Although NASA’s budget has risen about 7 percent over the past two years, its responsibilities have grown much faster. First, NASA must safely resume the flights of its space shuttles, which have been grounded since the loss of Columbia in 2003. Second, the agency plans to continue assembling the International Space Station, the half-built orbital outpost currently occupied by a two-person crew and supplied by Russian spacecraft. And third, President George W....
By Jennifer Dobner SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - A Utah man has admitted stealing, and then throwing away, a very rare fossilized dinosaur footprint, but will not spend any time in prison, according to court documents. Jared Ehlers, a 35-year-old construction worker, pleaded guilty on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City to one federal charge of removing a paleontological resource. Under the terms of the plea deal, he will be fined $15,000 and serve a year’s probation, including six months of home confinement....
For the first time a spacecraft orbiting a foreign planet has spied–and photographed–some of its kin. On Friday, scientists released photos taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor Spacecraft of two spacecraft also in orbit around the Red Planet: the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Odyssey. The Mars Global Surveyor mission is the oldest of the three, having been in orbit around the Red Planet since 1997. Mars Odyssey, meanwhile, has been circling the planet since 2001 whereas Mars Express is the relative newcomer in the group, after entering its orbit near the end of 2003....
With the challenges of climate change, hunger and dwindling freshwater supplies, educators have begun an academic movement to produce a new generation of leaders who will safeguard and help sustain essential resources. The MacArthur Foundation recently committed $15 million to jump-start a two-year master’s in development practice (MDP) program at a dozen institutions across the globe. Columbia University will be the first to offer the degree, starting in the fall of 2009, and schools in various countries, including Ghana, Nigeria and China, may follow suit in the next few years....
Before stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta and Adderall began their rise to popularity in the 1970s, treatment for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) focused on behavioral therapy. But as concerns build over the mounting dosages and extended treatment periods that come with stimulant drugs, clinical researchers are revisiting behavioral therapy techniques. Whereas stimulant medications may help young patients focus and behave in the classroom, research now suggests that behaviorally based changes make more of a difference in the long-term....
By now, you have received a statement about the current state of race relations from almost every institution and organization that you are affiliated with. Like me, you may be asking yourself: Will these statements mean anything? Will these organizations actually do something? Universities and scientific organizations are not just expected to say something, but to take action. Academic institutions and scientific organizations must confront race relations while navigating the difficulties of a pandemic and economic strife....
Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Zc(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter. Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays). Although no law of physics precludes larger congregations, finding a quartet expands the ways in which quarks can be snapped together to make exotic forms of matter....
A study of radio chirps and whistles blasting from Earth’s magnetic field—sounding a bit like the famous Star Wars droid R2-D2—may help astronomers devise new ways of searching for planets orbiting distant stars. U.S. astronomers used data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cluster satellites to track auroral kilometric radiation (AKR), radio emissions that accompany the dazzling lights of the auroras around Earth’s polar regions. The team from the University of Iowa in Iowa City found that the radio chirps fan out from starting points in the atmosphere in a narrow plane rather than a cone shape, as was long expected....
When we talk, we naturally gesture—we open our palms, we point, we chop the air for emphasis. Such movement may be more than superfluous hand flapping. It helps communicate ideas to listeners and even appears to help speakers think and learn. A growing field of psychological research is exploring the potential of having students or teachers gesture as pupils learn. Studies have shown that people remember material better when they make spontaneous gestures, watch a teacher’s movements or use their hands and arms to imitate the instructor....
From Nature magazine Your eyes aren’t deceiving you — you just watched a metal ball bounce off a sliver of jelly. But you wouldn’t put this jelly in a sherry trifle: it is a sophisticated hydrogel developed by Zhigang Suo, a materials engineer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues1. A hydrogel is a network of polymers that soaks up lots of water to form a jelly-like material. But most shatter easily and don’t stretch far without breaking....
Last night, light from a new supernova reached astronomers on Earth. Its origin: the nearby galaxy M82, some 3.5 megaparsecs away (11.4 million light years). It is one of the closest and brightest supernovae seen from Earth since a monster exploded in 1987 just 168,000 light years away. Astronomers say that the latest supernova is of the type 1a class, and may help reveal how such supernovae form. Moreover, because these supernovae are used as cosmic measuring sticks, understanding them better may help clarify the shape of the Universe....
Though Pluto is now famously frigid, it may have started off as a hot world that formed rapidly and violently, a new study finds. This result suggests Pluto may have possessed an underground ocean since early on in its life, potentially improving its chances of hosting life, researchers said. Previous work assumed Pluto originated from cold and icy rock clumping together in the distant Kuiper Belt, the ring of objects beyond Neptune’s orbit....
LONDON – Tropical ecosystems may be responding to global warming more energetically than anyone had expected. Scientists from China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States report in the journal Nature that the tropical carbon cycle – the uptake and release of carbon dioxide from and back into the atmosphere – has become twice as sensitive to temperature change in the last 50 years. A one degree rise in average tropical temperature leads to a release of around two billion more tons of carbon per year from tropical forests and savannahs, compared with the 1960s and 1970s....
The United States will begin its leadership of the Arctic Council at an international meeting in Iqaluit, Canada, on Friday, beginning a two-year term in which the State Department has signaled it will focus heavily on climate change. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry—who was often the lone member of Congress to attend U.N. climate talks—will assume the chairmanship from Leona Aglukkaq, the Canadian environmental minister whose tenure at the council’s helm has prioritized economic expansion (ClimateWire, Oct....
How many times have you dismissed sniffles as “just a cold,” and carried on with a stuffed nose and sinuses assuming that the symptoms would eventually run their course, perhaps a bit more quickly with a few doses of Mom’s homemade chicken soup? Influenza is another story. The common cold eventually fizzles, but the flu may be deadly. Some 200,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized and 36,000 die each year from flu complications — and that pales in comparison to the flu pandemic of 1918 that claimed between 20 and 100 million lives....
The people of Guinea have been locked in a life-and-death struggle with Ebola virus since last December. Nearly 60 percent of Guineans infected with the virus since then have died. To cope with the unprecedented disease, the government went so far as to ban soup made from bats. Why bats? Because three kinds of bats from the region are believed to harbor the deadly filovirus. That’s based on a survey of small animals in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Ebola virus seems to be endemic....
Panic is no picnic. You get hit with a tidal wave of fear, your body short-circuits, and you think this is the end - you’re either dying or going crazy. In short, it’s a pretty awful feeling, and the 1 in 4 Americans who have experienced it often go for months or even years without knowing what panic is or what to do about it. Luckily, panic is straightforward to treat....
Psychotherapy is not what most people think of as a quick fix. From its early Freudian roots, it has taken the form of 50- to 60-minute sessions repeated weekly (or more often) over a period of months or even years. For modern cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), 10 to 20 weekly sessions is typical. But must it be so? “Whoever told us that one 50-minute session a week is the best way to help people get over their problems?...
Click here for a full list of our coverage of the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show. CLICK HERE to view a video companion to this piece LAS VEGAS—The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a maddening array of stimuli—flashy displays, buzzing processors and beeping devices—located in a city known for pretty much all the same hallmarks. From the looks of last night’s press preview, the two primary orders of the day are touch screen–enabled software and hardware, as well as wireless transmission of data....
Love might be in the air on Valentine’s Day, metaphorically speaking. But scientists have long debated whether love—or, at least, sexual attraction—is literally in the air, in the form of chemicals called pheromones. Creatures from mice to moths send out these chemical signals to entice mates. And if advertisements about pheromone-laden fragrances are to be believed, one might conclude that humans also exchange molecular come-hithers. Still, after decades of research, the story in humans is not quite so clear....
