fidzu : Science news

By Victoria Bryan BERLIN (Reuters) - The Rosetta spacecraft ended its historic mission on Friday, crashing on the surface of the dusty, icy comet it has spent 12 years chasing in a hunt that has provided insight into the early days of the solar system and captured the public's imagination. Scientists in the European Space Agency control center in Darmstadt, Germany, clapped and hugged as confirmation of the end of the mission came at 1119 GMT. Rosetta completed its free-fall descent at the speed of a sedate walk, joining the probe Philae, which landed on the comet in November 2014 in what was considered a remarkable feat of precision space travel.

30 Sep 2016 12:41pm GMT

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's annual crop of Nobel Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace is announced in the coming days, beginning with the medicine prize. Oct. 3 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (announced in Stockholm at 0930 GMT at the earliest) Oct. 4 Nobel Prize in Physics (announced in Stockholm at 0945 GMT at the earliest) Oct. 5 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (announced in Stockholm at 0945 GMT at the earliest) Oct. 7 Nobel Peace Prize (announced in Oslo at 0900 GMT) Oct. ...

30 Sep 2016 11:12am GMT

(Reuters) - Nestle believes its Health Science unit will eventually generate annual sales of 10 billion Swiss francs ($10.3 billion). It already has sales of more than 2 billion francs.

30 Sep 2016 6:13am GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) - A team of top scientists is telling world leaders to stop congratulating themselves on the Paris agreement to fight climate change because if more isn't done, global temperatures will likely hit dangerous warming levels in about 35 years.

30 Sep 2016 12:30am GMT

BERLIN (AP) - Scientists began saying their final farewells to the Rosetta space probe Thursday, hours before its planned crash-landing on a comet, but said that data collected during the mission would provide discoveries for many years to come.

29 Sep 2016 6:26pm GMT

By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming is on track to breach a 2 degrees Celsius threshold by 2050 unless governments at least double their efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, scientists said on Thursday. Plans by almost 200 governments to cut greenhouse gases are far too weak to match targets set in a Paris Agreement on climate change last December for a drastic shift from fossil fuels towards greener energies, they said. "We've really got a problem," Robert Watson, a British-American scientist who was among the seven authors of the study and is a former head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Reuters.

29 Sep 2016 4:08pm GMT

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in the United States have successfully treated broken spines and skulls in animals using 3D-printed synthetic bone, opening the possibility of future personalized bone implants for humans to fix dental, spinal other bone injuries. Unlike real bone grafts, the synthetic material - called hyper-elastic bone - is able to regenerate bone without the need for added growth factors, is flexible and strong, and can be easily and rapidly deployed in the operating room. Giving details in a teleconference, the scientists said the results of their animal trials - published on Wednesday in the Science Translational Medicine journal - were "quite astounding".

29 Sep 2016 6:50am GMT

By Irene Klotz GUADALAJARA, Mexico (Reuters) - SpaceX is developing a massive rocket and capsule to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars with the ultimate goal of colonizing the planet, company chief and tech billionaire Elon Musk said on Tuesday. Musk outlined his plans for the Mars rocket, capable of carrying 100 passengers plus cargo per voyage, even as SpaceX is still investigating why a different rocket carrying a $200 million Israeli satellite blew up on a launch pad in Florida earlier this month. SpaceX intends to fly to Mars about every 26 months when Earth and Mars are favorably aligned.

28 Sep 2016 7:19am GMT

In the fast-changing world of science and technology, if you're not innovating, you're falling behind. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ranked #2) were behind some of the most important innovations of the past century, including the development of digital computers and the completion of the Human Genome Project.

28 Sep 2016 4:16am GMT

Astronomers on Monday said they have spotted evidence of water vapor plumes rising from Jupiter's moon Europa, a finding that might make it easier to learn whether life exists in the warm, salty ocean hidden beneath its icy surface. The apparent plumes detected by the Hubble Space Telescope shoot about 125 miles (200 km) above Europa's surface before, presumably, raining material back down onto the moon's surface, NASA said. Europa, considered one of the most promising candidates for life in the solar system beyond Earth, boasts a global ocean with twice as much water as in all of Earth's seas hidden under a layer of extremely cold and hard ice of unknown thickness.

26 Sep 2016 7:44pm GMT

Leprosy has been confirmed in one of two California schoolchildren suspected to have the disease, according to CBS Los Angeles. Health officials were first notified in early September about the two possible cases of leprosy, now usually called Hansen's disease. The diagnosis was confirmed at the National Hansen's Disease Laboratory Research Program (NHDP) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

26 Sep 2016 2:59pm GMT

A majority of Americans now say that a U.S. president should release all of his or her medical information. The poll, which was conducted by Gallup last week, found that a slim majority of Americans, 51 percent, said that a president should release all medical information that might affect that person's ability to serve in office, whereas 46 percent said that a president should have the right to keep those medical records private. The new poll results are a change from the results in 2004, when just 38 percent of Americans said that a president should release all of his or her medical information, and 61 percent said that a president should be able to keep those records private, according to Gallup.

26 Sep 2016 2:59pm GMT

More than 40 people in a Canadian city were treated for an opioid overdose this summer after they smoked crack cocaine that had been contaminated with an opioid drug related to fentanyl, according to a new report. In mid-July, a hospital in the city of Surrey, British Columbia, experienced a large spike in patients needing treatment for an opioid overdose - about 11 patients per day needed treatment, up from the usual four patients per day. Most of the patients had become unconscious after smoking what they thought was crack cocaine, the report said.

26 Sep 2016 2:58pm GMT

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Britain have found a new link between the diversity of bacteria in human poo - the human faecal microbiome - and levels of harmful types of body fat. In research that may help explain why excessive weight problems and obesity tend to run in families, the scientists said high levels of visceral fat - which is linked to risks of chronic disease - were linked to having a relatively small range of bacteria in faeces. People with a high diversity of bacteria in their faeces had lower levels of visceral fat, according to the study published on Monday in the journal Genome Biology.

26 Sep 2016 11:32am GMT

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Britain have found a new link between the diversity of bacteria in human poo - the human fecal microbiome - and levels of harmful types of body fat. In research that may help explain why excessive weight problems and obesity tend to run in families, the scientists said high levels of visceral fat - which is linked to risks of chronic disease - were linked to having a relatively small range of bacteria in faeces. People with a high diversity of bacteria in their faeces had lower levels of visceral fat, according to the study published on Monday in the journal Genome Biology.

26 Sep 2016 11:32am GMT

Although boredom is as familiar a feeling as excitement or fear, science has only begun to understand what makes people bored. Recently, six scientists who emerged after living for a year in isolation on the Mauna Loa volcano as part of the HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) experiment, which simulated the isolation that future space travelers might experience traveling to and living on Mars, said that boredom was their biggest challenge. Boredom "has been understudied until fairly recently, but it's [worth studying] because human experience has consequences for how we interact with each our and our environment," said James Danckert, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in an interview with Live Science.

23 Sep 2016 3:43pm GMT