Wednesday, July 6, 2016

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

feedamail.com Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

'Fearsome Raisin' Ant Sports Striking Fingerprint Pattern

Myrmecina magnificens, named for its beauty, lives in leaf litter on the forest floor and probably preys on tiny mites, said discoverer Mark Wong, an ecologist and independent researcher in Singapore. "Some people say it looks a little bit like a fearsome raisin," Wong told Live Science.


Read More »

Dwarf Dinosaur Sported Lumpy Tumor on Its Face

During its lifetime about 69 million years ago, a duck-billed dinosaur dwarf walked around with a tumor on its lower jaw, though the unusual growth likely didn't cause any pain, a new study finds. "This discovery is the first ever described in the fossil record and the first to be thoroughly documented in a dwarf dinosaur," one of the study's co-authors, Kate Acheson, a doctoral student of geology at the University of Southampton in England, said in a statement. Researchers found the fossils in western Romania in the "Valley of the Dinosaurs," which is part of a World Heritage site honored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).


Read More »

Secret World of Primeval Rivers Lies Beneath Greenland Glacier

A network of ancient rivers lies frozen in time beneath one of Greenland's largest glaciers, new research reveals. The subglacial river network, which threads through much of Greenland's landmass and looks, from above, like the tiny nerve fibers radiating from a brain cell, may have influenced the fast-moving Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier over the past few million years. "The channels seem to be instrumental in controlling the location and form of the Jakobshavn ice stream — and seem to show a clear influence on the onset of fast flow in this region," study co-author Michael Cooper, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, told Live Science.


Read More »

Physics prepares to feast on collider data, seeking dark universe

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's physics research centre CERN are preparing to unwrap the biggest trove of data yet from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), three years after they confirmed the existence of the elusive Higgs boson. "In the life of accelerator physics there are few moments like the one we are living through," said Tiziano Camporesi, leader of the CMS experiment at CERN. "This is the time when the probability of finding something new is highest." The Higgs boson, whose discovery secured the Nobel prize for physics in 2013, answered fundamental questions about how elementary matter attained mass.


Read More »

DARPA's Hacking Contest Will Pit Machines Against Each Other

The U.S. Department of Defense is hosting a huge hacking competition next month to highlight vulnerabilities in the world's growing network of "smart" devices — the so-called internet of things. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the Department of Defense responsible for developing new technologies for the military, will hold its Cyber Grand Challenge Aug. 4 in Las Vegas. More importantly, critical connected infrastructure such as traffic lights, utility systems and power grids could be susceptible to cyberattacks, according to DARPA.


Read More »

Massive 'Lava Lamp' Blobs Deep Inside Earth Have Scientists Puzzled

"To me, the big unanswered question is, what is it, and how did it form?" said the paper's lead author Edward Garnero, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. The blobs are characterized by slower wave speeds, which suggests they are a different temperature from the rest of the Earth's mantle, the researchers said. Because they're big and characterized by the slower wave speeds, the blobs have been called large low velocity provinces (LLVPs).


Read More »

Man Paralyzed After Mosquito Bite: How Often Does West Nile Strike the Nerves?

A man in Arizona who recently became infected with the West Nile virus is now paralyzed from the waist down, CBS Los Angeles reported. Infections with the mosquito-borne West Nile virus have been known to lead to neurological problems, including paralysis, though these results are rare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), less than 1 percent of people who are infected with West Nile develop neurological symptoms.

Read More »

Plunging Neckline May Help Women Land More Job Interviews

Women who show more skin in a job application photo may have a much better shot of landing an interview, a new study suggests. Researchers in France found that women who submitted a color picture of themselves wearing a low-cut dress were more likely to be called in for a job interview for sales and accounting positions than women whose photos showed them wearing a dress with a less revealing, round neckline, according to the study. The analysis revealed that the female candidates who showed more cleavage were five times more likely to be invited to an interview for a sales position, and four times more likely to land an interview for an accounting position, than women who were more conservatively dressed, said study researcher Sevag Kertechian, a doctoral candidate in human resources management at Paris-Sorbonne University in France.

Read More »

US Olympic Team Will Be Studied for Zika

When the U.S. Olympic team heads to Brazil in the coming weeks for the start of the Summer Games, some athletes will be studied to see if they become infected with the Zika virus. The government-funded study will involve at least 1,000 members of the U.S. Olympic team, including athletes, coaches and staff, according to the National Institutes of Health, which announced plans for the study today (July 5). Those who sign up for the study will undergo periodic tests for Zika, the virus that's currently causing an outbreak in Brazil and other  countries in the Americas.

Read More »

California city's curb fix disappoints earthquake scientists

HAYWARD, Calif. (AP) — A faulty curb that perfectly illustrated the seismic forces at work underneath a San Francisco Bay Area neighborhood has been fixed, stunning scientists, who say a curbside laboratory for studying earthquakes was destroyed.

Read More »

Weight check for first penguin born through artificial insemination

OSAKA, Japan - The world's first penguin conceived through artificial insemination tipped the scales at a healthy 1,210 grams (2.6 lbs) on Wednesday in Japan, where scientists have been working for six years to develop technology to preserve the species. The southern rockhopper penguin was born on June 6, according to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan. The aquarium teamed up with Hiroshi Kusunoki, of Kobe University Graduate School of Agricultural Science, for the project and the Tokyo Sea Life Park, which provided a healthy sperm sample from a male penguin. ...

Read More »
 
Delievered to you by Feedamail.
Unsubscribe

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

feedamail.com Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

NASA's Juno spacecraft loops into orbit around Jupiter

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - NASA'S Juno spacecraft capped a five-year journey to Jupiter on Monday with a do-or-die engine burn that looped it into orbit to probe the origins of the biggest planet in the solar system and how it impacted the rise of life on Earth, the U.S. space agency said. Juno fired its main engine for 35 minutes beginning at 11:18 a.m. EDT/0318 Tuesday GMT, slowing the spacecraft so it could be captured by the planet's gravity.     Once in position to begin its 20-month science mission, Juno will fly in egg-shaped orbits, each one lasting 14 days, to learn if Jupiter has a dense core beneath its clouds and map its massive magnetic field. The probe also will hunt for water in Jupiter's thick atmosphere, a key yardstick for figuring out how far away from the sun the gas giant formed.


Read More »

Freeloading Butterflies Get Away with Theft

A bizarre Amazonian butterfly is the ultimate freeloader, researchers say. The butterfly species steals and eats gooey bamboo secretions from its ant neighbors, in a relationship known as kleptoparasitism, new research has found. Pomerantz and his colleagues have now captured images of the odd behavior — the first time that kleptoparasitism has been documented between adult butterflies and ants.


Read More »

Tallest Mountain in US Arctic Crowned

Though Denali is the uncontested highest peak in North America — with a summit elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190 meters) — there has been a more than 50-year debate over which U.S. mountain can be crowned the tallest beyond the Arctic Circle. U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps from the 1950s show either Mount Chamberlin or Mount Isto as the highest mountain in the eastern Alaska Arctic region. At 8,975.1 feet (2,735.6 m), Mount Isto is the tallest peak in the U.S. Arctic, and Mount Chamberlin (at 8,898.6 feet, or 2712.3 m) is only the third highest.


Read More »

Revenge Is Bittersweet, Research Finds

Revenge is a dish best served cold. The culture is swimming with depictions of revenge: Sometimes it's deeply satisfying, sometimes it injures the avenger, and sometimes it's a little bit of both. "We show that people express both positive and negative feelings about revenge, such that revenge isn't bitter, nor sweet, but both," Fade Eadeh, a doctoral candidate in psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement.


Read More »

Tomb with a View: Ancient Burial Sites Served as 'Telescopes'

And the scientists are looking especially closely at passage graves, a type of tomb with a large chamber accessed through a long and narrow entry tunnel. This type of structure could have greatly enhanced views of faint stars as they rose on the dawn horizon. The findings were presented June 29 at the Royal Astronomical Society's (RAS) National Astronomy Meeting 2016 in Nottingham, in the United Kingdom.


Read More »

Female Komodo Dragon Saved After Her Eggs Burst

A complex surgery has saved the life of a captive Komodo dragon at the Denver Zoo. Anika, a 6-year-old female Komodo dragon, developed dystocia, a condition in which reptiles are unable to deposit their eggs. Zoo staff first noticed that Anika's abdomen was swollen and that she'd lost weight, even though her appetite (and eating) had increased dramatically.


Read More »

Your Brainwaves May Fall into a 'Texting Rhythm'

These days, it seems like smartphones are an integral part of people's daily lives — and a new study suggests that texting on these devices may actually change certain processes in the brain. They were surprised that the rhythm could be reproduced in different patients in the study, said Dr. William Tatum, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Florida, and the lead author of the study. The discovery of new brain-wave patterns is rare — it was more common in the years following the late 1920s, when the electroencephalogram (EEG) device, which shows brain activity, was invented, he said.

Read More »

Science Finds a Way to Overcome Life's Regrets

The people in the study who practiced self-compassion, or being kind to oneself, were more likely to overcome regrets than the people who did not do so, according to the study, published in February in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Although regrets are often painful, previous studies have suggested that some people can overcome them and feel stronger afterward, said Jia Wei Zhang, a graduate student in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers wanted to better understand why some people report feeling improvement from regrets but others don't, Zhang said.

Read More »

Satellite Spies International Space Station Orbiting Earth

A satellite captured a bird?s-eye view of the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting Earth, revealing spectacular images just released by NASA. With the Space Station orbiting at only 250 miles (400 km) above the surface, the Landsat 8's Operational Land Imager (OLI) gets a unique view of the ISS when the two orbits align. On June 19, 2016, the Landsat 8's OLI captured images of the ISS over the state of Odisha in eastern India.

Read More »

Court rules against White House science office in email case

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court says work-related emails on a private account used by the White House's top science adviser are subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Read More »

New Robo-Salamander Can Really Move

With the help of X-ray videos, scientists have developed a new robot that mimics the way salamanders walk and swim. In general, scientists investigate animal locomotion for insights that could, among other things, help people recover from devastating losses of mobility, said study senior author Auke Ijspeert, a bioroboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Increasingly, scientists are creating robot copies of animals to perform such investigations of animal locomotion.


Read More »

Physics prepares to feast on collider data, seeking dark universe

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's physics research center CERN are preparing to unwrap the biggest trove of data yet from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), three years after they confirmed the existence of the elusive Higgs boson. "In the life of accelerator physics there are few moments like the one we are living through," said Tiziano Camporesi, leader of the CMS experiment at CERN. "This is the time when the probability of finding something new is highest." The Higgs boson, whose discovery secured the Nobel prize for physics in 2013, answered fundamental questions about how elementary matter attained mass.


Read More »
 
Delievered to you by Feedamail.
Unsubscribe

Monday, July 4, 2016

FeedaMail: Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

feedamail.com Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News

NASA's Juno spacecraft poised for one-shot try to orbit Jupiter

By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A NASA spacecraft was poised for a one-shot attempt to slip into Jupiter's orbit on Monday for the start of a 20-month-long dance around the solar system's largest planet to learn how and where it formed. Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, were preparing for a long night as the Juno probe streaked closer toward Jupiter at 200 times the speed of sound in the empty vacuum of space. Confirmation of whether Juno, the only solar-powered spacecraft ever dispatched to the outer solar system, had successfully placed itself into polar orbit around Jupiter was not expected until 11:53 p.m. EDT on Monday (0353 GMT on Tuesday).


Read More »

Fastest-Ever Spacecraft to Arrive at Jupiter Tonight

NASA's Juno probe will attempt to slip into orbit around Jupiter tonight (July 4), shortly after becoming the fastest object ever made by human hands. As Juno nears Jupiter tonight, the giant planet's powerful gravity will accelerate the spacecraft to an estimated top speed of about 165,000 mph (265,000 km/h) relative to Earth, mission team members said. "I don't think we've had any human[-made] object that's moved that fast, that's left the Earth," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said during a news conference last week.


Read More »
 
Delievered to you by Feedamail.
Unsubscribe