Buzzing science news

AP - NASA will try to launch Discovery to the international space station next week, less than a month after the last shuttle mission.

(AP) -- Unlimited domestic phone calls are nearly standard feature for landline plans these days. Now, Vonage Holdings Corp., which helped pioneer that feature with its Internet phone service, ...
Read more ...

A new movie intriguingly turns the tables on the notion of alien overlords – but science quickly takes a back seat to explosions in this sci-fi film


Read more ...

A decision has been reached in the case of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and will be announced Thursday, the Scottish government said. British news networks reported that he would be released on compassionate grounds.
Read more ...

As the nationwide recession continues, California and 14 other states have unemployment rates hovering around 10 percent. Job loss can devastate workers, says David Dooley, UC Irvine professor of psychology & social behavior, and it can take a toll on their families and communities as well.
Read more ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Young adults see living together as the best way to protect against divorce, not as an alternative to marriage, a University of Michigan researcher says.
Read more ...

AP - NASA will try to launch Discovery to the international space station next week, less than a month after the last shuttle mission.

Simulations that showed the British Mars probe tumbling to disaster in the Martian atmosphere were wrong, says the Beagle team


Read more ...

A 63-year-old woman spends five days alone trapped on a small raft in Iowa's Wapsipinicon River after it gets tangled in brush. Her rescue came when a fisherman spotted her. Jeanne Schnepp, who only had two cans of Mountain Dew and a bottle of water with her, is doing "remarkably great" after her ordeal.
Read more ...

A team of scientists led by CSIRO's Dr Kishore Prayaga has been awarded a prestigious Australian Museum Eureka Prize for its work to develop a simple genetic test which has the potential to end the need to dehorn cattle in Australia.
Read more ...

Back in the day, planes, trains and automobiles all sported one brand name. If you bought a Boeing, you got, nose to tail, a Boeing. These days, however, complex industrial equipment is starting to look like NASCAR vehicles festooned with logos. Why does it matter? "When component brands become powerful it changes the industry," says George John, Marketing Department Chair at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "What becomes more important, the product brand or the component? The Dodge truck or its Cummins engine?"

read more

AFP - The European Space Agency (ESA) on Wednesday signed a deal with its Russian counterpart Roscosmos to cooperate on two Mars exploration projects, Russia's Interfax news agency reported.

Under a microscope, Heterosigma akashiwo looks like a potato or a cornflake. To the naked eye, sea lettuce is a big, green sheet of seaweed. In most cases, these different algae are food for the ocean's vegetarians.
Read more ...

(AP) -- This week's indictment of a hacker believed responsible for the biggest retail-store data breaches in U.S. history doesn't necessarily make shoppers safer from having their credit card ...
Read more ...

Some children with a history of severe milk allergy can safely drink milk and consume other dairy products every day, according to research led by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and published in the Aug. 10 online edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Read more ...

From 1995 to 2006, hospital 30-day death rates decreased significantly for Medicare patients hospitalized for a heart attack, as did the variation in the rate between hospitals, according to a study in the August 19 issue of JAMA.
Read more ...

SPACE.com - An international spaceflight company plans to launch paying passengers on week-long orbital trips by 2013 using vehicles based on Soviet-era spacecraft built for classifed military space stations.
Read more ...

A group of researchers in Australia and Taiwan has developed a new way to analyze the health of human teeth using lasers. As described in the latest issue of Optics Express,, by measuring how the surface of a tooth responds to laser-generated ultrasound, they can evaluate the mineral content of tooth enamel -- the semi-translucent outer layer of a tooth that protects the underlying dentin.
Read more ...

When Planet Earth was just cooling down from its fiery creation, the sun was faint and young. So faint that it should not have been able to keep the oceans of earth from freezing. But fortunately for the creation of life, water was kept liquid on our young planet.
Read more ...

AFP - An absent-minded musician left his 18th century violin in the back of a New York taxi but was soon reunited with the instrument thanks to satellite technology, newspapers reported Tuesday.

Crosstalk between cells lining the lung (epithelial cells) and airway smooth muscle cells is important in lung development. However, it has also been shown to contribute to several lung diseases, including asthma and pulmonary hypertension.
Read more ...

A hacking incident report released Monday warns there has been a steep rise in attacks at social-networking hotspots including wildly popular microblogging service Twitter.
Read more ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has developed a kind of invisible fence for trapping and controlling particles as small as a single virus or large protein.
Read more ...

An international research team has used lotto to show that the condition 'spatial neglect', which affects how we see the world, isn't connected to how is it is imagined.
Read more ...

Super-streamlining, pothole power and heat recycling: a spate of innovation is about to transform diesel-guzzling trucks into green giants


Read more ...

A cargo ship that disappeared weeks ago in European waters has been found near Cape Verde, according to Russian news agencies. The Arctic Sea and its 15-man Russian crew, discovered about 300 miles from the island nation off West Africa, mysteriously vanished on July 28 after passing through the English Channel.
Read more ...

Romania, which has been lauded for tackling its AIDS epidemic, is facing shortages of antiretroviral drugs because of the global recession.


Read more ...

University of California, San Diego computer scientists have created software that they hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks. The software system -- PortLand -- is a fault-tolerant, layer 2 data center network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond.
Read more ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Heavier rainstorms lie in our future. That's the clear conclusion of a new MIT and Caltech study on the impact that global climate change will have on precipitation patterns.
Read more ...

Rather than encouraging indulgence, appetising images of junk food may actually encourage dieters to eat more healthily


Read more ...

An 'adopt-a-star' programme aims to raise money for an international research consortium to analyse data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission


Read more ...

A wedding celebration in Kuwait becomes a "horrific scene" after a blaze lasting just three minutes kills dozens of women and children. The cause of the fire remains unclear, but authorities say faulty electrical wiring may have been a factor.
Read more ...

More than one third of photos in women's magazines depicted babies in unsafe sleep positions, according to a new study in Pediatrics. Additionally, the study found that two-thirds of sleep environments depicted in these magazines were also unsafe.
Read more ...

After getting off to a slow start, the Atlantic hurricane season got busy Sunday as a tropical depression formed off the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, threatening to bring heavy rain and possible flooding to the area.
Read more ...

(AP) -- The tribes of the lower Klamath River have since ancient times decorated themselves with condor feathers when they performed the dances designed to heal a world gone wrong.
Read more ...

(AP) -- Hundreds of schools are heeding the government's call to set up flu-shot clinics this fall, preparing for what could be the most widespread school vaccinations since the days of polio.
Read more ...

A study published in this week's online issue of Nature Biotechnology, demonstrates a unique and highly sensitive method for detecting methylation-associated cancers.
Read more ...

Attention all smokeless tobacco users! It's time to banish the comforting notion that snuff and chewing tobacco are safe because they don't burn and produce inhalable smoke like cigarettes. A study that looked beyond the well-researched tobacco hazards, nitrosamines and nicotine, has discovered a single pinch â€"â€" the amount in a portion â€"â€" of smokeless tobacco exposes the user to the same amount of another group of dangerous chemicals as the smoke of five cigarettes.

read more

In a debate in which he often sounds professor-like, President Barack Obama spoke with a rare bit of emotion that seemed to counter that of vocal health care opponents as he referenced the beloved grandmother who helped raise him and who he called "Toot." She died of cancer at age 86 on Nov. 2, two days before he won election to become the nation's first African-American president.
Read more ...

The US agency behind Voice of America said Friday it is working on ways to slip news past tough Internet blockades in countries such as China and Iran.
Read more ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Aug. 14, 2009 (Reuters) -- The U.S. plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 will not happen without a big boost in NASA's budget, leaving only the International Space Station as a viable target for the country's human space program, according to a presidential review panel. ... > read full story
Read more ...

Jichi Medical University has succeeded in restoring the motor function of patients suffering from Parkinson's disease by injecting their brains with a virus with a built-in gene that has an enzyme to produce dopamine, it has been learned.
Read more ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Positive expectations can often lead patients to better recovery in a number of health conditions. Very little is known about expectations to recover from injury, such as whiplash. That was, until now.
Read more ...

Solar physicists at NASA have confirmed that small, sudden bursts of heat and energy, called nanoflares, cause temperatures in the thin, translucent gas of the sun's atmosphere to reach millions of degrees.

read more

Satellite images of artificial lighting could help provide more accurate measurements of economic growth for developing countries


Read more ...

The Baltic Sea winter climate has changed more in the last 500 years than previously thought. Research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shows that our part of the world has experienced periods of both milder and colder winters, and the transitions between these climate types seem to have been abrupt.
Read more ...

Reality consists of what you pay attention to, and new research is unraveling how the brain chooses some things over others.Penguin Press, 2009, 256 p., $25.95.
Read more ...

A University of Arizona anthropologist has discovered that humans living at a Paleolithic cave site in central Israel between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago were as successful at big-game hunting ...
Read more ...

A 17-year-old girl who ran away from her Ohio home to Florida says she fears her parents will harm her for converting from Islam to Christianity, but her parents dismiss her claim and say she was brainwashed.
Read more ...

Q: I have a problem with our Dell laptop computer's wireless connection using Internet Explorer. At various times, the speed drops down to sloth and then stops altogether. At the same time, other computers, a desktop connected directly to the router and another laptop which is connected through the wireless connection both function. When the Dell is taken to another wireless site location, it works.
Read more ...

A group of researchers whose planned leg ulceration study was hamstrung by a physician recruitment rate of 2% have published the reasons why so many doctors turned them down. The qualitative information, featured in the open access journal BMC Medical Research Methodology, should be of use to those designing trials of their own.
Read more ...

People were using fire to make sharp blades out of poor stone 164,000 years ago – much earlier than we thought
Read more ...

A new look at a large database of prostate cancer patients shows that obesity plays no favorites when it comes to increasing the risk of recurrence after surgery: Being way overweight is equally bad for blacks and whites, say researchers at Duke University Medical Center.
Read more ...

With HIV patients living longer thanks to advances in treatment, the primary care needs of those living with HIV have never been more important. Updated, evidence-based guidelines from the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) are designed to help providers manage the care of those living with this complex chronic infection.
Read more ...

Honeybees in colonies affected by colony collapse disorder (CCD) have higher levels of pathogens and are co-infected with a greater number of pathogens than their non-CCD counterparts, but no individual pathogen can be singled out as the cause of CCD, according to a study by an international team of researchers.

read more

AFP - NASA said Thursday that engineers are testing the foam insulation bonding on the space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tanks before it heads to the International Space Station on August 25.

The team, in collaboration with University Hospital Aintree, the University of Warwick and researchers in Sweden, found that people classified as obese and those with pre-diabetes have raised levels of a protein called SPARC, that can cause tissue scarring. The research revealed that an increase in insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar levels, and leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite, can trigger an increase in SPARC, which can prevent the proper storage of fat in fat tissue cells.
Read more ...

The project, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), found that many young volunteers travelled long distances from cities to short-term projects in rural areas and felt they were being punished for being disruptive or naughty at school. They saw the conservation work as having no relevance to their future employment, or educating them on green issues.
Read more ...

AP - A series of satellite images taken over Sri Lanka's former war zone showed the existence of large grave sites and evidence of possible mortar positions near areas that had been packed with trapped civilians, a human rights group said Thursday.

Just a few years ago, Advanced Micro Devices executive Linda Starr racked up a million air miles a year in business travel. Now she logs a mere 100,000 miles per year, thanks to sophisticated video conferencing technology.
Read more ...

(AP) -- Sprint Nextel Corp. has agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit claiming the fees it has charged customers who end their wireless contracts early are illegal.
Read more ...

Gamma-ray telescopes are helping unravel the secrets of the universe. See the most important ones in this gallery


Read more ...

Until now, creating the microchips that power all of our electronic gadgets has been a laborious, complex and time-consuming process costing billions of dollars. But if a Milpitas, Calif.-based startup succeeds, making them could be as easy as printing a piece of paper.
Read more ...

A team of researchers from Boston University, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently made a discovery that changes a long held paradigm about how bacteria move through soft gels. They showed that the bacterium that causes human stomach ulcers uses a clever biochemical strategy to alter the physical properties of its environment, allowing it to move and survive and further colonize its host.
Read more ...

If a lush, protected forest with a winding stream is considered luxury accommodation for a migratory bird, a Purdue University study shows that those birds would be just as happy with the equivalent of a cheap roadside motel.

read more

AP - NASA is charged with spotting most of the asteroids that pose a threat to Earth but doesn't have the money to complete the job, a federal report says.

Economic woes coupled with a liberal black president have energized militia groups across the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in a new report. "All it's lacking is a spark," says one U.S. official, referring to the anti-government movement.
Read more ...

An unmanned German mission to the moon is plausible by the middle of the next decade, the official in charge of space flight said on Wednesday, despite the financial crisis battering the country.
Read more ...

LONDON, Aug. 12, 2009 (Reuters) -- The unique wildlife of the Galapagos Islandsis under threat from disease-carrying mosquitoes arriving on board growing numbers of aircraft and tourist boats, researchers said on Wednesday. ... > read full story
Read more ...

AP - The annual Perseid meteor shower is expected to put on a dazzling sky show.

Scientists at the University of Mainz have discovered a close correlation between over-indebtedness and obesity. According to the report published in the journal BMC Public Health, over-indebted Germans are more likely to be overweight or obese than the population in general.
Read more ...

During about the last 20 years, the risk of delivery-related death at birth or shortly thereafter for term infants has decreased nearly 40 percent in Scotland, with the largest contributing factor being a decrease in the number of deaths caused by a lack of oxygen for the baby during the childbirth process, according to a study in the August 12 issue of JAMA.
Read more ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new calibration technique that will improve the reliability and stability of one of NIST's most versatile technologies, the microhotplate. The novel NIST device is being developed as the foundation for miniature yet highly accurate gas sensors that can detect chemical and biological agents, industrial leaks and even signs of extraterrestrial life from aboard a planetary probe.

read more

Canadian scientists uncover alarming invasion of round goby into Great Lakes tributaries: impact on endangered fishes likely to be serious

read more

Modern lighting is bright and harsh compared with the lamps of antiquity, but computer reconstructions are letting us see archaeological sites as their creators did


Read more ...

Divers on the Hudson River are hoping to recover the last body following a midair collision on Saturday. Nine people died when a small plane and a tourist helicopter collided, sending both aircraft into the waters. Here, divers maneuver near where the plane's wreckage is thought to be on Monday.
Read more ...

The discovery of an unknown hitherto chemical compound in the atmosphere may help to explain how and when clouds are formed. The discovery of the so called dihydroxyepoxides (an aerosol-precursor), is reported in this week's issue of Science by a team comprising of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Copenhagen.
Read more ...

Stable isotope data published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael Richards of the University of British Columbia and the Max Planck Institute, suggests that at least some of the European early modern humans consistently consumed fish, supplementing their diet of terrestrial animals.
Read more ...

A squadron of spindly robots dropped into Mount St Helens is the first network of volcano sensors that can route data to each other and to space, making them robust and efficient


Read more ...

Relatives of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President Kennedy, were summoned to a Massachusetts hospital Monday, a source close to the family told CNN.
Read more ...

Chances are, we all know someone like Marya Hornbacher. We just don't realize that we do because, like Hornbacher, these someones are charming, smart, well-spoken and prosperous -- not at all like people who are (cough) bipolar.
Read more ...

Muscular dystrophy, a group of inherited diseases characterized by progressive skeletal muscle weakness, can be caused by mutations in any one of a number of genes. Another gene can now be added to this list, as Yukiko Hayashi and colleagues, at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Japan, have now identified mutations in a gene not previously linked to muscular dystrophy as causative of a form of the disease in five nonconsanguineous Japanese patients.
Read more ...

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, collaborating with pediatric cardiologists and surgeons at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, have developed a tool for virtual surgery that allows heart surgeons to view the predicted effects of different surgical approaches. By manipulating three-dimensional cardiac magnetic resonance images of a patient's specific anatomy, physicians can compare how alternative approaches affect blood flow and expected outcomes, and can select the best approach for each patient before entering the operating room.
Read more ...

A genetically modified maize plant is genetically engineered to produce a chemical rallying cry that summons help against a damaging pests


Read more ...