Live Bullfrog Trade Implicated in Amphibian-Killing Disease

Bullfrogs, often shipped live between continents to be eaten, are spreading the deadly chytrid fungus that is threatening amphibians worldwide, new research indicates.

A team of researchers collected bullfrogs on sale at Asian food stores in seven cities in the United States and found 41 percent of the frogs were infected with the fungus.

The chytrid fungus is harmless to people, but it has caused species declines and even extinctions among amphibians. However, it is not fatal to all amphibians. The fungus doesn't kill the North American bullfrog, the type of frog sampled in this study, making this species an excellent carrier.

Frogs in these U.S. shops are imported live primarily from farms in Taiwan, Brazil and Ecuador. In the United States, the live frogs are then sold for their legs.

The team also looked for fungus at frog farms in Brazil and among several native frog species from Brazil's Atlantic Forest, one of the most amphibian-rich regions in the world.

Their work revealed four new strains of chytrid, also known as Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd. One of these was found on a bullfrog in southeastern Michigan. This frog appeared to have come from a farm in the Atlantic Forest region, where sampling from native frogs revealed that the four strains are common.

By comparing these strains with those described from studies in Japan, the team found Brazilian chytrid had made its way to Japan.

The Brazilian chytrid probably first infected native frogs in Brazil, spread to farms, and from there, around the world, the researchers say. [7 Devastating Infectious Diseases]

The trade in frogs has probably led to the global spread of the disease, said study researcher Timothy James, a University of Michigan evolutionary biologist.

"A lot of the movement of this fungus is related to the live food trade, which is something we should probably stop doing," James said in a statement. "We don’t need to have millions of live frogs being shipped from foreign countries into the United States."

The research was detailed online July 31 in the journal Molecular Ecology.

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7 rare rhinos photographed in western Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A conservationist says seven of the world's rarest rhinoceroses were photographed at a national park in Indonesia. It is the first sighting there in 26 years.

Tarmizi, from the Leuser International Foundation, said Thursday that pictures from movement-triggered cameras identified a male and six female Sumatran rhinos in Aceh province's Leuser National Park as of April.

More than 1,000 images from 28 camera traps were taken since last July. The park's rhino population is estimated to be no more than 27.

There are an estimated 200 Sumatran rhinos living in the wild in small groups in Indonesia and Malaysia, half the number from 15 years ago.

An estimated 70 percent of the population has been lost since 1985, mainly to poaching and loss of habitat.

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25 Companies That Offer Great Work-Life Balance

While most employees are in search of a positive work-life balance, not all companies make that a possibility.

Some, however, are taking steps to ensure their employees have the proper amount of balance in their lives. Among the companies leading the push are MITRE, a not-for-profit organization that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government, and the consulting firm North Highland. The two earned the highest scores on this year's survey of the best companies for work-life balanceby the online jobs and career community Glassdoor.

MITRE employees ranked the company highly for the flexible schedules, generous paid time off and other  perks like an on-site cafeteria and gym, while North Highland got high marks from its staff for the company's family-friendly work environment.

"In today's highly connected world, striving for work-life balance can feel virtually impossible given greater access to our jobs around the clock," said Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor's career and workplace expert. "Companies that make sincere efforts to recognize employees' lives outside of the office will often see the payoff when it comes to recruiting and retaining top talent."

[7 Ways to Improve Your Work-Life Balance]

This year's rankings were based solely on the input of employees who elected to participate in an online company review survey. The survey gathered employee feedback on some of the best and worst reasons to work for their employer.

Other firms in this year's Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance are:

Agilent Technologies                          SAS Institute                                 CareerBuilder REINational Instruments                          LinkedInFactSetUnited Space Alliance                         Rackspace                     Orbitz Worldwide  NovellSusquehanna International Group               Slalom Consulting                              Discover MorningstarWayfair Citrix Systems  Hitachi Data Systems                          Southern California Edison                    Bain & Co.NAVTEQW.L. Gore                                     Fluor                                      

This was the second year in a row for nine of the companies, including MITRE, Agilent Technologies, SAS Institute, National Instruments, FactSet, United Space Alliance, Susquehanna International Group, Slalom Consulting and Morningstar.

This story was provided by BusinessNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Chad Brooks on Twitter @cbrooks76 or BusinessNewsDaily @BNDarticles. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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NASA's 'green' planetary test lander crashes

WASHINGTON (AP) — Earlier this week NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars about 150 million miles away. But on Thursday here on Earth, a test model planetary lander crashed and burned at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just seconds after liftoff.

The spider-like spacecraft called Morpheus was on a test flight at Cape Canaveral when it tilted, crashed to the ground and erupted in flames. It got only a few feet up in the air, NASA said.

NASA spokeswoman Lisa Malone said it appears that the methane-and-liquid oxygen powered lander is a total loss. Nobody was hurt in the unmanned experiment and the flames were put out, she said.

NASA suspects a mechanical device that is part of its GPS navigation system, spokeswoman Brandi Dean said.

So far NASA has spent $7 million on the Morpheus program, but that includes parts for a still-to-be-built second lander.

Morpheus is a prototype for a cheap, environmentally friendly planetary lander. Thursday was the first time it had been tested untethered in a free flight. It had performed 19 flights at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it was designed and made, and one more in Florida, but it was always tethered to a crane, Dean said.

The testing moved from Texas to Florida last week and Morpheus had a successful tether test on Friday. NASA had planned to run tests for three months. The plan was for flights over a specially created field designed to mimic the surface of the moon, with boulders, rocks, slopes and craters.

The lander was built mostly with low-cost, off-the-shelf materials. It was an attempt by NASA to use cheaper, more readily available and environmentally friendly rocket fuel. The space agency was considering it as a potential lander for places like the moon or an asteroid, figuring it would carry a human-like robot or small rover.

NASA promoted Morpheus as a "green" project because methane is more environmentally friendly than the toxic rocket fuels it uses. Methane, which is the main component of natural gas, is also cheaper and could even be made from ice on the moon or Mars, NASA figured.

Morpheus was early in the NASA experimental "test bed" process and the space agency hadn't committed to using the lander in any specific flight, NASA officials said.

NASA has parts and plans to build a second Morpheus lander, Dean said: "Hopefully, we'll be testing again before too long."

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Online

Project Morpheus: http://morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov/

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Women's Migraines Not Linked to Mental Decline: Study

Researchers have some reassuring news for women who suffer from migraines: There is no strong link between the intensely painful headaches and cognitive decline or dementia.

The research out of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston is based on data from 6,349 women ages 45 and older who participated in a health survey. The participants were classified into four groups: no history of migraine, past history of migraine, and continued history of migraine with and without aura. (Auras can cause a person to see flashes of light or feel pins-and-needles sensations before a migraine kicks in.)

After this baseline information was collection, the participants were tested for cognitive function in two-year intervals up to three times. The results, which were published online Aug. 8 in the British Medical Journal, showed no strong relationship between migraines and long-term consequences on cognition, according to the researchers.

"Compared with women with no history of migraine, those who experienced migraine with or without aura did not have significantly different rates of cognitive decline," Pamela Rist, who led the study, explained in a statement from Brigham and Women's Hospital.

"Previous studies on migraines and cognitive decline were small and unable to identify a link between the two," Rist added. "Our study was large enough to draw the conclusion that migraines, while painful, are not strongly linked to cognitive decline."

About 30 million Americans suffer from migraines, but women are three times more likely than men to be impacted by them. The debilitating headaches have been linked to an increased risk of depression and even stroke. Much is still unknown about the chronic condition, but researchers recently found the first genetic link to migraines — a gene variant also found to change the activity of other genes, including one previously linked to disorders such as epilepsy.

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NASA: Mars rover snapped pic of rocket stage crash

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Space enthusiasts have been abuzz for days over whether the Mars rover Curiosity captured an extraterrestrial crash. On Friday, NASA declared the mystery solved.

Seconds after the car-size rover parked its six wheels in an ancient crater, a tiny camera under the chassis snapped a picture revealing a smudge on the horizon. The feature disappeared in a later photo.

Was it dirt on the camera lens or a spinning dust devil? It turned out Curiosity spotted the aftermath of its rocket-powered backpack crash-landing in the distance.

It "was an amazing coincidence that we were able to catch this impact," said engineer Steve Sell of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $2.5 billion mission.

The nuclear-powered rover landed in Gale Crater near the equator Sunday night to study whether environmental conditions could have favored microbes. Its ultimate target is a mountain looming from the crater floor where mineral signatures of water have been spied.

Curiosity performed a novel, complex landing routine. In the final seconds, the rocket stage hovered as cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground. After landing, it cut the cords and the rocket stage flew out of the way, crashing 2,000 feet from the landing site.

Speeding at 100 mph, the high-speed impact kicked up a plume of dust — which showed up in Curiosity's field of view.

Curiosity was in the right place at the right time and facing the right direction, Sell said.

Since the feat, Curiosity has returned a flood of pictures including a 360-degree color view and a low-resolution video featuring the last minutes of its descent. Over the weekend, it will get a software update, a process that will take four days. During the hiatus, stored data will continue to be downloaded.

It will be weeks before Curiosity can take its first drive, zap at boulders or dig up soil in search of the chemical building blocks of life. The prime mission lasts two years.

A preliminary reconstruction of the "seven minutes of terror" plunge through the Martian atmosphere revealed everything went as planned. Curiosity ended up 1 1/2 miles downrange from the bull's-eye target, probably because of tail winds and a late steering turn.

"We're still happy where we landed," said Gavin Mendeck of the NASA Johnson Space Center.

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NASA Rover's New Red Planet Address: Yellowknife, Mars

The patch of Mars where NASA's Curiosity rover touched down Sunday night (Aug. 5) has a name: Yellowknife.

The moniker is a tribute to the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories, a city that has long served as the jumping-off point for geologists interested in studying North America's oldest rocks, scientists said.

"If you ask, 'What is the port of call you leave from to go on the great missions of geological mapping to the oldest rocks in North America?' — it's Yellowknife," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters Friday (Aug. 10).

In the home stretch of Curiosity's eight-month space cruise, Grotzinger and his team divided the rover's predicted landing zone inside Mars' Gale Crater into a set of 151 "quadrangles," each of which measures about 1 mile (0.6 km) on a side.

The idea was to break the work of characterizing the landing zone into manageable chunks. The Curiosity rover landed on Quadrangle 51, which the team has dubbed Yellowknife.

Curiosity's main mission is to determine if the Gale Crater area could ever have supported microbial life. Mars appears hostile to Earth-like life today, at least on the surface. But things might have been different in the past, which is why the rover team is drawing connections with the 2.7-billion-year-old rocks of northwest Canada.

"We went to Mars to really get at the ancient geology, because that's where we think there might be evidence for past environments similar to on Earth," said Curiosity deputy project scientist Joy Crisp, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "So it's connected in that way — simply, ancient rocks that might preserve evidence of past environments favorable for life."

Curiosity will likely be in Yellowknife for a while (the rover won't even take its first drive for two weeks or so), but eventually the six-wheeled robot will leave the quadrangle to explore more of Gale and to investigate Mount Sharp, the mysterious 3-mile-high (5 km) mountain that rises from the crater's center.

The mission team is not in a big rush. Curiosity's prime mission is slated to last about two Earth years, and the rover's nuclear power source may keep it roaming for considerably longer than that if no key parts break down, researchers have said.

Visit SPACE.com for complete coverage of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

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Former astronaut Armstrong has heart surgery

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was recovering from heart surgery, days after his 82nd birthday.

A NASA spokesman talked to Armstrong's wife, Carol, on Wednesday and said only that he was recovering. Armstrong's birthday was Sunday.

It wasn't clear where the surgery occurred or where the former astronaut was recuperating.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden wished Armstrong a quick recovery from cardiac bypass surgery in a Facebook statement.

"Neil's pioneering spirit will surely serve him well in this challenging time and the entire NASA Family is holding the Armstrong family in our thoughts and prayers," the statement said.

Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and he radioed back to Earth the historic news of "one giant leap for mankind." He spent nearly three hours walking on the moon with fellow astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.

A message Wednesday on Aldrin's Twitter account also wished Armstrong well.

Armstrong and his wife married in 1999 and made their home in the Cincinnati suburb of Indian Hill, but he has largely stayed out of public view in recent years.

He spoke at Ohio State University during a February event honoring fellow astronaut John Glenn and the 50th anniversary of Glenn becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. In May, Armstrong joined Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida to support the opening of The National Flight Academy, which aims to teach math and science to kids through an aviation-oriented camp.

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Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight: How to Watch

If you watch one meteor shower all year, then catch the overnight Perseid shooting star display tonight.

This weekend, the annual Perseid meteor shower peaks, sending hundreds of shooting stars flying through the night sky in what many experts call the best shower of the year.

"We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. "The Perseids always put on a good show."

To see the Perseid meteor shower, all you need are your naked eyes and a relatively dark spot to view from. Avoid light pollution if at all possible, as city lights can obscure all but the brightest meteors. And weather conditions such as clouds can also dampen the sights, so if you catch a clear weather window, take advantage of it.

The peak of the meteor shower should occur between midnight and 9 a.m. EDT (0400 and 1300 GMT, or UT) on Sunday, Aug. 12. However, viewing during dark hours between now and the beginning of next week should provide ample meteor sights. The dark hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning should be especially fruitful for meteor hunting. [Spectacular Perseid Meteor Shower Photos]

The shooting stars will appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, named after the ancient Greek hero — hence the name Perseids.

This peak occurs as planet Earth passes through the trail of debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. Bits of rock and ice from the comet slam into Earth's atmosphere, burning up to create short-lived streaks of light that we see as shooting stars. Our planet meets with Swift-Tuttle's trail every year in late July or early August.

This year's pass through the Perseids will be extra-special because of a celestial show going on now. The bright planets Jupiter and Venus, along with the crescent moon, are visible in the night sky alongside the Perseids, offering an especially dazzling sight for stargazers. These planets, and the moon, will be aligned in the eastern sky before dawn Aug. 11 to Aug. 13.

Luckily for observers, the moon should not be bright enough to obscure most meteors, but should provide a complementary celestial wonder to behold.

"Sky watchers say there's nothing prettier than a close encounter between the slender crescent moon and Venus — nothing, that is, except for the crescent moon, Venus and a flurry of Perseids," astronomer Tony Phillips wrote on the Science@NASA website.

Editor's note: If you snap an amazing photo of the 2012 Perseid meteor shower that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send images and comments (including name and location) to managing editor Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com.

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Ouch! July in US was hottest ever in history books

WASHINGTON (AP) — This probably comes as no surprise: Federal scientists say July was the hottest month ever recorded in the Lower 48 states, breaking a record set during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

And even less a surprise: The U.S. this year keeps setting records for weather extremes, based on the precise calculations that include drought, heavy rainfall, unusual temperatures, and storms.

The average temperature last month was 77.6 degrees. That breaks the old record from July 1936 by 0.2 degree, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Records go back to 1895.

"It's a pretty significant increase over the last record," said climate scientist Jake Crouch of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In the past, skeptics of global warming have pointed to the Dust Bowl to argue that recent heat isn't unprecedented. But Crouch said this shows that the current year "is out and beyond those Dust Bowl years. We're rivaling and beating them consistently from month to month."

Three of the nation's five hottest months on record have been recent Julys: This year, 2011 and 2006. Julys in 1936 and 1934 round out the top five.

Last month also was 3.3 degrees warmer than the 20th century average for July.

Thirty-two states had months that were among their 10 warmest Julys, but only one, Virginia, had the hottest July on record. Crouch said that's a bit unusual, but that it shows the breadth of the heat and associated drought.

For example in 2011, the heat seemed to be centered mostly in Oklahoma and Texas. But this summer "the epicenters of the heat kind of migrated around. It kind of got everybody in the action this month," Crouch said.

The first seven months of 2012 were the warmest on record for the nation. And August 2011 through July this year was the warmest 12-month period on record, just beating out the July 2011-June 2012 time period.

But it's not just the heat that's noteworthy. NOAA has a measurement called the U.S. Climate Extreme Index which dates to 1900 and follows several indicators of unusually high and low temperatures, severe drought, downpours, and tropical storms and hurricanes. NOAA calculates the index as a percentage, which mostly reflects how much of the nation experience extremes. In July, the index was 37 percent, a record that beat the old mark for July last year. The average is 20 percent.

For the first seven months of the year, the extreme index was 46 percent, beating the old record from 1934. This year's extreme index was heavily driven by high temperatures both day and night, which is unusual, Crouch said.

"This would not have happened in the absence of human-caused climate change," said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

Crouch and Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said what's happening is a double whammy of weather and climate change. They point to long-term higher night temperatures from global warming and the short-term effect of localized heat and drought that spike daytime temperatures.

Drought is a major player because in the summer "if it is wet, it tends to be cool, while if it is dry, it tends to be hot," Trenberth said.

So the record in July isn't such a big deal, Trenberth said. "But the fact that the first seven months of the year are the hottest on record is much more impressive from a climate standpoint, and highlights the fact that there is more than just natural variability playing a role: Global warming from human activities has reared its head in a way that can only be a major warning for the future."

Here are some more numbers unlikely to provide cold comfort. The coolest July on record was in 1915. The coldest month in U.S. history was January 1979 with an average temperature of 22.6 degrees.

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Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

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