Big Bird Helps Scientists Study Brain Development

Children are not the only ones who can learn from Big Bird — brain scans of children and adults watching "Sesame Street" reveal how brains change as they learn reading and math, researchers say.

One goal of brain imaging is discovering more about how children learn. Such an understanding of the building blocks of learning might help diagnose and treat learning difficulties.

For instance, "when children fail to learn mathematics well, there could be a number of different reasons for that — it could be that they have weak concepts of numbers, that they have poor memory, that they have limited attention," researcher Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York, told LiveScience. Brain tests could help determine the precise cause of a kid's math impairments, "because different patterns of brain activity likely accompany each of those different cognitive impairments."

Although scientists currently cannot see what goes on in the brains of children when they are learning in the classroom, Cantlon and her colleagues instead focused on analyzing what happens when kids watched educational television programs.

For the investigation, 27 children between the ages of 4 and 11 joined 20 adults in watching the same 20-minute "Sesame Street" recording as they had their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The video featured a variety of short clips with Big Bird, the Count, Elmo and other stars of the show, and focused on numbers, words, shapes and other subjects. The children then took standardized IQ tests for math and verbal ability. [See Elmo Video]

"This took three years," Cantlon said. "Working with children can be challenging ... It also took time for us to get the analyses right."

Using statistical algorithms, the researchers created "neural maps" of the thought processes for the children and the adults and compared the groups. Children whose neural maps more closely resembled those of adults scored better on standardized math and verbal tests, showing that the brain's neural structure, like other parts of the body, apparently develops along predictable pathways as people mature. [Inside the Brain: A Photo Journey Through Time]

This research also confirmed where these developing abilities are located in the brain. For math, adultlike neural patterns in the intraparietal sulcus, a region of the brain involved with the processing of numbers, were linked to higher scores. For verbal tasks, more mature patterns in Broca's area, which is linked to speech and language, predicted better verbal test scores in children.

Normal activities such as TV watching may be a better way of learning about "neural maturity" than the short and simple tasks typical of fMRI studies. For instance, when the children matched simple pictures of faces, numbers, words or shapes, the neural responses of the children did not predict their test scores like watching "Sesame Street" did, the researchers said.

The researchers stress "that these results do not mean that there is anything special about 'Sesame Street' in particular," Cantlon said. "We chose 'Sesame Street' because it is mainstream. There are likely lots of stimuli that could yield the same result."

Still, while this research does not advocate watching television, it does show that "neural patterns during an everyday activity like watching television are related to a person's intellectual maturity," Cantlon said. "It's not the case that if you put a child in front of an educational TV program that nothing is happening — that the brain just sort of zones out. Instead, what we see is that the patterns of neural activity that children are showing are meaningful and related to their intellectual abilities."

Future studies can help pinpoint what areas might be linked with difficulties with learning math or verbal tasks. Research could also see if educational television shows are better than noneducational shows at eliciting math- and verbal-related brain activity, Cantlon said.

Cantlon and her colleague Rosa Li detailed their findings online Jan. 3 in the journal PLOS Biology.

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Scientists urge end to limits on gun safety research

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Research restrictions pushed by the National Rifle Association have stopped the United States from finding solutions to firearms violence, more than a hundred scientists from virtually every major U.S. university told Vice President Joe Biden's task force on gun violence in a letter on Thursday.

In the wake of the December school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, and other mass homicides, the group of economists, health researchers, educators, doctors and criminologists said funding should be restored to a range of study areas, from gun safety to tracking illegal guns.

President Barack Obama has asked Biden to head a task force to come up with gun policy proposals, and Biden was to meet with NRA representatives on Thursday. He said the task force will have recommendations ready for the president by Tuesday.

"While mortality rates from almost every major cause of death declined dramatically over the past half century, the homicide rate in America today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1950," the academics wrote in a letter organized by scholars at the University of Chicago Crime Lab research center.

"Politically-motivated constraints" left the nation "muddling through" a problem that costs American society on the order of $100 billion per year, it said.

The federal Centers for Disease Control has cut firearms safety research by 96 percent since the mid-1990s, according to one estimate. Congress, pushed by the gun lobby, in 1996 put restrictions on CDC funding of gun research into the budget. Restrictions on other agencies were added in later years.

The NRA, the main lobbyist for gun rights, has taken credit for the research halt. "These junk science studies and others like them are designed to provide ammunition for the gun control lobby by advancing the false notion that legal gun ownership is a danger to the public health instead of an inalienable right," it said in 2011.

Research into links between teenagers' use of guns and alcohol, and firearm storage practices, were examples the gun rights group cited, arguing that the studies were meant to show gun ownership was a "disease."

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment ahead of the letter's release.

'ANTI-GUN PROPAGANDA'

A political fight over firearms research has waxed and waned for years. Public health researchers began digging into gun violence in the late 1980s as homicides surged. By 1996, the NRA and allies had concluded that the work was producing "anti-gun propaganda."

Congress in 1996 nearly cut the CDC budget by $2.6 million, the amount the agency spent on firearms research at the time, researchers say. The funds were later restored, but a restriction was added to the budget and remains.

"None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control," the budget read.

Similar language was added to the budget in 2011 for the National Institute of Health and other federal health agencies.

Officials have largely pulled the plug on gun research.

A forthcoming study by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's group, estimates that CDC funding for such research was cut to $100,000 a year in 2009-2012 from an average of $2.5 million, in current dollars, in 1992-1996.

Gun related studies as a percentage of total peer-reviewed research dropped 60 percent, the mayors' group estimates.

"Scientific inquiry in this field has been systematically starved, and as a result almost no one does it," said emergency room physician and University of California, Davis, professor Garen Wintemute, who signed the letter. He estimated that there were fewer than a dozen researchers in the country whose primary commitment was to firearm violence prevention.

Separate federal actions have stopped federal law enforcement officials from collecting, keeping and distributing gun ownership data. Wintemute said that made it much more difficult to effectively study gun trafficking.

Without the research, there is no clear evidence of what to do to curb gun-related violence, the scientists said. Gun rights advocates put the matter differently, saying there is no evidence that gun control works.

The letter will be available on the University of Chicago Crime Lab's Web site, http://crimelab.uchicago.edu.

(Reporting By Peter Henderson; Editing by Martin Howell and Vicki Allen)

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Warp Speed: What Hyperspace Would Really Look Like

The science fiction vision of stars flashing by as streaks when spaceships travel faster than light isn't what the scene would actually look like, a team of physics students says.

Instead, the view out the windows of a vehicle traveling through hyperspace would be more like a centralized bright glow, calculations show.

The finding contradicts the familiar images of stretched out starlight streaking past the windows of the Millennium Falcon in "Star Wars" and the Starship Enterprise in "Star Trek." In those films and television series, as spaceships engage warp drive or hyperdrive and approach the speed of light, stars morph from points of light to long streaks that stretch out past the ship.

But passengers on the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise actually wouldn't be able to see stars at all when traveling that fast, found a group of physics Masters students at England's University of Leicester. Rather, a phenomenon called the Doppler Effect, which affects the wavelength of radiation from moving sources, would cause stars' light to shift out of the visible spectrum and into the X-ray range, where human eyes wouldn't be able to see it, the students found. [How Interstellar Space Travel Works (Infographic)]

"The resultant effects we worked out were based on Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, so while we may not be used to them in our daily lives, Han Solo and his crew should certainly understand its implications," Leicester student Joshua Argyle said in a statement.

The Doppler Effect is the reason why an ambulance's siren sounds higher pitched when it's coming at you compared to when it's moving away — the sound's frequency becomes higher, making its wavelength longer, and changing its pitch.

The same thing would happen to the light of stars when a spaceship began to move toward them at significant speed. And other light, such as the pervasive glow of the universe called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is left over from the Big Bang, would be shifted out of the microwave range and into the visible spectrum, the students found.

"If the Millennium Falcon existed and really could travel that fast, sunglasses would certainly be advisable," said research team member Riley Connors. "On top of this, the ship would need something to protect the crew from harmful X-ray radiation."

The increased X-ray radiation from shifted starlight would even push back on a spaceship traveling in hyperdrive, the team found, slowing down the vehicle with a pressure similar to the force felt at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, such a spacecraft would need to carry extra energy reserves to counter this pressure and press ahead.

Whether the scientific reality of these effects will be taken into consideration on future Star Wars films is still an open question.

"Perhaps Disney should take the physical implications of such high speed travel into account in their forthcoming films," said team member Katie Dexter.

Connors, Dexter, Argyle, and fourth team member Cameron Scoular published their findings in this year's issue of the University of Leicester's Journal of Physics Special Topics.

You can follow SPACE.com assistant managing editor Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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Scientist Proposes to Girlfriend in Amazing Northern Lights Time-Lapse Video

Dazzling green, purple and turquoise auroras glimmer in the sky over Iceland while a man proposes to his girlfriend in a new time-lapse video.

Neuroscientist Alex Rivest shot the amazing aurora time-lapse video, which featured his own proposal, over several days and nights in September 2012.

"On a trip to Iceland I asked my girlfriend to marry me under the aurora borealis," Rivest wrote in a video caption. "She said yes."

The couple is seen hugging after Rivest bows down on one knee toward the end of the footage, all while gorgeous displays of the Northern Lights dance in the night sky.

"Iceland is a pretty amazing place to watch the stars and the aurora," Rivest told SPACE.com.

The aurora borealis, as well as its Southern Hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis, is created when charged particles from the sun hit atoms in Earth's high-altitude atmosphere, which are directed by the planet's magnetic field. The resulting light show has been dubbed the northern lights in the north, and the southern lights in the south.

Rivest has a Ph.D. from MIT and studies how brains form episodic memories. Rivest is also the founder of a non-profit called Blue Kitabu, which works to build sustainable schools in Ghana and Kenya. And of course, he's also an avid photographer and videographer.

The aurora time-lapse was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 40D, using a triggering device from pclix.com.

This isn't the first time an astronomical event has served as a backdrop for a marriage proposal caught on video. Last year, stargazer Shookie Basuroy proposed to girlfriend Rajeep while watching a total solar eclipse from a hot air balloon above Cairns, Australia, on Nov. 14.

Rajeep, like Rivest's girlfriend, said "yes."

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+

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Saving Lives in Serenity: Can a Fanboy and Physics Change a Movie?

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Weightlessness no cure for "morning clumsies," astronaut says

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Like many people, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield confesses that he's sometimes clumsy in the morning just after waking up.

The three-time astronaut, now living aboard the International Space Station, was surprised to learn that did not change in the weightless environment of space.

"When I come out of my sleeping berth to go into our galley and our bathroom, I bump into things even though I'm floating weightless," the 53-year-old pilot told reporters during an in-flight press conference on Thursday.

"You can still have the morning clumsies up here and that surprised me," said Hadfield, who is in line to become the first Canadian commander of the orbital outpost in March.

Hadfield has been sharing his experiences in orbit with a growing flock of Twitter followers. His "Cmdr_Hadfield" Twitter account has added more than 130,000 new subscribers since the astronaut blasted off on December 19 for a six-month stay on the station.

"What we're doing on the space station is fundamentally fascinating ... It encapsulates where we are in history, with people permanently living off Earth. With these new technologies and communications, we can directly give people the human side of that," said Hadfield, who now has more than 163,000 followers.

In between Twitter posts about false fire alarms and fixing the station's toilet, Hadfield has been sharing photographs taken from his unique vantage point 250 miles above Earth.

His favorite subject so far has been so-called noctilucent, or "night shining" clouds that form at the outermost edge of Earth's atmosphere.

These tenuous patches of ice crystals are barely visible from the planet's surface, but sparkle clearly in orbit, Hadfield said.

"The light bounces off of those clouds directly into our eyes," he said.

In addition to the beautiful colors, textures and ripples, Hadfield said the clouds also are a way to monitor changes in the atmosphere and learn more about how the atmosphere interacts with space.

That vantage point from orbit extends beyond visual perception, he added.

"The world just unrolls itself for you, and you see it absolutely discretely as one place. It's hard to reconcile the inherent patience and beauty of the world with the terrible things that we can do to each other as people and can do to the Earth itself," Hadfield said.

"With increased communication, with increased understanding comes a more global perspective and it's one that we feel incredibly honored to see directly and one that we do our best to try to pass on to everybody," he said.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Dan Grebler)

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'Zombie' Planet's Rogue Orbit Around Star Shocks Scientists

The unbalanced orbit of a so-called "zombie planet" in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet's behavior.

New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross through a vast minefield of dusty debris. 

"We are shocked. This is not what we expected," said study leader Paul Kalas, an astronomer with the University of California at Berkeley and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., in a statement Tuesday (Jan. 8).

'Zombie planet' gets weirder

Fomalhaut b is a giant alien planet that is nearly three times the mass of Jupiter. It was the first alien planet ever directly imaged in visible light. The planet orbits the dust-shrouded star Fomalhaut and is located about 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. 

In October, scientists dubbed the world a "zombie planet" because it appeared to rise from the academic grave. After first being discovered in 2008, subsequent studies suggested the planet was nothing more than a huge dust cloud. In 2012, astronomers resurrected Fomalhaut b's planet status when new observations proved there was a planetary object embedded in a free-floating dust cloud. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The latest observations of the odd planetary system revealed that the dusty debris disk surrounding the star Fomalhaut is much wider than previously thought. The debris belt spans a vast region of space between 14 billion and 20 billion miles (22.5 billion to 32.1 billion kilometers) around the star.

Stranger still: The planet Fomalhaut b appears to approach with 4.6 billion miles (7.4 billion km) of its star at the closest point in its orbit, then swing way out to a point about 27 billion miles (43.4 billion km) away at the farthest point. Scientists call the extremes of such a planet’s path a highly eccentric orbit.

Fomalhaut b's path, scientists say, sends the planet crashing through the surrounding debris disk during its 2,000-year orbit around its parent star. The research was unveiled Tuesday at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif.

A hidden planet around Fomalhaut?

Among the several theories to explain Fomalhaut b's extreme orbit is the possibility that the exoplanet had an encounter with another planet, a yet-to-be discovered neighbor. The cosmic close encounter could have gravitationally ejected Fomalhaut b into its current orbit, scientists said.

"Hot Jupiters get tossed through scattering events, where one planet goes in and one gets thrown out," study co-investigator Mark Clampin, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.  "This could be the planet that gets thrown out."

Hubble telescope images revealed an apparent gap in the dust and ice debris around Fomalhaut, a region that could have been swept clean by the presence of the undetected planet, researchers said.

Another theory suggests that Fomalhaut b could have once had a small dwarf planet as a neighbor, but that the giant planet obliterated the smaller world in a catastrophic collision. Such a crash could explain why the star Fomalhaut has a narrow outer debris disk that is less than 10,000 years old, scientists said.

Does Fomalhaut b have rings?

Another tantalizing theory suggests Fomalhaut b may have Saturn-like rings and be destined for a spectacular crash through the debris disk around the star Fomalhaut in the year 2032. [Photos of Saturn’s Glorious Rings]

A set of rings or a nearby shroud of dust and ice could explain why Fomalhaut b appears so bright in visible light images, but is relatively dim in infrared light, according to Kalas. The rings or dust around the planet would reflect starlight, making the planet bright. A dust cloud could be created impacts on moons around Fomalhaut b, if they exist, researchers said.

In 2032, astronomers expect to solve one riddle that has perplexed scientists since Fomalhaut b's discovery: Is the exoplanet in the plane of the debris disk around its star, or not?

If the planet is on the same plane as the debris disk, than it will be bombarded by dust and ice in 2032 when it crosses through the disk during the outbound leg of its orbit, researchers said. That would make the planet increase its brightness in infrared light, they added. Impacts from the debris could create a celestial light show on the planet similar to that seen on Jupiter when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 battered the gas giant in 1994.

If Fomalhaut b is not in the same plane as the debris disk, then it should gradually get dimmer as it gets farther and farther from its parent star, researchers said. One way or another, the clues should come out starting in 2032, scientists said.

Hubble telescope officials said astronomers plan to continue to monitor the Fomalhaut star system over the next few years and decades to see how the star system changes over time.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Big Chill vs. Global Warming: What's Going On?

The recent, rare snow in Jerusalem and parts of Lebanon, along with freezing temperatures for Southern California have not nixed the reality of climate change. The planet is warming, and chilled weather doesn't negate that fact, say climate experts.

In fact, such "rare" storms are expected in a warming world.

"As the globe warms, regions of the Earth that have cold winters will still have cold winters, and we will still see the random rolls of the weather dice, like we are seeing this winter," climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University told LiveScience. "But climate change is loading the weather dice, so that 'sixes' are becoming more common, and 'ones' are becoming less common."   

No single weather event can be pegged to climate change, which is a long-term trend that over time affects weather, and it affects the weather in different regions in different ways. Rather, as the planet warms, the chances of an extreme-weather event, including very large snowfalls, increase. That is, the dice are loaded for extreme events. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

"Climate is the statistics of weather over the long term," Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University, told LiveScience last year. "No specific weather event can by itself confirm or disprove the body of scientific knowledge associated with climate change."

Global warming with a side of chill

A big chill crept over California this weekend, with temperatures in a San Diego county dipping to 23 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 degrees Celsius), breaking a record set in 2007. And, according to news reports and the National Weather Service, San Diego beaches may have gotten a coating of morning frost, while a freeze warning remains in effect until Tuesday morning for the San Joaquin Valley.

Meanwhile, a storm system dumped 4-6 inches (10-15 centimeters) of snow on Jerusalem last week, killing at least eight people. And sleet and freezing rain will stretch across parts of the Southeast today and Tuesday, according to weather.com. [The World's Weirdest Weather]

Amidst the chilly headlines, however, Earth continues to break heat records left and right. "It's easy to cherry pick and find places that might be unusually cold at any given time, for example Southern California right now," Mann told LiveScience in an email. "But meanwhile, daffodils are coming up in Cincinnati.

"Over the past decade, we have seen daily records for all-time warmth broken twice as often as daily records for all-time cold," Mann wrote. "The year 2012 had the highest ratio we have ever recorded, more than four to one. That's like 'sixes' coming up four times as often as 'ones.'"

Here's how cold temperatures and snowfall can abound in some regions while the Earth warms: Warm air holds more moisture than its cold counterpart. That means if the temperature is low enough, "those warmer winters will counter-intuitively favor larger snowfall events," Mann explained.

And modest cooling is expected to result from global warming in some regions. For instance, Mann explained, models forecast a slowdown of the warm, poleward-moving ocean current in the North Atlantic, a slowing that will modestly cool that part of the ocean.

Most of Earth getting hotter

"But these are highly seasonal and regional effects," Mann said. "The vast majority of the globe will warm substantially over the next century, likely with profound negative consequences, if we continue to heat the planet by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations through fossil-fuel burning."

In fact, at least in the United States, 2012 was the hottest year on record, smashing the previous warmest year, 1998. And the past decade set itself apart in terms of extreme weather, from heat waves and drought to flooding, something scientists say can be, in part, attributed to climate change.

"It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropocentric global warming," study researchers wrote in the March 25, 2012, issue of the journal Nature Climate Change. In that study, two scientists reviewed extreme weather events going back to 2000 as well as research into possible connections with global warming.

Since 1950, human-caused climate change seems to have brought on more extreme weather, with even more such extremes expected this century, reported the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body charged with assessing climate change, in 2011.

So far this year, the United States has set 630 records for highest maximum temperature versus 114 records for lowest minimum temperature, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

"When you step back and look at what is happening overall, it is very clear that we are seeing overall warming, and a dramatic increase in record-breaking heat around the world," said Mann, pointing out the record heat and wildfires happening in Australia right now and the record heat experienced in the United States this past summer.

"They are both symptomatic of the perceptible and profound impact that climate change is already having on our weather," Mann added.

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Why America's Kids Need New Standards for Science Education

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DNA pioneer James Watson takes aim at "cancer establishments"

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A day after an exhaustive national report on cancer found the United States is making only slow progress against the disease, one of the country's most iconic - and iconoclastic - scientists weighed in on "the war against cancer." And he does not like what he sees.

James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, lit into targets large and small. On government officials who oversee cancer research, he wrote in a paper published on Tuesday in the journal Open Biology, "We now have no general of influence, much less power ... leading our country's War on Cancer."

On the $100 million U.S. project to determine the DNA changes that drive nine forms of cancer: It is "not likely to produce the truly breakthrough drugs that we now so desperately need," Watson argued. On the idea that antioxidants such as those in colorful berries fight cancer: "The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer."

That Watson's impassioned plea came on the heels of the annual cancer report was coincidental. He worked on the paper for months, and it represents the culmination of decades of thinking about the subject. Watson, 84, taught a course on cancer at Harvard University in 1959, three years before he shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for his role in discovering the double helix, which opened the door to understanding the role of genetics in disease.

Other cancer luminaries gave Watson's paper mixed reviews.

"There are a lot of interesting ideas in it, some of them sustainable by existing evidence, others that simply conflict with well-documented findings," said one eminent cancer biologist who asked not to be identified so as not to offend Watson. "As is often the case, he's stirring the pot, most likely in a very productive way."

There is wide agreement, however, that current approaches are not yielding the progress they promised. Much of the decline in cancer mortality in the United States, for instance, reflects the fact that fewer people are smoking, not the benefits of clever new therapies.

GENETIC HOPES

"The great hope of the modern targeted approach was that with DNA sequencing we would be able to find what specific genes, when mutated, caused each cancer," said molecular biologist Mark Ptashne of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The next step was to design a drug to block the runaway proliferation the mutation caused.

But almost none of the resulting treatments cures cancer. "These new therapies work for just a few months," Watson told Reuters in a rare interview. "And we have nothing for major cancers such as the lung, colon and breast that have become metastatic."

The main reason drugs that target genetic glitches are not cures is that cancer cells have a work-around. If one biochemical pathway to growth and proliferation is blocked by a drug such as AstraZeneca's Iressa or Genentech's Tarceva for non-small-cell lung cancer, said cancer biologist Robert Weinberg of MIT, the cancer cells activate a different, equally effective pathway.

That is why Watson advocates a different approach: targeting features that all cancer cells, especially those in metastatic cancers, have in common.

One such commonality is oxygen radicals. Those forms of oxygen rip apart other components of cells, such as DNA. That is why antioxidants, which have become near-ubiquitous additives in grocery foods from snack bars to soda, are thought to be healthful: they mop up damaging oxygen radicals.

That simple picture becomes more complicated, however, once cancer is present. Radiation therapy and many chemotherapies kill cancer cells by generating oxygen radicals, which trigger cell suicide. If a cancer patient is binging on berries and other antioxidants, it can actually keep therapies from working, Watson proposed.

"Everyone thought antioxidants were great," he said. "But I'm saying they can prevent us from killing cancer cells."

'ANTI-ANTIOXIDANTS'

Research backs him up. A number of studies have shown that taking antioxidants such as vitamin E do not reduce the risk of cancer but can actually increase it, and can even shorten life. But drugs that block antioxidants - "anti-antioxidants" - might make even existing cancer drugs more effective.

Anything that keeps cancer cells full of oxygen radicals "is likely an important component of any effective treatment," said cancer biologist Robert Benezra of Sloan-Kettering.

Watson's anti-antioxidant stance includes one historical irony. The first high-profile proponent of eating lots of antioxidants (specifically, vitamin C) was biochemist Linus Pauling, who died in 1994 at age 93. Watson and his lab mate, Francis Crick, famously beat Pauling to the discovery of the double helix in 1953.

One elusive but promising target, Watson said, is a protein in cells called Myc. It controls more than 1,000 other molecules inside cells, including many involved in cancer. Studies suggest that turning off Myc causes cancer cells to self-destruct in a process called apoptosis.

"The notion that targeting Myc will cure cancer has been around for a long time," said cancer biologist Hans-Guido Wendel of Sloan-Kettering. "Blocking production of Myc is an interesting line of investigation. I think there's promise in that."

Targeting Myc, however, has been a backwater of drug development. "Personalized medicine" that targets a patient's specific cancer-causing mutation attracts the lion's share of research dollars.

"The biggest obstacle" to a true war against cancer, Watson wrote, may be "the inherently conservative nature of today's cancer research establishments." As long as that's so, "curing cancer will always be 10 or 20 years away."

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Peter Cooney)

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Global Warming Brings Earlier Spring Flowers

The warmest springs on record caused flowers to bloom at their earliest dates in decades at two historic sites, according to new research.

The findings, published online today (Jan. 16) in the journal PLoS ONE, show just how much climate change has altered ecosystems throughout the temperate areas of the United States. The study used 161-year-old data on flowering times from Henry David Thoreau's notebooks, as well as nearly 80-year-old data from the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold.

Scientists had previously described the Thoreau records but they hadn't combined the two naturalists' findings until now.

"Record warm temperatures (in 2010 and 2012) have resulted in record early flowering times," said study researcher Elizabeth Ellwood of Boston University. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

Famous naturalists

Henry David Thoreau was one of the most iconic figures of the 19th century. The famous naturalist and poet wrote the book "Walden" about his years living at idyllic Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. Starting in 1852 and at different points throughout his life, he also created the first "spreadsheets of flowering dates" for many well-known flowers, including the wild columbine, the pink-lady slipper orchid and the marsh marigold, Ellwood said.

Similarly, the naturalist Leopold took detailed records of first flowering times at a site called "The Shack" in wilderness near the Wisconsin River, starting in 1935.

"It's the iconic equivalent to Walden Pond for Wisconsinites," Ellwood told LiveScience.

While scholars knew of these flowering observations, many were scattered in different libraries and archives, and no one had systematically analyzed their patterns, she said.

Hotter springs, earlier blooms

To do so, Ellwood and her colleagues gathered all of Thoreau's flowering records from several archives. They then compared flowering dates with spring temperatures for 32 different flowering plants.

They found that as temperatures warmed over the last 161 years, the date of first blooms of the season crept forward, too — about 10 days earlier than when Thoreau first visited the site. During the record-breaking years of 2010 and 2012, flowering happened a full 20 to 21 days earlier. The average spring temperature at Walden Pond has increased about 6 degrees Fahrenheit (3.4 degrees Celsius) since Thoreau's time.

Similarly, at The Shack, as average spring temperatures rose about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 degrees Celsius) over the last eight decades, first flowering came a week early for the 23 species they studied. During the hottest years in the United States (2010 and 2012), flowering came 24 days earlier than in Leopold's time.

Still adapting

The research may have tracked just two sites, but has broad implications, said Elizabeth Wolkovich, a climate change ecologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study.

"One is deep within the country and one is on the coast," Wolkovich said.

That means the findings probably apply to temperate climates throughout a large swath of the United States, she told LiveScience.

Though Thoreau and Leopold's works have highlighted how much climate change alters ecosystems, in some ways, the findings are good news.

At some point, the climate will get too hot for plants to survive without evolving, but the fact that the plant flowering time is still changing in step with the temperature means they haven't hit that point yet, said David Inouye, a University of Maryland biologist who was not involved in the study.

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Science Fiction Aims to Fund Real Weapon

Can a science fiction book's sales fund development of a futuristic laser weapon? A physicist hopes to find out with his "Dragon Empire" book that envisions such a weapon helping to fend off a Chinese invasion during a future war.

The "Dragon Empire" book imagines how lasers, hypersonic missiles, stealth aircraft and satellite weapons might influence a huge war between China, the U.S. and U.S. allies in 2025. But the book's real purpose is to help fund Lightning Gun Inc., a startup aimed at making laser weapons capable of knocking out guided missiles with electronics-disabling electromagnetic pulses (EMPs).

"I never had a good idea for an entire fiction book until I started to realize that if directed energy weapons did nullify the effect of guided missile technology, then all of warfare would be changed — especially strategy and tactics," said Adam Weigold, founder and CEO of Lightning Gun Inc.

Weigold hopes to raise $20,000 on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to get professional editing and marketing for the book's planned release in November. The book's sales would ideally represent one way for Lightning Gun to fund large-scale laser experiments by raising $2 million over the next few years.

How to make a laser weapon

The U.S. military has investigated the idea of laser-powered EMPs in the past. High-energy lasers can create an ionized ball of plasma by ripping electrons from molecules in the air — enough to generate a small EMP pulse that could knock out the electronic sensors and guidance systems of missiles. That means an F-35 fighter jet armed with a kilowatt-class laser could theoretically become invincible against a swarm of missiles.

But earlier experiments faltered because the lasers could not focus accurately over greater distances to ensure an EMP knockout blow. Differences in air pressure, clouds and smoky conditions can throw the laser targeting off by 98 to 164 feet (30 to 50 meters) over a firing distance of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer), whereas the laser-powered EMP can only hit targets about 7 to 16 feet (2 to 5 meters) within range of the laser's focal point. [Video: Navy Fires Laser HEL On Target Vessel]

"Our patent-pending technology not only dramatically improves the focal accuracy of the laser plasma but helps to focus the EMP energy produced directly at the target," Weigold told TechNewsDaily.

If Lightning Gun can raise about $300,000 to $500,000 to set itself up, Weigold plans to apply for U.S. Department of Defense funding through the small business innovation research program that requires companies to have established employees and security clearances. The Australian-born physicist has already moved his startup to the U.S. and unofficially recruited several physicists and engineers.

Such research may come with even greater uncertainties than the average Kickstarter project — Weigold acknowledges that there is no guarantee that Lightning Gun can successfully scale its experimental results up to the kilowatt power levels needed for a viable weapon. But he hopes successful funding and testing can lead to an operational weapon within three or four years.

A future world at war

Luckily, Kickstarter donors don't have to worry about the research project's likelihood of success or failure. They just have to decide if they like Weigold's storytelling enough to donate $10 and up to preorder their copy of the final book. (A 5-chapter sample of "Dragon Empire" sets the stage for China's fleets to launch simultaneous strikes on Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Hawaii even as the first U.S. female president is sworn into office.)

The "Dragon Empire" story reflects a future in which China's hardliners win the battle for control over more liberal politicians, Weigold said. He envisions a full-scale war as more of a "worst-case scenario" in reality, but pointed to the possibility for smaller conflicts as the U.S. moves to enhance cooperation with its Pacific allies and China faces territorial disputes with neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Whatever the future, Weigold sees laser-powered EMP (LEMP) and other energy weapons as game-changing military technologies. "Remote weapons" such as guided missiles and drones have become dominant offensive weapons capable of dealing out death and damage from afar, but laser weapons offer the possibility of a cost-effective defense against missiles and drones in the future.

"I think as laser weapons (and LEMP) become smaller and cheaper, they have the real potential to offer defenders "remote shielding," which will be the first real challenge to the era of remote weapons," Weigold said.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. You can follow TechNewsDaily Senior Writer Jeremy Hsu on Twitter @jeremyhsu. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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National Lab Scientist Recognized for Solar Silicon Research

In 2010, scientist Howard Branz, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was part of a team honored for reducing reflection waste by turning silicon cells black. Now, Branz has been honored again -- this time for his work on thin films and nanostructures -- by the American Physical Society. Here are the details.

* Branz was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, an honor bestowed yearly on fewer than one-half of 1 percent of the organization's 50,000 members, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reported this week.

* According to the laboratory, Branz was elected for his research on "thin film silicon: defects, metastability, growth processing, nano-structuring and solar cells."

* The award in 2010 for black silicon was given to Branz's National Center for Photovoltaics team by R&D 100 Magazine after the team showed that the process of turning silicon black produced a confirmed record of 18.2 percent efficiency for a nano solar cell.

* In 2010, Branz also won the Southeast Regional Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer.

* Described as a talented, productive scientist who is gifted at creating novel renewable energy technology, and a brilliant research organizer, Branz has been recognized worldwide for research in nano-structured anti-reflection silicon, solar hydrogen production and defects and diffusion in semiconductors, the national laboratory reported.

* Branz was also recently named to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Research Fellows Council , which advises the lab on enhancing the quality and defining the direction of science and technology. A spot on the 10-member council is reserved for those who have national and international recognition in their fields of science.

* Branz obtained his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1987. He has published 106 journal articles and 104 conference papers.

* Branz also has 17 patents issued or applied for and five pending National Renewable Energy Laboratory Records of Invention.

* The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, based in Golden, Colo., is operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

* The American Physical Society is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. Its membership includes physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry throughout the world.

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'Mars Flower' Photo Puzzles Scientists

An odd flower-like feature spotted on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover continues to perplex researchers, who nevertheless stress that its origins are not biological.

The object garnered a lot of attention after Curiosity photographed it last month, with many Internet users quickly dubbing it the "Mars flower." The feature is actually a rounded, light-colored pebble slightly larger than a grain of sand, but determining its precise mineralogical makeup would require more information, researchers said.

"It could be a lot of things, but without some chemical information to back me up, I'd really hesitate to say what it is," Aileen Yingst, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., told reporters today (Jan. 15).

"I'm not trying to be cagey," added Yingst, the deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. "I'm just trying to be clear that a light grain could be a lot of different things."

The so-called Mars flower juts from a rock near an outcrop mission scientists have named "John Klein," in honor of a former Curiosity deputy project manager who died in 2011. The car-size rover is preparing to use its drill for the first time in the area, boring into a John Klein rock over the next two weeks or so.

The outcrop and its environs show many signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water, including water-deposited mineral veins that fill fissures in the rock. John Klein is thus a suitable drilling target for Curiosity, whose main goal is to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

The Mars flower is not a sign of life, but it does add to the site's intrigue, researchers said.

"It does indicate that you have, you know, a relatively diverse set of grains just in this one sample," Yingst said.

The 1-ton Curiosity rover landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5, 2012. NASA officials have called the six-wheeled robot the most capable planetary explorer ever launched. It carries 17 different cameras and 10 science instruments, including gear that can detect organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.

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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Happy Birthday, Buzz Aldrin! Apollo 11 Moonwalker Is 83 Today

Famed space man Buzz Aldrin, the second person ever to walk on the moon, is celebrating his 83rd birthday today (Jan. 20) in cosmic style.

Aldrin, who along with Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong boldly walked where no one had before in 1969, is marking his birthday on the road with a trip to England.

"I'm heading home today if the UK weather allows," Aldrin wrote in a post on Twitter today, where he writes as @TheRealBuzz.

This month, Aldrin helped launch the AXE Space Academy, a private spaceflight competition that aims to launch 22 people on suborbital spaceflights as part a deal with the space tourism company Space Expedition Curacao and XCOR Aerospace, which is building the Lynx space plane  to be used on the flights.

"Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience," Aldrin said during the project's launch this month.

But Buzz Aldrin is likely most well-known for his role on NASA's Apollo 11 mission, which made the first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969, when and Armstrong landed on the moon and performed the first moonwalk. Aldrin served as lunar module pilot for the Apollo 11 mission, with Armstrong commanded the mission. Astronaut Michael Collins, meanwhile, served as command module pilot and remained in orbit around the moon during the landing. Armstrong died at age 82 last year.

Aldrin is a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force and flew combat missions in Korea before joining NASA's astronaut corps in 1963 as one of the space agency's third group of astronauts. He was born Edwin Aldrin ("Buzz" was originally a nickname) in Montclair, N.J., and earned a Ph.D. in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [Photos of Buzz Aldrin at NASA]

Aldrin's fist space mission, Gemini 12, launched on Nov. 11, 1966, sending him and astronaut James Lovell on a four-day mission to test spacewalk methods, among other goals. It was the final mission of NASA's Gemini program, allowing the space agency to proceed with the Apollo missions that ultimately sent Aldrin to the moon.

Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins launched their Apollo 11 mission on July 16, 1969. Aldrin and Armstrong spent two hours and 15 minutes walking on the lunar surface during their time on the moon. The Apollo 11 crew returned to Earth on July 24, 1969. Five more successful moon landing missions would follow.

Aldrin left NASA in 1971 and retired from the Air Force a year later. Altogether, he logged 289 hours and 53 minutes in space.

Since then, Aldrin has used his moonwalker fame to lobby for continued space exploration, specifically a return to the moon and missions to Mars. He has written several books, including two autobiographies, and made several notable television appearances, with stints on "Dancing with the Stars," "Top Chef," "The Colbert Report" and "Big Bang Theory."

Earlier this year, Aldrin settled his divorce from his wife Lois Driggs Cannon after 23 years of marriage, citing "irreconcilable differences."

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Spanish cuts widen Europe's north-south research divide

MADRID (Reuters) - Amanda Bolanos, a young Spanish scientist, knows she will not be coming home.

"Exiled in Cambodia" read the banner the molecular biologist carried at a protest in Madrid against government cutbacks. Back on leave from Phnom Penh, the 30-year-old researcher plans to head for Latin America if her present contract in Cambodia is not renewed. She sees little chance of finding work in Spain.

Bolanos and other scientists say sharp cuts in Spanish state spending on research and development, part of efforts to lower the national debt, leave them little choice but to go abroad. And they worry the cuts put Spain's competitive future at risk.

"There are two problems," said another demonstrator, Amaya Moro-Martin, 38, an astrophysicist with a prestigious Ramon y Cajal fellowship. "One is that there isn't enough investment. The other is that the investment there is isn't efficient."

She returned to Spain after 11 years in the United States but Moro-Martin, who carried her infant daughter on the march, said there was no chance her contract in Spain would be renewed at the end of this year and she will probably go abroad again.

Spain's modest place in the world of scientific research is far from new. Moro-Martin's fellowship is named after one of just two Spaniards ever to win a Nobel science prize.

And while state spending on R&D, even since the financial crisis hit, is comparable to that of wealthier EU governments such as Germany, private research by Spanish firms trails their northern rivals: current total national R&D spending is only about 1.4 percent of Spain's GDP, half the level in Germany.

But what particularly worries Spanish scientists who fret for their jobs, and economists who see research spending as an engine of growth, is that far from redoubling efforts to catch up, Spain now risks falling even further behind its competitors.

The government chopped fully 25 percent off its research and development budget last year and will trim a further 7 percent in 2013, leaving it at under 6 billion euros ($8 billion). The German government, by contrast, is increasing spending on R&D by over 6 percent this year to close to 14 billion euros.

With an economy just over 40 percent the size of Germany's, Madrid is still spending a comparable amount to Berlin, but the government's critics fear it is not doing enough to make up for a historic lag in investment, especially by private firms.

An official at the Economy Ministry, which swallowed up the science ministry after conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy took power a year ago, insisted the government was doing what it could: "In the current circumstances we are keeping the system going and preparing for the future, to guarantee that every euro spent is well invested," the official said. "We have to create the best conditions possible so our scientists come back."

Spain is not alone. As France, Britain, Germany and others in the north fund more research to fend off competition from Asia, Italy has also scaled back its government R&D budget, prompting Roberto Natalini, a mathematician at Italy's National Research Council (CNR) to warn: "We will pay for this in the medium term, not immediately. We will lose our competitiveness."

TWO-SPEED EUROPE

Without more private R&D spending, Spain, Italy and others in the south may continue to lag. But critics of government cuts say these risk creating a vicious circle, discouraging business:

"Public money attracts private sector money," said biologist Antonio Baraber from Spain's National Oncology Centre. "You can't just hope people will invest if there's no base."

In 2010, OECD figures show, only 242 international patents were filed from Spain, compared to over 5,600 from Germany. Where the private sector accounts for over two thirds of total German R&D spending, in Spain it provides less than half.

All the more reason, Spain's researchers say, for their government not to be cutting while competitors invest more:

"There's a crisis everywhere but other countries aren't cutting off the lifeline," said Ester Artells, a 36-year-old Spanish biologist based at Marseille University in France.

The German government has raised its R&D budget by 6.3 percent this year and France is finding 1.2 percent more. After cutting back, Britain too is adding investment in science.

Venture capitalist Francisco Marin, whose Ambar fund invests in Spanish technology firms, said Madrid's failure to catch up in generating ideas to drive new businesses was a big risk for a country where one worker in four is already out of a job:

"Employment and wealth come from the creation of new companies," he said. "Existing companies don't create employment, they keep it at the same level."

Carlos Andradas, the mathematician who is president of the Spanish Confederation of Scientific Societies (COSCE), says it will take years, if not decades, to bridge the widening gap Spain has allowed to open up with its northern competitors.

"When you fall behind in a race, catching up is very hard," Andradas said. "It will take a long time for Spain to catch up, starting from a position of insufficient development."

Protesting astrophysicist Moyo-Martin believed her country had begun to improve its international performance in research in recent years, half a century after New York-based Severo Ochoa became the last Spaniard to win a Nobel science prize.

Now, however, it was back in a "very precarious position", she said: "The problem is, what's happening now isn't reform - it's just cuts."

(Additional reporting by Naomi O'Leary in Rome and Gareth Jones and Michelle Martin in Berlin; Editing by Chris Wickham, Fiona Ortiz and Alastair Macdonald)

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Astronomers discover largest known structure in the universe

(Reuters) - Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe - a group of quasars so large it would take 4 billion years to cross it while traveling at speed of light.

The immense scale also challenges Albert Einstein's Cosmological Principle, the assumption that the universe looks the same from every point of view, researchers said.

The findings by academics from Britain's University of Central Lancashire were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and reported on the society's website on Friday.

Quasars are believed to be the brightest objects in the universe, with light emanating from the nuclei of galaxies from the early days of the universe and visible billions of light-years away.

"Since 1982 it has been known that quasars tend to group together in clumps or 'structures' of surprisingly large sizes, forming large quasar groups or LQGs," the society said.

This newly discovered large quasar group has a dimension of 500 megaparsecs, each megaparsec measuring 3.3 million light-years.

Because the LQG is elongated, its longest dimension is 1,200 megaparsecs, or 4 billion light-years, the society said.

That size is 1,600 times larger than the distance from Earth's Milky Way to the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda.

"While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe," Roger Clowes, leader of the research team, said in a statement. "This is hugely exciting - not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe."

Clowes said the team would continue to investigate the phenomenon with particular interest in the challenge to the Cosmological Principle, which has been widely accepted since Einstein, whose work still forms the basis for much of modern cosmology.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Gary Hill)

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Star Hackers: Scientists Hold 1st Astronomy 'Hack Day'

Astronomers have a "Big Data" problem. While telescopes around the world record reams of data every day, researchers struggle to manage this surplus of information. But there is a change brewing within the astronomy community, one where researchers  assume many different roles: astronomer, hacker and communicator.

DotAstronomy, a community that bridges the gap between science research and computer coding, hosted the first "Hack Day" exclusively for astronomy in the United States, last month at the Bit.ly headquarters in New York.

The Dec. 15 event was co-sponsored by Bit.ly and Harvard's Seamless Astronomy Group. Participants had a single day to tackle a problem within astronomy data. The day was split into three parts: presentations of tools that some participants have been working on, hack time, and presentations of the day's accomplishments. 

Participants came from all over the tri-state area to learn from other astronomy hackers and work on joint projects. Most of them were either professors or graduate students from NYU, Harvard, Yale or CUNY, but there were others from non-astronomy backgrounds as well. 

Many of the tools presented were frameworks to make astronomy data more manageable, often with a heavy community and open-source aspect.

For example, there was Astropy, a community-driven astronomy package; Planethunters.org, where public online users can hunt for exoplanets; the yt-project, a community-driven platform that transforms data into breathtaking graphic models, to help researchers ask better questions from their data; and an API (an interface between a user and a site's database) where you can easily look up any celestial object's spectral data from archives of the Sloan Digital Survey.

Hacking and camaraderie

After the main presentations, everyone grabbed a quick lunch and circled the whiteboard to pitch their hacks. They then split into groups and started exchanging ideas, debugging, and scrawling flow charts or models. Practically all the participants were acquainted with Python computer coding, but still, the best hackers quickly stood out, and many clamored for their aid. [5 Threats That Keep Security Experts Up at Night]

Demitri Muna is one of those hackers. He runs an online forum and workshop called SciCoder, teaching scientists how to efficiently work in Python. Muna is working toward a SciCoder book, which will include a free PDF for the astronomy community.

Muna worked during the hack day with Kelle Cruz from the American Museum of Natural History department of astrophysics and others to create a "SQLite" database to store brown dwarf star data that they could distribute to members' email accounts.

"Astronomers are dealing with an embarrassment of riches in the volume of data at our fingertips, but most still work with the same tools and file formats from 25-30 years ago," Muna said. "These tools are increasingly unable to scale to handle the data we now have. I strongly feel that better, not just more, investment into software development needs to be made in our community."

Different worlds

In our age of social media, it's not just about getting the data, but making it fast and convenient to use. However, many of the online tools that house the necessary astronomy data are scattered in terms of compatibility, programming interface capability, naming conventions, units used, and descriptive data. Astronomers typically have to write the same code over and over again to customize it on a case-by-case basis.

"One problem is that every sub-community [in astronomy] handles data differently, and the tools they might use are different," said Lia Corrales, a grad student at Columbia University. "I'm working to make cross-communication between different databases easier. I work with X-ray data. I'd like to put all of [the] data together, find all the quasars and say something about the dust around each one. I've wasted a lot of time in the past writing the cross-communicating code manually. I learned a lot from that experience but also to never do it again." 

Adric Riedel, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, said that his current dataset was taken from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey, which was photographed in the 1950s; researchers are still getting new things out of it. "We need to work smarter and take advantage of tools that others have built."

David Hogg, an astronomy and physics professor at NYU, worked on a paper predicting the distribution of stars that have transiting exoplanets based on data from NASA's Kepler planet-hunting space telescope.

"Kepler has been very generous with their data and astronomers have just started asking questions about it," he said. "We're guessing [based on observations] that the numbers of one-, two-, and three-planet systems puts a strong constraint on the true numbers. What we really want to do has to be simplified if we are going to finish it in one day." [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

Unfortunately, the paper wasn't completed by the end of the Hack Day, but his group put together a literature review and a graph to model the assumptions about the data.

Hack Day results

Chris Beaumont, a graduate student from Harvard, worked on a project to speed up plots and models in Python. He used OpenGL, a platform used for 3D game graphics, to leverage its processing power and resolution. The results shown, at the end of Hack Day, were quite amazing. He's now planning to create full-featured code for others to use.

And Megan Schwamb, who is part of the Planethunters.org team, created a new API for the site that retrieves data about possible planets orbiting binary stars.

One the most unconventional hacks attempted to take down and expose the flaws of MAST (Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes), carried out by Micha Gorelick, a data scientist at Bit.ly.

Gorelick found that when MAST data parameters are entered to find celestial objects, the program didn't check what type of data was being requested. This could lead to the ability of hackers to insert their own database commands to manipulate the catalog. Afterward, he contacted the folks at MAST, and they are currently addressing the issue.

Overall, the Hack Day was a success, according to those involved, not only because of the projects completed, but because of the discussions and information sharing that the event sparked.

Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

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Studies find hardy Earth microbes may resist conditions on Mars

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A hardy bacteria common on Earth was surprisingly adaptive to Mars-like low pressure, cold and carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, a finding that has implications in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The bacteria, known as Serratia liquefaciens, is found in human skin, hair and lungs, as well as in fish, aquatic systems, plant leaves and roots.

"It's present in a wide range of medium-temperature ecological niches," microbiologist Andrew Schuerger, with the University of Florida, told Reuters.

Serratia liquefaciens most likely evolved at sea level, so it was surprising to find it could grow in an experiment chamber that reduced pressure down to a Mars-like 7 millibars, Schuerger said.

Sea-level atmospheric pressure on Earth is about 1,000 millibars or 1 bar.

"It was a really big surprise," Schuerger said. "We had no reason to believe it was going to be able to grow at 7 millibars. It was just included in the study because we had cultures easily on hand and these species have been recovered from spacecraft."

In addition to concerns that hitchhiking microbes could inadvertently contaminate Mars, the study opens the door to a wider variety of life forms with the potential to evolve indigenously.

To survive, however, the microbes would need to be shielded from the harsh ultraviolet radiation that continually blasts the surface of Mars, as well as have access to a source of water, organic carbon and nitrogen.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is five months into a planned two-year mission to look for chemistry and environmental conditions that could have supported and preserved microbial life.

Scientists do not expect to find life at the rover's landing site - a very dry, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater located near the Martian equator. They are however hoping to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system has or ever had the ingredients for life by chemically analyzing rocks and soil in layers of sediment rising from the crater's floor.

So far, efforts to find Earth microbes that could live in the harsh conditions of Mars have primarily focused on so-called extremophiles which are found only in extreme cold, dry or acidic environments on Earth.

Two extremophiles tested along with the Serratia liquefaciens and 23 other common microbes did not survive the experiment, which not only replicated Mars' low pressure, but also its cold temperature and carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

A follow-up experiment on about 10,000 other microbes retrieved from boring 40 to 70 feet into the Siberian permafrost found six species - all members of the genus Carnobacterium - that could survive and grow in the simulated Mars chamber, located at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory adjacent to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The next step is to see how the microbes fare under even more hostile conditions, such as higher salt levels, more radiation and less water.

Related studies to analyze the genetics and metabolism of the common bacteria Serratia liquefaciens also are under way.

"In the search for life on another planet, we have to start with something that we at least have access to. We don't have a Martian bacterium we can experiment with, not yet, so we keep trying to see if some of our own hardy micro-organisms have the ability to grow at another location," Schuerger said.

"If we can never find a microbe that can grow under conditions on another planet, then it starts implying that life may not exist on that other location," he said.

The studies appear in the December 19 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and this week in the journal Astrobiology.

(Edited David Adams; Editing by M.D. Golan)

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Finding Another Earth: How Will Scientists Confirm It Exists?

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The announcement this week that astronomers have found a potential alien world that could be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet is raising a big question: How will scientists confirm the existence of a true alien Earth?

While NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which discovered the newfound Earth-like planet candidate KOI 172.2, is great for finding large numbers of exoplanets, it is not our best bet for characterizing an Earth twin circling a distant star, researchers say.

In order to understand what an "alien Earth" candidate really looks like, it takes a more refined approach than what Kepler can provide at the moment.

"It’s a statistical mission," Kepler deputy science team lead Natalie Batalha said at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday (Jan. 8).

The Kepler mission is designed to find out how many possible exoplanets there could be in any given part of the galaxy. The space telescope launched in 2009 and stares unblinking at a single patch of the sky to scan for dips in light from stars, a telltale sign of an orbiting planet passing in front of the star. Kepler's observations can tell scientists where a planet is in relation to its home star, but the spacecraft has little to add about important details such as an exoplanet's climate, researchers said. [Most Earth-like Exoplanet Discovery Explained (Infographic)]

But how can scientists study those important questions that need to be answered before a planet can be deemed a true Earth twin?

Finding Earth’s twin

The Kepler mission is a starting point in the search for a true Earth-like planet, Nicolas Cowen a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. told SPACE.com. "Kepler just told us how big the telescope we have to build is."

There could be more than 17 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to research once detected. Once planets of interest are confirmed by Kepler, then other instruments can be used to investigate the specifics of the planet.

A ground-based telescope could be just the right tool for finding Earth’s twins, said Cowen. If the exoplanet in question is near enough to the Earth and in exactly the right position, researchers could aim a 10-meter (33 foot) dish toward the planet to optically observe its transit between the Earth and its home star. After researchers have measured the radius of the planet, and if a telescope can make direct observations of the planet in question, Cowen said, then it is just a matter of patience.

Cowen added that all it takes after a researcher knows the size and rotation of the planet is as much observation time as possible. Watching the way a planet rotates and taking measurements of the different colors that come in and out of view as the planet orbits its star gives researchers a sense of what might lie under the surface of the atmosphere.

Water, land and clouds reflect light in different ways, and by directly observing those reflections, astronomers like Cowen can start to see how an exoplanet might be an Earth twin.

“That’s what would happen in an ideal world,” Cowen said.

Closer than we think?

Those days of "ideal" research might not be as far off as some believe. Cowen thinks that it could only be a matter of time before astronomers are able to peer into the atmosphere of an exoplanet and see what’s happening on the surface using a ground-based telescope.

In a presentation earlier this week, astronomer Ian Crossfield suggested that it’s likely that an Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” of an M-dwarf star — a type of star smaller and dimmer than the sun, but plentiful in the Milky Way — will be found within 31 parsecs of Earth, a relatively short distance in astronomical terms.

“This is the first meeting where any of these ideas have even brought up,” Cowen said. “It’s very exciting.”

You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

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Big Strides Made in Tracking Near-Earth Asteroids, NASA Scientist Says

NEW YORK — Humanity has made substantial progress in the hunt for near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a grave threat to the planet, NASA's chief space rock hunter said Monday (Jan. 14).

Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, told a crowd here at the American Museum of Natural History that it is the smaller asteroids, not giant space rocks, that are difficult to spot.

"It’s unlikely that we'd miss a big one," said Yeomans, who has written a new book on near-Earth asteroids "Near Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us" (Princeton University Press 2013). “It’s the small ones that sneak up on us.”

Yeomans' office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is devoted to finding near-Earth objects (which includes asteroids and comets) and plotting their positions over time. A few of the more notable asteroids NASA has placed on the "cleared" list in the past year include such high profile space rocks as the asteroid Apophis, which will swing extremely close to Earth in 2029 and return in 2036. All told, astronomers have found 90 percent of the large asteroids whose orbits bring them close to our planet.

Apophis was cleared of concern last week when it made a distant flyby of Earth, which allowed astronomers to make new observations that helped complete rule out an impact threat in 2036. Previous observations had already ruled out the 2029 flyby.  [See Photos of Giant Asteroid Apophis]

In the near-future, as in this year, there will be other asteroids giving the Earth a close shave, said Yeomans.

On Feb. 15, the 164 foot (50 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass the Earth at a range of about 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers), well inside the orbit of geosynchronous GPS navigation and communications satellites that fly about 22,370 miles (36,000 km) above the planet. Asteroid 2012 DA14 also poses no threat of impacting Earth during the flyby.

Yeomans and his colleagues can take close looks at near-Earth objects using advanced radar technology. By sending a beam in the general direction of an asteroid or comet, researchers can measure how long it takes for the beam to leave and then eventually be sent back, to the receiver. Scientists then analyze the reflected signal to determine exactly how far away an asteroid is and gain a sense of the its structure.

From there, NASA researchers enlist the help of amateur astronomers for follow-up observations to determine the orbit of a newfound asteroid, paying particular attention to how close the orbit track comes to the Earth.

"We observe where these objects are in the sky and project their orbits on years into the future," Yeomans said.

If Yeomans and his team did see an asteroid headed for the planet, there are a few courses of action available to them. Landing a small probe on the asteroid to nudge it slightly off course could be one way, while other have suggested impacting the crater with a probe that would drastically change its orbit, he said.

You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

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Astronomy Teacher Finds Hubble Telescope's Hidden Treasure

A Connecticut astronomy teacher has uncovered a dazzling view of a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way while exploring the "hidden treasures" of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The new Hubble photo, released Thursday (Jan. 17), shows an intriguing star nursery dotted with dark dust lanes in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The Hubble observation used to create the image was discovered in the telescope's archives by Josh Lake, a high school astronomy teacher at Pomfret School in Pomfret, Conn., as part of the "Hubble Hidden Treasures" contest that challenged space fans to find unseen images from the observatory.

Hubble officials also released an eye-popping video tour of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which zooms in on the region highlighted in Lake's photo.

Lake won first prize in the Hubble photo contest with an image of the LHA 120-N11 (N11) region of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble officials combined Lake's image with more observations of the N11 region in blue, green and near-infrared light wavelengths to create the new view.

"In the center of this image, a dark finger of dust blots out much of the light," Hubble officials said in an image description. "While nebulae are mostly made of hydrogen, the simplest and most plentiful element in the universe, dust clouds are home to heavier and more complex elements, which go on to form rocky planets like the Earth." [Hubble Telescope's Hidden Treasures: Winning Photos

The interstellar dust in N11 is extremely fine, much more so than household dust on Earth. It is more similar to smoke, researchers explained.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is one of two small satellite galaxies of the Milky Way (the other is the smaller, aptly named Small Magellanic Cloud). Because of its relatively close proximity, the Large Magellanic Cloud has long been used as a sort of cosmic laboratory to study how stars form in other galaxies.

"It lies in a fortuitous location in the sky, far enough from the plane of the Milky Way that it is neither outshone by too many nearby stars, nor obscured by the dust in the Milky Way’s center," Hubble officials said in a statement. "It is also close enough to study in detail … and lies almost face-on, giving us a bird’s eye view."

In addition to the N11 region, the Large Magellanic Cloud is also home to the spectacular Tarantula nebula, the brightest nearby star nursery, Hubble officials said.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been snapping spectacular photos of the universe since 1994 and is a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency. This month, NASA officials said the long-lived space observatory could potentially last through 2018.

You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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