Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Do you find yourself experiencing more headaches during the gloomy winter months? Turns out, there may actually be a real connection between the lack of sunshine and your chronic, unbearable headaches. See, shorter days during winter mean we don't get enough vitamin D - referred to as the ‘sunshine vitamin'. It's well-known…
Starving stars are more common than intelligent life T.Pyle/JPL-Caltech/NASA Artist's concept of dust orbiting a ravenous star Tabby’s Star probably isn’t surrounded by an energy-sucking alien super-structure. But it may have eaten a nearby planet. The star, known more formally as KIC 8462852, has baffled scientists by quickly and erratically losing brightness. In observations made over…
A SpaceX Falcon rocket blasted off from California on Saturday, returning the company to flight for the first time since a fiery launchpad explosion in September. The 230-foot (70-meter) rocket launched from VandenbergAir Force Base at 9:54 a.m. PST (1754 GMT) to deliver 10 satellites into orbit for Iridium Communications Inc.
"It's a clean sweep – 10 for 10," SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said after the satellites were released. SpaceX founder and entrepreneur Elon Musk's ambitious flight plans had been grounded since the Sept. 1 explosion during fueling ahead of a pre-flight test in Florida.
About 10 minutes after Saturday's launch, the first stage of the rocket, which had separated from the rest of craft, successfully touched down on a platform in the Pacific Ocean, a feat previously accomplished by four other returning Falcon rockets. SpaceX intends to reuse its rockets to cut costs.
"Rocket is stable," Musk posted on Twitter. "Mission looks good."
Two other returning Falcon boosters landed on the ground.
The mission tested changes implemented by SpaceExploration Technologies Corp, known as SpaceX, since the launchpad explosion.
Accident investigators determined that a canister of helium burst inside the rocket's second-stage liquid oxygen tank, triggering the explosion. The canister is being redesigned, but until then SpaceX is addressing the issue by modifying its fueling procedures.
The explosion destroyed a $62 million SpaceX booster and a$200 million Israeli communications satellite that it was to put into orbit two days later.
The accident clouded the company's aggressive agenda, which includes beginning to ferry U.S. astronauts into space next year, when it also plans to make its first voyage to Mars.
Saturday's flight begins to clear a logjam of more than 70 planned missions, worth more than $10 billion, involving SpaceX Falcon rockets, which last flew in August, SpaceX said.
The launch is the first in a seven-flight contract with Iridium worth $468.1 million, company spokeswoman Diane Hockenberry said.
SpaceX aims to launch 27 rockets in 2017, more than triple the eight flights the privately held firm managed in 2016,according to a report on Friday in the Wall Street Journal.
In addition to its dozens of commercial customers, SpaceX is one of two companies hired by NASA to fly cargo to the International Space Station.
The company's 2017 agenda includes the debut launch of a heavy-lift booster, flying its first reused rocket and repairing the Florida launchpad damaged in the explosion.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Tom Brown)
Two astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Friday for a six-hour spacewalk to replace aging batteries for the laboratory's solar power system, an upgrade needed to keep the outpost running into the next decade, NASA said.
U.S. astronaut Shane Kimbrough left the station’s airlock at about 6:30 a.m. EST (1130 GMT) to begin his second spacewalk this month. He was joined minutes later by French crew mate Thomas Pesquet, a rookie astronaut making his first spacewalk.
Kimbrough and Pesquet breezed through work on the batteries and completed several maintenance chores before heading back inside the station just before 12:30 p.m. EST (1730 GMT), a half-hour earlier than originally planned.
"Thanks for all the help,” Kimbrough radioed to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston.
The men continued work started during a spacewalk earlier this month to hook up an array of 428-pound (194 kg) lithium-ion battery packs, about the size of a small refrigerator, to the station's solar power system. They replace nickel-hydrogen batteries that are losing the ability to hold a charge.
The first six of the new 24 lithium-ion batteries arrived at the station aboard a Japanese HTV cargo ship in December. The remaining 18 new lithium-ion battery packs will be flown to the station on future Japanese resupply missions.
Nine of the old batteries will be loaded aboard the cargo ship that will depart the station later this month and burn up in the atmosphere. Three defunct batteries will be stored outside the station.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects it will take about three years to complete the space station's power system upgrade, which will keep it operational until at least 2024.
Before this month's spacewalks, ground control teams used the station's robotic arm to move the new batteries into position and remove the old ones. This robotics work cut the number of spacewalks needed for the project from six to two, NASA said.
The solar-powered station draws power from the batteries when it flies in darkness, circling about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
The space station, which is about the size of a five-bedroom house, is a $100 billion research laboratory, owned and operated by 16 nations.
(Editing by Letitia Stein and Bill Trott)
By Jonathan Sadowsky, Theodore J. Castele Professor of Medical History, Case Western Reserve University. Carrie Fisher’s ashes are in an urn designed to look like a Prozac pill. It’s fitting that in death she continues to be both brash and wryly funny about a treatment for depression. The public grief over Carrie Fisher’s death was not…
If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on. Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off…
New evidence suggests it could be a rogue planet captured by our sun Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) An artist's illustration of the mysterious Planet Nine, which may hide near the edges of our solar system. A year ago, astronomers announced evidence for the existence of an undiscovered planet hiding out in the boonies of our solar system.…
Japanese scientists say that silicon is likely the mystery element in the Earth's inner core, claiming progress on solving one of the planet's deepest secrets.
Consensus has long been that the centre of the planet is composed of about 85 percent iron and 10 percent nickel, with sulphur, oxygen and silicon prime candidates for the other five percent.
But geophysicist Eiji Ohtani at Tohoku University in northern Japan and his research team suggest that silicon is the most likely candidate.
Ohtani's team conducted experiments on iron-nickel alloys mixed with silicon, subjecting them in the lab to the kinds of high temperatures and pressure found in the inner core.
It discovered that the data for the mixed material observed with X-rays matched seismic data -- namely, sound velocity, or seismic waves -- obtained for the inner core.
"Our latest experiments suggest that the remaining five percent of the inner core is composed mostly of silicon," Ohtani told AFP on Wednesday.
He said that the finding helps understand whether the Earth's surface was rich in oxygen in its early formation before photosynthesis began as oxygen has been another potential candidate for the mystery element in the Earth's inner core.
Ohtani cautioned that more work needs to be done to confirm his findings on silicon.
Some scientists say that if the Earth's inner core contains silicon then it means the rest of the planet must have been relatively oxygen rich at the time of its formation, because oxygen that they believe existed when the planet was formed was not confined to the inner core.
But if the mystery element in the core is oxygen then the rest of the Earth was oxygen-poor in the beginning.
Ohtani said he does not think oxygen now exists in the inner core, citing the difficulty for silicon and oxygen to co-exist in the same place.
"But it doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the planet was oxygen rich because there is a possibility that oxygen did not exist as an element of the Earth at its formation in the first place."
The Earth is believed to be made up of three main layers: the solid outer layer where creatures including humans live, the mantle which is made up of hot magma and other semi-solid materials, and the core at the centre.
The core comprises an outer layer of liquid iron and nickel, and an inner layer -- a hot dense ball of mostly iron.
Ohtani presented his team's work at a meeting in December of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, and is preparing to submit a research paper to a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
The presentation used a method similar to that applied by his team in a study published in February last year in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
SAN FRANCISCO - The University of California, San Francisco, announced Thursday that it would receive a $500 million gift - among the largest donations ever to any university - reinforcing the health-science university's ascendency in research and education and promising to stoke the Bay Area's already white-hot life sciences industry. The money from the Helen Diller…
President-elect Donald Trump and members of his proposed cabinet and transition team have taken aim at many of President Obama’s climate and clean-energy policies, programs and legacies — from the Paris Agreement to the Clean Power Plan. But there’s probably no more consequential and contentious a target for the incoming administration than an arcane metric called…
Science fiction movies always portray black holes as the cosmic bad guy. They suck up everything that might stray too close, those objects never to be seen again. It works slightly different in reality, but with much the same outcome. For instance, when an unlucky star wanders too close to the black hole at the center…
Just because zombies aren’t real doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them Daniel Hollister via Flickr Scientists have used math to estimate how a zombie outbreak would play out, similarly to how we predict the spread of real diseases. When the zombie apocalypse comes, it will be swift and brutal. Within 100 days of the dead…
A man who spent four months in jail for treating his deathly ill son with natural remedies instead of medicine is back to pushing his family's nutritional supplements -- which they claim treats mental illness.
David Stephan and his wife were convicted last year of failing to provide the necessities of life to their 19-month-old son, Ezekial, who died nearly five years ago.
The 33-year-old Stephan appeared Tuesday at a health food store in Prince George, British Columbia, where he promoted EMPowerplus, a nutritional supplement developed by a company co-founded by his father, reported CBC.
Truehope Nutritional Support describes EMPowerplus, which is basically a mixture of vitamins and minerals, as "a natural alternative to pharmaceutical medications" that can be used to manage bipolar disorder, ADD/ADHD and stress.
Critics say the company's claims about the supplement are not backed by reliable scientific testing, and Truehope has threatened to sue a mental health writer who wrote critically about her experience buying and taking the supplement.
Health Canada issued warnings about EMPowerplus in 2003 and 2007, and the government department unsuccessfully sued in 2004 to stop the company from distributing the product in Canada.
Truehope was found not guilty in 2006 of distributing the supplement without a drug identification number.
Stephan's appearance at Ave Maria provoked controversy, but the store's owner asked critics not to judge the nutritional supplement against the Alberta man's conviction in connection with his son's death.
“Who are we to say, because these are two different things – what happened to his child and his work itself are two different activities," said store owner David Fuller. "Who are we to not be compassionate to that and not be merciful? Here’s a man and his livelihood is affected.”
Fuller said his customers enjoyed Stephan's health and nutrition seminars in the past and hoped he would return.
"He’s very knowledgeable, and we had requests from our customers to bring David back," Fuller said. "Although we had concerns in light of the case last summer that there might be issues, at some point we have to accept the fact that people have made mistakes.”
The 33-year-old Stephan and his wife, Collet, did not seek medical attention for their toddler son until he fell unconscious, and instead tried to treat the boy's illness with natural remedies such as maple syrup, apple cider vinegar, horseradish root, hot peppers, onion, garlic and ginger root.
Prosecutors said the couple also administered EMPowerplus to the dying boy.
The child was airlifted to a hospital after he stopped breathing, but he died five days later from bacterial meningitis.
Fuller hoped critics would keep an open mind about Stephan and the products he sells.
“Our store has products for people’s body, mind and soul," Fuller said. "We want people to get results. This product gets results for people, David Stephan is a representative of that company, and we hope that he continues to help people improve their health and offers an alternative to pharmaceutical medication that doesn’t always work.”
Stephan has said he believes the government prosecuted him and his wife to force parents through the courts — instead of through legislation — to vaccinate their children.
Stephan and his wife, who was sentenced to house arrest, are appealing their conviction.
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