coast, but for five years now filling his boat has become increasingly difficult. Overfishing is responsible for some of the lowered catch, but another problem may also be contributing: lack of food for the fish themselves, driven by global warming. "Rapid warming in the Indian Ocean is playing an important role in reducing phytoplankton up to 20 percent," said Roxy Mathew Koll, a scientist at the Centre for Climate Change Research at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune. Read More » Red, Dead Galaxies Are Also LIERs, Scientists Say Many galaxies are LIERS, says Francesco Belfiore, a graduate student at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Earth lies in a galaxy that is flush with new star birth. In trying to study the chemistry of these "dead" galaxies, researchers have found a different chemical fingerprint than the one that dominates star-forming galaxies. Read More » Worm in the Eye! Creepy Crawly Removed in Odd Case "His occupation as a fruit vendor may have increased his risk for infection, as fruit flies may carry the parasite," said Dr. Bhagabat Nayak, an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon at the Dr. R.P. Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences in New Delhi, India. Worms inside the eye are generally rare in India, he added. Read More » Poor Sleep Tied to Hardened Brain Arteries in Older Adults Older people who sleep poorly may have a slightly increased risk of having hardened blood vessels in the brain, and oxygen-starved brain tissue, according to a new study. Both of these issues may contribute to a greater risk of stroke and cognitive impairment, the researchers said. "The forms of brain injury that we observed are important because they may not only contribute to the risk of stroke but also to chronic progressive cognitive and motor impairment," study author Dr. Andrew Lim, a neurologist and scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, said in a statement. Read More » Doctors Reflect on 'Surreal' Day of 2013 Asiana Airlines Crash On July 6, Flight 214 from Incheon International Airport in South Korea crashed just short of the runway at San Francisco International Airport, striking the airport's seawall with its landing gear and tail section. It was San Francisco General that received the most patients of any area hospital that day, and doctors are now reporting their experience in the hopes of helping other hospitals prepare for a similar event. "The day was a surreal experience," said Dr. Rachael Callcut, a surgeon, and the lead author of a new article about the tragedy published today (Jan. 14) in the journal JAMA Surgery. Read More » Self-Filling Water Bottle Converts Humid Air into Drinkable H2O Kristof Retezár, a designer based in Vienna, invented a device that can extract humidity from the air and condense it into drinkable water. The handy gadget, dubbed Fontus, can be attached to a bike so that cyclists can generate water during long-distance rides through the countryside, where pit stops may be few and far between. Fontus works using the basic principle of condensation, which can be easily demonstrated by taking something out of a refrigerator (for instance, a can of soda) and leaving it on the kitchen counter for a bit. Read More » NASA to Capture Best-Ever Portrait of Coral Reef Health NASA is about to get up close and personal with Earth's corals: The space agency will use airplanes and water instruments to survey these delicate structures and capture the most detailed views ever of the planet's corals. Corals are crucial to Earth's ecosystem, but they are typically studied only occasionally, during diving expeditions. The new NASA campaign is aptly named CORAL (short for COral Reef Airborne Laboratory), and aims to assess the condition of these vulnerable ecosystems and to collect data on the size and quality of the reefs. Read More » Hawking: Threats to human survival likely from new science LONDON (AP) — Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned that new technologies will likely bring about "new ways things can go wrong" for human survival. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

	Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News
	(Sponsor this newsletter) Belgian drone mixes plane and quadcopter technology By Jim Drury Researchers in Belgium have devised a prototype delivery drone which they say could rival the likes of Amazon Prime Air and Google's Project Wing. The University of Leuven team behind VertiKUL 2 (KUL is the acronym for Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) say the drone combines the ability of quadcopters to take-off and land vertically with both the speed of conventional aircraft and their capacity to fly long distances. Lead researcher Bart Theys told Reuters that combining aspects of multicopters and conventional aircraft created great potential for a future drone delivery service. Read More » Fossils of Largest Marine Croc Found … on Tatooine! "At one point, when one eye of the crocodile was completely exposed, we realized there was an entire, giant skull just under our feet," said excavation team member Andrea Cau, a doctoral student at the Biological, Geological and Environmental Department of Alma Mater Studiorum in Bologna University, in an email interview with Live Science. In the hours that followed, they became certain they were laying eyes on a previously unknown species. Read More » SpaceX narrowly missed Falcon 9 rocket landing, video shows The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that exploded into a fiery ball just after landing at sea off California on Sunday had descended with pinpoint accuracy onto an ocean barge before a landing leg buckled, causing the booster to tip over, a landing video showed. Heavy fog at the rocket's launch site in California may have caused condensation to collect in the latching mechanism and then ice it over, said technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, owner and chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. SpaceX is seeking to develop a cheap, reusable rocket and a successful ocean landing would have marked a second milestone for the company, a month after it nailed a spaceflight first with a successful ground landing in Florida. Read More » How the cat got its spots A team of biologists and mathematicians from three British universities are challenging conventional thinking on piebaldism - a benign genetic disease caused by a mutation which results in the distinctively colored fur patches of cats, horses, pigs, dogs, and deer, while human hair is occasionally affected.     In a paper published in Nature Communications, the team, led by University of Bath mathematical biologist Dr Christian Yates, say their findings have potential implications for a wide range of serious embryonic diseases. Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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	(Sponsor this newsletter) SpaceX rocket to launch climate satellite, re-try ocean landing By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is poised to launch from California on Sunday to put a key climate-monitoring satellite into orbit, then turn around and attempt to land on a platform in the ocean. Liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base is scheduled for 10:42 a.m. PST (1842 GMT). After sending the U.S.- and European-owned Jason-3 satellite on its way to orbit, the rocket's first stage will separate, turn around and attempt to touch down on a platform floating in the Pacific Ocean, said officials with privately-held SpaceX, also known as Space Exploration Technologies. Read More » SpaceX rocket blasts off from California with science satellite: NASA By Gene Blevins VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (Reuters) - A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from California on Sunday to put a climate-monitoring satellite into orbit, NASA said. Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX then planned to attempt to land the rocket on a barge in the Pacific Ocean, which would mark its second milestone a month after it nailed a spaceflight first with a successful ground landing in Florida. (Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by Alan Crosby) Read More »
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FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

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	(Sponsor this newsletter) SpaceX success launches space startups to new heights By Heather Somerville SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - SpaceX's successful landing of a reusable rocket booster last month opens a new frontier for commercial space startups by offering tremendous cost savings and attracting venture capitalists who once shied away from spatial ventures. Space startups include nano-satellite makers, earth-imaging and weather-tracking technology developers, and ventures with ambitious plans to mine asteroids. If this fledgling industry can reuse rockets, that will save money and accelerate the pace of launches, enabling startups to more quickly test and update their technology, and replace old satellites more frequently - all critical for growing revenue. Read More » Largest Giraffe Relative Found "This is certainly the largest giraffid [a member of the giraffe family] that ever existed," said study lead author Christopher Basu, a doctoral student in the Structure and Motion Laboratory at the Royal Veterinary College in London. Read More » Real Heavy Metal: Fans Want Motörhead Singer on Periodic Table Motörhead fans still mourning the death of the band's singer, songwriter and bassist, Ian 'Lemmy' Kilmister, in December are seeking commemoration for the rock icon in an unusual location — the periodic table. A petition launched on Change.org by John Wright of York, United Kingdom, proposed "Lemmium" as a name for element 115, quickly gathering thousands of signatures. The element holds the cumbersome temporary working name "ununpentium" and the temporary symbol Uup, according to a statement issued by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on Dec. 30, 2015. Read More » Cruz's Birthplace Debated: Here's Where Most US Presidents Were Born At the Republican debates last night, Donald Trump argued that fellow Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz might be ineligible to be U.S. president, given that the Constitution requires the president to be a "natural born citizen" of the country. One man, Houston attorney Newton Schwartz Sr., has even filed a suit against Cruz, aiming to settle the question before the primaries or party conventions get under way, Bloomberg Business reported. Whatever your opinion may be, it is true that all of the presidents to date have been born in one of the 50 U.S. states. Read More » A Look at Alex: NASA Satellite Spies Oddball January Hurricane It's rare to see a hurricane in January, but Hurricane Alex formed yesterday (Jan. 14) in the Atlantic Ocean — well after the end of the hurricane season — and a NASA satellite caught a glimpse of the menacing storm. It marks the first time a hurricane has formed in the Atlantic in the month of January since 1938, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. NASA's Terra satellite spied the hurricane yesterday as it was developing. Read More » West Africa Is Not 'Ebola Free' After All, New Case Shows The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is not over — just one day after the region was declared "Ebola-free," a new case of the virus was confirmed in Sierra Leone. The new case involved a 22-year-old woman, who was found dead in northern Sierra Leone and tested positive for the disease today (Jan. 15), according to The New York Times. Just yesterday, the World Health Organization declared the end of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, because the three hardest-hit countries in the region — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — had not reported a new Ebola case for at least 42 days. Read More » Butchered Mammoth Suggests Humans Lived in Siberia 45,000 Years Ago The slashed and punctured bones of a woolly mammoth suggest that humans lived in the far northern reaches of Siberia earlier than scientists had previously thought, a new study finds. Before the surprising discovery, researchers thought that humans lived in the freezing Siberian Arctic no earlier than about 30,000 to 35,000 years ago. Now, the newly studied mammoth carcass suggests that people lived in the area, where they butchered the likes of this giant animal about 45,000 years ago. Read More » Tapping the Human Microbiome (Kavli Hangout) Late last year, 48 scientists from 50 U.S. institutions proposed the "Unified Microbiome Initiative," a national effort to decipher the nature, and applications, of microbiomes, ecosystems of microscopic life forms such as bacteria, viruses, archaea and fungi. Scientists can now identify microbes by the organisms' DNA, and have thereby discovered that microbiomes are far more diverse than anyone ever imagined. Each microbiome potentially includes hundreds of thousands of microbial species, all interacting with one another. Read More »
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