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Friday, January 22, 2016

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Researchers find possible ninth planet beyond Neptune

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The solar system may host a ninth planet that is about 10 times bigger than Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune, according to research published on Wednesday. Computer simulations show that the mystery planet, if it exists, would orbit between about 200 and 1,000 times farther from the sun than Earth, astronomers with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said. "It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting," said astronomer Mike Brown, whose discovery was published in this week's Astronomical Journal.

Hiding in Plain Sight: 24 New Beetle Species Discovered in Australia

Most of the beetles were collected almost 30 years ago, but they remained unnamed until Alexander Riedel, a curator at the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe, and Rene Tänzler, a biologist at the Zoological State Collection in Munich, both in Germany, started cataloging them and stumbled across 24 new species that have now been added to the weevil genus Trigonopterus. All of the newly described weevils are restricted to small areas of tropical rainforests along the east coast of northern Queensland, Australia. The new beetle species are also easily overlooked because they live on fallen leaves and dead wood, feeding on leaf litter, bits of palm fronds and other rainforest plants, basically recycling plant material, the scientists added.

NASA Sees Massive Winter Storm Moving East

A massive winter storm that is expected to bring snow and ice to the eastern United States in the next 48 hours dwarfs the central part of the country in a new satellite image. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-West satellite spotted this cloudy view of the large storm near the Gulf Coast today (Jan. 21) at 10 a.m. EST. The NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite captured another view of the looming winter storm yesterday (Jan. 20) at 2:30 p.m. EST, showing clouds and snow cover stretching from northern Texas into the Great Lakes states.

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Thursday, January 21, 2016

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Baking-Soda Ingredient May Lower Risk of Premature Death

Older people may be at increased risk of premature death if they have low levels of bicarbonate, a main ingredient in baking soda, in their blood, a new study suggests. The reason for the link isn't exactly clear, but it may have to do with the ill effects of having slightly acidic blood, the researchers said. Bicarbonate, a base, is a natural byproduct of metabolism that the body uses to regulate the pH level of the blood.

Don't Blame Pot for Teens' IQ Drop, Study Says

Instead, the results suggest that if teens experience a cognitive decline, other factors, such as genetics or that young person's family environment, are more likely to be responsible for the drop, the researchers said. The implications of the new findings are that "it is unlikely that the exposure to marijuana itself is causing children to show intellectual change," Isen told Live Science. Previous research on marijuana use during adolescence has yielded mixed results.

10,000-Year-Old Battered Bones May Be Oldest Evidence of Human Warfare

The skeletons of 27 people who died about 10,000 years ago bear marks of blunt force trauma and projectile wounds, the researchers said in the study. The victims included men, women and children. "That scale of death — it can't be an individual murder or homicide amongst families," said study co-author Robert Foley, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in England.

Prehistoric massacre in Kenya called oldest evidence of warfare

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Man's inhumanity to man, as 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, is no recent development. Scientists said on Wednesday they had found the oldest evidence of human warfare, fossils of a band of people massacred by a troop of attackers with weapons including arrows, clubs and stone blades on the shores of a lagoon in Kenya about 10,000 years ago. The remains of 27 people from a Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture were unearthed at a site called Nataruk roughly 20 miles (30 km) west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.

'Dragon thief' dinosaur thrived after primordial calamity

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the early years of the Jurassic Period, when the world was recovering from one of the worst mass extinctions on record, a modest meat-eating dinosaur from Wales helped pave the way for some of the most fearsome predators ever to stalk the Earth. Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of fossil remains of a two-legged dinosaur called Dracoraptor that lived 200 million years ago and was a forerunner of much later colossal carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus and Spinosaurus. The fossil is of a 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) juvenile, with adults reaching perhaps 10 feet (3 meters), said paleontologist Steven Vidovic of Britain's University of Portsmouth.

From sawdust to petrol

By Jim Drury As world governments mull over global emission targets agreed at last December's United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), attention is turning to which new technologies can help them achieve this. Researchers at the University of Leuven say they have part of the answer, having devised a way to convert sawdust into valuable chemicals and the building blocks for gasoline. By developing a unique chemical process in their laboratory at the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, outside Brussels, they can convert the lignin in sawdust into aromatic chemicals and the cellulose into hydrocarbon chains.

Even Centenarians Are Living Longer

In recent years, the death rate among American centenarians — people who have lived to age 100 or older — has decreased, dropping 14 percent for women and 20 percent for men from 2008 to 2014, according to the report, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, "the risk of dying for centenarians decreased" over this period, study author Dr. Jiaquan Xu, of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, told Live Science. In 2000, the top five causes of death for centenarians were heart disease, stroke, influenza and pneumonia (the two conditions are grouped together), cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

Eating Healthy Fats May Reduce Deaths from Heart Disease

Encouraging people to eat healthy fats such as those found in olive oil or fish could help prevent more than a million deaths from heart disease worldwide each year, according to a new study. In fact, the number of deaths from heart disease due to insufficient intake of healthy fats is almost three times' greater than the number of deaths due to excessive intake of saturated fats, according to the researchers. "Policies for decades have focused on saturated fats as the priority for preventing heart disease, but we found that in most countries, a too-little intake of healthy fats was the big problem, bigger than saturated fat," said study author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston.

Low-Fiber Diet May Change Gut Microbes for Generations

Diets that are low in fiber may cause irreversible changes to populations of gut bacteria, and those changes may be passed on over generations, new research suggests. What's more, the depleted microbial community, called the microbiome, was passed on from parent to offspring, and worsened over time: After four generations of mice had eaten a low-fiber diet, most of the bacteria species normally found in the animals' gut microbiome were completely missing, the researchers found. The study, which was published Wednesday (Jan. 13) in the journal Nature, may have implications for humans, said study lead author Erica Sonnenburg, a microbiome researcher at Stanford University in California.

New Seafloor Map Reveals Secrets of Ancient Continents' Shoving Match

Tectonic plates may have inched across the Earth's surface to where they are now over the course of billions of years, but they left behind traces of this movement in bumps and gashes under the sea. Now, a new topographic map of the seafloor has helped researchers chronicle when the Indian-Eurasian continent formed as well as find a previously undiscovered microplate that broke off as a result of the event.

Racing Pigeons Fly Home Faster in Polluted Air, Scientists Find

China currently has an air pollution problem so severe that smog is occasionally dense enough to be visible from space. Using publicly available data gathered from environmental and pigeon racing agencies, scientists analyzed pigeon performance in 415 races that took place on the North China Plain, where concentrations of air pollution are higher than anywhere else in the country, the scientists reported. By comparing the pigeons' racing times to records of pollution levels on race days, the researchers hoped to learn whether air pollution might affect how well the pigeons performed during the races, the scientists said.

State of play of Virtual Reality

Valkyrie, a new action-packed space adventure developed by game company CCP, was designed to harness the latest in virtual reality technology. Tomorrow we want to change the dynamic around immersive, advanced, virtual reality," said JP Nauseef, the founder of Krush technologies, a company starting to develop virtual reality hardware. Major advances in virtual reality are starting to take shape.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

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Stephen Hawking Warns of Planetary Doom (Again)

Stephen Hawking has once again warned that humanity could wipe itself out before it has a chance to establish far-flung space colonies. At a recent talk in England, the famed physicist singled out nuclear war, genetically engineered viruses and global warming as likely culprits. According to Hawking, the odds of a planetary disaster in the next millennia are high.

Transgenic mosquito ready to join Brazil's war on Zika virus

By Anthony Boadle BRASILIA (Reuters) - A genetically modified mosquito has helped reduce the proliferation of mosquitoes spreading Zika and other dangerous viruses in Brazil, its developers said on Tuesday. The self-limiting strain of the Aedes aegypti mosquito was developed by Oxitec, the U.K.-subsidiary of U.S. synthetic biology company Intrexon. Oxitec, which produces the mosquitoes in Campinas, announced it will build a second facility in nearby Piracicaba, Sao Paulo state, following strong results there in controlling the population of the Aedes vector that also carries the dengue virus.

Transgenic mosquito ready to join Brazil's war on Zika virus

A genetically modified mosquito has helped reduce the proliferation of mosquitoes spreading Zika and other dangerous viruses in Brazil, its developers said on Tuesday. The self-limiting strain of the Aedes aegypti mosquito was developed by Oxitec, the UK-subsidiary of U.S. synthetic biology company Intrexon. Oxitec, which produces the mosquitoes in Campinas, announced it will build a second facility in nearby Piracicaba, Sao Paulo state, following strong results there in controlling the population of the Aedes vector that also carries the dengue virus.

Biodegradable bodies for more eco-friendly robots

By Matthew Stock Scientists from the Italian Institute of Technology are developing 'smart materials' that could lead to robots that will decompose like a human body once they've reached the end of their life-span. Bioplastics are made from plant material, but are more energy-intensive to produce.

Last year was hottest on record globally: U.S. science agencies

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last year's global average temperature was the hottest ever by the widest margin on record, two U.S. government agencies said on Wednesday, adding to pressure for deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts scientists say are needed to arrest warming that is disrupting the global climate. Data from U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that in 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 Celsius) above the 20th century average, surpassing 2014's previous record by 0.29 F (0.16 C). This was the fourth time a global temperature record has been set this century, the agencies said in a summary of their annual report. "2015 was remarkable even in the context of the larger, long-term warming trend," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Sorry, Spider-Man! You're Too Big to Scale That Wall

Like spiders, a variety of critters can scurry up walls, including some species of cockroach, lizard and beetle. "If a human, for example, wanted to walk up a wall the way a gecko does, we'd need impractically large, sticky feet — our shoes would need to be a European size 145 or a U.S. size 114," study senior author Walter Federle, a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. In fact, humans would need adhesive pads covering 40 percent of their body, or about 80 percent of their front, in order to climb up a vertical wall, the researchers said.

Hundreds of Tiny Bugs Are Probably Hiding in Your Home

Entomologists from North Carolina State University conducted an investigation to find out just how many different arthropods — insects, spiders and other invertebrates that have segmented bodies and jointed legs — might share homes with people. Many arthropod species — like termites, bedbugs and roaches — are known to live alongside humans, and to seek out these living spaces, generally bringing a measure of discomfort and inconvenience to their hosts. The researchers visited and sampled homes within a 30-mile (48 kilometers) radius of Raleigh, North Carolina, collecting any living or dead arthropod that they found in attics, basements, bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms and common areas.

Raging Fires in Australia Visible from Space

Australia rang in the new year with dangerous tidings: Parts of Western Australia have been battling large bushfires since the beginning of the month. The blazes seem to be easing off, but an Earth-observing satellite captured a dramatic view of the fires earlier this month, showing thick clouds of smoke hugging the nation's southwestern coast. Last week, NASA's Earth Observatory posted a photo taken Jan. 7 by the Suomi NPP satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).

Last year was hottest on record globally - U.S. science agencies

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last year's global average temperature was the hottest ever by the widest margin on record, two U.S. government agencies said on Wednesday, adding to pressure for deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts scientists say are needed to arrest warming that is disrupting the global climate. Data from U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that in 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 Celsius) above the 20th century average, surpassing 2014's previous record by 0.29 F (0.16 C). "2015 was remarkable even in the context of the larger, long-term warming trend," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

In global warming bets, record 2015 heat buoys mainstream science

By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - For British climate expert Chris Hope, new data showing that 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded is not just confirmation he's been right all along that the planet is getting warmer. It also won the Cambridge University researcher a 2,000 pound sterling ($2,830) wager made five years ago against a pair of scientists who reject man-made global warming and bet Hope that the Earth would be cooling by now. NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Met Office said on Wednesday that 2015 was the warmest year recorded since 1880, boosted by a long-term build-up of greenhouse gases and a natural El Nino event warming the Pacific Ocean.

In global warming bets, record 2015 heat buoys mainstream science

Last year was hottest on record globally - U.S. science agencies

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last year's global average temperature was the hottest ever by the widest margin on record, two U.S. government agencies said on Wednesday, adding to pressure for deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts scientists say are needed to arrest warming that is disrupting the global climate. Data from U.S. space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that in 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 Celsius) above the 20th century average, surpassing 2014's previous record by 0.29 F (0.16 C). "2015 was remarkable even in the context of the larger, long-term warming trend," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Scientists: Good evidence for 9th planet in solar system

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Scientists reported Wednesday they finally have "good evidence" for Planet X, a true ninth planet on the fringes of our solar system.

Russian space agency scales back plans as crisis shrinks budget

By Dmitry Solovyov MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will spend 30 percent less on its space program in the next decade and scale back a slew of projects to save money in the face of tanking oil prices and a falling rouble, a plan presented by the country's space agency showed on Wednesday, According to the blueprint, presented to Russian media by Igor Komarov, head of space agency Roscosmos, the space program budget for 2016-2025 will be cut to 1.4 trillion roubles ($17.36 billion), down from 2 trillion roubles. "Russia is certain to implement this project, but at the moment the launch of a booster rocket with a reusable first stage is not economically viable," local media cited Komarov as saying. Russia's Cold War-era rival, the United States, has already successfully tested similar vehicles.

India launches satellite, moves closer to its own GPS

India successfully launched the fifth of a constellation of navigation satellites on Wednesday, as part of a program that will reduce dependency on the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS) and other networks. India's plan is to have seven satellites that will provide navigational information over the country and upto 1,500 kilometers (932.06 miles) around the mainland, Indian Space Research Organisation said. China is also building its own global positioning system, known as Beidou or COMPASS.

In global warming bets, record 2015 heat buoys mainstream science

Researchers find possible ninth planet beyond Neptune

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The solar system may host a ninth planet that is about 10 times bigger than Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune, according to research published on Wednesday. Computer simulations show that the mystery planet, if it exists, would orbit about 20 times farther away from the sun than Earth, said astronomers with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting," astronomer Mike Brown said in a statement.

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