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NASA gives green light to space walk

International Space Station Commander Gennady Padalka and NASA ISS Science Officer Mike Fincke will leave the Pirs docking compartment’s airlock again Wednesday afternoon for a second try to repair a Station circuit breaker. Mission managers gave formal approval to the Wednesday spacewalk at a Tuesday morning meeting. Its purpose is to restore power to one of the 600-pound gyroscopes that orient the Station in space.

Electronic game use linked to childhood obesity

A new study adds to the evidence that sedentary behaviors are linked to childhood obesity and sheds light on the world-wide dimension of the problem. In their study, researchers present a strong association between playing electronic video games and childhood obesity in school-aged Swiss children. The researchers also found that obesity was associated with television watching, paternal smoking and mother’s working outside the home.

Therapeutic cloning no longer a dream

A member of the team who were the first in the world to produce stem cells from a cloned human embryo told the 20th annual conference of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology today (30 June) that the work could generate potentially unlimited undifferentiated stem cells. These could eventually be used for tissue repair and transplantation medicine.

Deserts and rainforests are equally productive during drought

A team of researchers lreport that, from desert to rainforest, during drought conditions, the maximum rain use efficiency (RUEmax), or effective productivity of plant growth per unit of precipitation converges to a common value. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the International Biological Program (IBP) began to study how water affects productivity in different ecosystems. It was not until this current group of scientists pooled long-term data in a workshop at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at University of California, Santa Barbara that the scope and similarity of productivity in all ecosystems was seen.

Birds show superior listening skills

Canadian researchers have shown that humans just aren’t cut out to discern certain pitches like their feathered friends. Testing completed on humans, rats, and three different species of birds shows that the birds–even ones that have been raised in isolation–are better at identifying, classifying, and memorizing absolute pitches than both humans and rats, with humans performing just slightly better than rats.

Surprise! Dogs poor at brightness discrimination

Dogs’ ability to discriminate brightness is about half as good as that of humans. In research conducted by scientists from the Veterinary University of Vienna and the University of Memphis, dogs showed a surprising lack of ability to discriminate between grey cards that varied in brightness. While a great deal is known about dogs’ visual acuity and the cellular components of their eyes, there is a paucity of information about their ability to discriminate brightness.

NASA to launch rocket built by students

If you build it, they will launch it. That’s been the basic hope of a small team of high school and college students from Ohio and Wyoming who are building a rocket from scratch. NASA will launch their handiwork come the middle of July. About two years ago, three University of Cincinnati aerospace engineering students launched an idea: To design, manufacture parts for, construct and blast off a rocket they’d build from scratch.

Chromosomal chaos linked to cell division abnormalities

Abnormalities in the spindles (the bi-polar thread like structures that link and pull the chromosomes during cell division) of human embryos before implantation may be the primary reason for many of the chromosome defects observed in early human development, researchers report, showing for the first time that such abnormalities occur throughout the development of the pre-implantation embryo.

Speed of light may have changed recently

Well that’s a little upsetting. The truest of constants turns out to be off just a tad. New Scientist has the story. “The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago – and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth. The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the