ScienceBlog.com

I found all the great places to see what’s coming in my sky, but it never tells you what way in the sky to look. N S E W? even NASA Ksy Watch didn’t put that info in! Any help? Really want to see the space station! Thanks

NASA engineers successfully activated the Advanced Camera for Surveys at 9:12 a.m. EDT Friday aboard the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope. Checkout was completed at 10:20 a.m. EDT with science observations scheduled to resume Sunday, July 2.

For many women, accumulated sun exposure has already permanently damaged their skin cells, causing them to overproduce pigment that shows up as unsightly dark splotches and uneven skin tone over time. But new research indicates that glucosamine – a compound best known for treating arthritis – can actually help stop the formation of new age spots, and help fade existing ones.

Transparent jellyfish-like creatures known as salps, considered by many a low member in the ocean food web, may be more important to the fate of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the ocean than previously thought. In the May issue of Deep Sea Research, scientists report that salps, about the size of a human thumb, swarming by the billions in “hot spots” may be transporting tons of carbon per day from the ocean surface to the deep sea and keep it from re-entering the atmosphere.

For most people on the planet, the term “psychopath” evokes thoughts of violence and bloodshed – and evil of the darkest kind. But during 25 years, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has built a body of work that may help temper such deeply ingrained perceptions. Sure, people do commit horrific, unimaginable crimes. But does that automatically mean they are psychopathic? And what is “psychopathy” anyway?

A recent study suggests that the fat intake of successful weight losers entering the National Weight Control Registry has increased over the past decade, while carbohydrate intake has declined. This is the finding of a research paper appearing in the April 2006 issue of Obesity Research by researchers at The Miriam Hospital and Brown Medical School, and University of Colorado.

It’s pretty difficult to overlook the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, or even an average-size person dressed in a gorilla suit. But a new study indicates that people who were given a simple visual task while mildly intoxicated were twice as likely to have missed seeing the person in a gorilla suit than were people who were not under the influence of alcohol.

A mysterious shiny coating found on rocks in many of Earth’s arid environments could reveal whether there was once life on Mars, according to new research. The research, published in the July edition of the journal Geology, reveals that the dark coating known as desert varnish creates a record of life around it, by binding traces of DNA, amino acids and other organic compounds to desert rocks. Samples of Martian desert varnish could therefore show whether there has been life on Mars at any stage over the last 4.5 billion years.

A newly established Training and Dissemination Centre (TDcentre) will contribute significantly to the rapid diffusion of scientific knowledge that is being generated by an EU-Integrated Project on RNA Viruses. The TDcentre has now launched its activities with a workshop at the Campus Vienna Biocenter on 28. June. Participants from 15 countries exchanged ideas and facts about the structural analysis of protein domains.

The NBA is introducing a new Official Game Ball for play beginning in the 2006-07 season. The new ball, manufactured by Spalding, features a new design and a new material that together offer better grip, feel, and consistency than the current leather ball. This marks the first change to the ball in over 35 years and only the second in 60 seasons.

This drives astronomers crazy. Every summer, on the one night when millions of Americans are guaranteed to be outside at nightfall, necks craned upward watching the sky, almost no one pays attention to the heavens. It’s all fireworks, fireworks, fireworks. Stars and planets don’t stand a chance. But this 4th of July is different.

Three years after the preliminary results first were presented at a scientific meeting and drew wide attention, University of Utah psychologists have published a study showing that motorists who talk on handheld or hands-free cellular phones are as impaired as drunken drivers.

Three Florida teenagers recently pleaded not guilty to the brutal beatings and in one case, death, of homeless men. One of the beatings was caught on surveillance video and in a most chilling way illustrates how people can degrade socially outcast individuals, enough to engage in mockery, physical abuse, and even murder. According to new research, the brain processes social outsiders as less than human; brain imaging provides accurate depictions of this prejudice at an unconscious level.

Cancer researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have found that a protein known for driving the growth of cancer also plays a surprising role in restoring the ability of neurons to regenerate, making it an important target for addressing spinal cord damage or neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Robotic technology is advancing apace and now a top team of European scientists and engineers hope to make the leap from single function ‘dumb’ machines to adaptive learning machines. The concept of a cognitive robotic companion inspires some of the best science fiction but one day may be science fact following the work of the four-year COGNIRON project funded since January 2004 by the IST’s Future and Emerging Technologies initiative. But what could a cognitive robot companion do?

Patients have been known to hug Lauren Gerson, MD, so overjoyed are they at hearing her words. What does she say to them? Go ahead and eat chocolate. Indulge your passion for spicy cuisine. Drink red wine. Enjoy coffee when you want it, have that orange juice with breakfast and, what the heck, eat a grapefruit, too. Gerson says that for most heartburn patients, there’s insufficient evidence to support the notion that eating these foods will make heartburn worse – or that cutting them out will make it go away.

The importance of molecular diagnostics for cancer treatment is set to increase significantly in coming years, according to a symposium held yesterday in Vienna. The reason for organising the symposium was the acquisition of a cutting-edge microarray analyser as part of the EU OVCAD (Ovarian Cancer Diagnosis) project. The device provides what is currently the most sensitive technology for analysing the activity of all human genes and therefore enables the type and progress of cancers to be determined with previously unattainable levels of accuracy.

For the first time, glaciologists have combined and compared sets of ancient climate records trapped in ice cores from the South American Andes and the Asian Himalayas to paint a picture of how climate has changed – and is still changing – in the tropics.

Building on a series of recent breakthroughs in silicon photonics, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a novel approach to silicon devices that combines light amplification with a photovoltaic – or solar panel – effect.

Hockey players, rejoice! A team of University of Alberta researchers has created technology to regrow teeth–the first time scientists have been able to reform human dental tissue. Using low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS), Dr. Tarak El-Bialy from the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and Dr. Jie Chen and Dr. Ying Tsui from the Faculty of Engineering have created a miniaturized system-on-a-chip that offers a non-invasive and novel way to stimulate jaw growth and dental tissue healing.