Last month was the hottest March worldwide since record keeping began in 1880, and the first three months of 2015 also set a new heat record, US government scientists said Friday.
"During March, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.53 Fahrenheit (0.85 Celsius) above the 20th century average," said the report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"This was the highest for March in the 1880-2015 record, surpassing the previous record of 2010 by 0.09 F (0.05 C)."
A NASA probe that has circled Mercury for the past four years will make a dramatic death plunge into the planet's surface in late April when it runs out of fuel.
The MESSENGER spacecraft -- which stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging -- will end its run, as planned, on or around April 30, the US space agency said.
Its mission was initially only supposed to last one year, but since it was operating well and returning interesting data and discoveries, scientists extended its life as long as they could.
MESSENGER's key finding, in 2012, was a thick coat of ice in Mercury's polar regions, providing "compelling support for the hypothesis that Mercury harbors abundant frozen water and other volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters," NASA said.
"For the first time, scientists began seeing clearly a chapter in the story of how the inner planets, including Earth, acquired water and some of the chemical building blocks for life," the agency said in a statement.
Scientists believe that the closest planet to the Sun likely got its water when comets and volatile-rich asteroids made impact, sometime in history.
MESSENGER was launched in 2004 and traveled for more than six years before it finally began orbiting Mercury on March 18, 2011.
Once the unmanned probe runs out of propellant, it will no longer be able to fight the downward pull of the Sun's gravity and will fall, striking the planet at more than 8,750 miles per hour (3.91 kilometers per second) on the side of the planet facing away from Earth.
No images are expected from the impact.
"For the first time in history we now have real knowledge about the planet Mercury that shows it to be a fascinating world as part of our diverse solar system," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA.
Scientists will continue to analyze data from MESSENGER for years to come, he said.
Larry Wilmore hosted Neil deGrasse Tyson on “The Nightly Show” to discuss conspiracy theories in hopes of breaking the popular astrophysicist’s brain.
First off, Wilmore asked his head writer, Robin Thede, and comedian Mike Cannon – the host of the conspiracy podcast “Deep Inside The Rabbit Hole” – whether they believed the moon landing actually happened.
“Are you trying to blow my mind?” Tyson said, after Cannon conceded that he believed the landing had occurred but the television footage was staged.
“You can look at the Saturn V rocket, which got us to the moon and back, and calculate how much fuel is in there, and watch the thing take off, and ask yourself: Where the hell do you think this thing is going?” Tyson said. “There’s enough fuel to get you to the moon, and stuff left over to come back. It’s not just going down to the grocery store -- it is a Saturn V rocket.”
He dismissed the idea that the massive, 33-story rocket went to the moon so astronauts could stage landing footage.
“It went there but they faked the footage while they were there?” Tyson said. “What the hell sense does that make?”
Some conspiracy theorists point to the American flag seen waving on the grainy TV footage as proof the landing was staged, but Tyson said there was a scientific explanation.
“Since there is no air on the moon, anything set into motion – because they set up the flag, and he’s holding it and (then) lets go, the flag flips back and forth, and it doesn’t slow down because there’s no air to slow it down,” Tyson said.
Wilmore then asked Tyson whether he believes aliens exist, and if they do – “why are they so into butt stuff?”
“It’s not a matter of belief – if you look at the evidence, the evidence shows the universe is vast, it’s been around a long time, we are not made of special ingredients,” Tyson said. “It would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone in the cosmos. That is a separate statement from saying that we have been visited by aliens giving rectal exams. It’s a completely different statement.”
Wilmore pointed out that black people never seem to report UFO sightings or alien abductions, and he suggested “we have a (mental) block against ships that might take us.”
“That hadn’t occurred to me,” Tyson said – but he had a scientific explanation for that, as well.
“It’s just that most black folk live in cities, most of the United States live in densely populated cities, and aliens that visit us tend to be shy and only visit places where there are hardly any people to minimize the eyewitnesses that could account for it,” he said.
Wilmore said millions of Americans said in a recent poll that they doubted musician Stevie Wonder was, in fact, blind – pointing to a recent video showing him grab a falling microphone stand.
Thede said she suspected Wonder might have at least some sight capabilities because so many of his songs, including “Ribbon in the Sky,” feature visual elements – but Tyson offered a philosophical explanation.
“Maybe there are certain things that only become visual to you – to your heart, to your mind, to your soul – by the act of not laying sight upon them in the first place,” he said.
Archaeologists have reportedly discovered the oldest tools ever created by human ancestors: Stone flakes that have been dated to 3.3 million years ago, or 700,000 years before the oldest previously-identified tools used by the predecessors of modern mankind. According to Science, the discovery (if confirmed) would indicate that tools were…
Female chimpanzees create spears in order to stab their prey, suggesting that the ability to craft these kinds of weapons originated with early primates and that ancient humans may have hunted in a similar manner, according to a new Royal Society Open Science study. The authors of that paper observed…
E-cigarette use jumped from 2011-2014, but proportion of high schoolers who reported smoking cigarettes fell steeply over the same period
E-cigarette use among high school students jumped almost tenfold from 2011-2014, but the proportion of high schoolers who reported smoking cigarettes fell steeply from 15.8% to 9.2% over the same period, according to a new
study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study, based on tens of thousands of responses to federally administered National Youth Tobacco Surveys, found that tobacco use among US middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12) students fell off for most products – cigarettes, cigars, pipes and smokeless tobacco – in the years under study.
Two products recorded steady gains in popularity, however – hookahs and e-cigarettes.
“Consequently, 4.6 million middle and high school students continue to be exposed to harmful tobacco product constituents, including nicotine,” the study concluded.
Hookah or water-pipe use grew from 4.1% to 9.4% in the years under study, according to the CDC, while e-cigarette use grew from 1.5% o 13.4%. E-cigarettes were the most popular products in the study.
The CDC brackets e-cigarettes with other “tobacco products”, although the nicotine in e-cigarettes may not necessarily come from a tobacco plant.
Advocates of e-cigarettes say the level of risk is significantly less than with traditional cigarettes because they deliver a hit of nicotine without the array of cancer-causing chemicals found in cigarette smoke.
But some researchers are concerned that people will become addicted to the nicotine in e-cigarettes instead. The long-term health consequences of vaping are not yet well known.
E-cigarettes heat liquified nicotine, which may be extracted from a tobacco plant, into a vapor for inhalation.
CDC director Tom Frieden has warned of their dangers, although he acknowledged that “stick to stick, they’re almost certainly less toxic than cigarettes”.
“If they get another generation of kids more hooked on nicotine and more likely to smoke cigarettes, that’s more harm than good,” Frieden said last year.
Earlier this month, the CDC reported that poison center calls relating to e-cigarettes had jumped from an average of one a month in 2010 to 215 a month in 2014, with more than half of those calls (51%) involving young children under the age of five.
“Use of these products is skyrocketing and these poisonings will continue,” Frieden said. “E-cigarette liquids as currently sold are a threat to small children because they are not required to be childproof, and they come in candy and fruit flavors that are appealing to children.”
Tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths per year, according tothe CDC.
A group of physicians and medical experts is asking Columbia University to remove Mehmet Oz -- better known on television as "Dr. Oz" -- from a top position at the university's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Gizmodo reported.
"Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops," the group stated in a letter to Columbia medical school dean Lee Goldman. "Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain."
Oz is currently a professor of surgery and the college's vice-chair. The letter was coordinated by physician Henry I. Miller, currently a Robert Wesson Fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford University, and is also signed by officials at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Diego and the American Council on Science and Health, among others.
The letter is the latest round of criticism by Miller toward Oz. Earlier this month, Miller and Kavin Senapathy blasted him in an op-ed piece for Slate, accusing him of fear-mongering against genetically-modified food even after it meets federal safety standards.
"Nationwide polls suggested that up to 80 percent of Americans want labels on foods that contain DNA -- although, presumably, few of them realize that that would encompass virtually everything in their diets except highly refined foods such as oil, sugar, and salt," Miller and Senapathy wrote. "These exercises prove only that people know little about the chemistry and biology of what they eat. (Or about their own bodies, for that matter—they, too, are composed of chemicals, including DNA.)"
Senapathy, who works for an unidentified genomics company, said in a separate column for Skepchick that the success of that piece led Miller to put together the group letter asking Columbia to fire Oz.
"Whatever the nature of his pathology, members of the public are being misled and endangered, which makes Dr. Oz's presence on the faculty of a prestigious medical institution unacceptable," the letter stated.
This past January, one of Oz's guests agreed to pay $9 million as part of a settlement for selling bogus weight-loss products. And British researchers determined last year that 54 percent of the claims made on his show were either contradicted or unsupported by available evidence.
A NASA spacecraft that made surprising discoveries of ice and other materials on Mercury will make a crash landing into the planet around April 30, scientists said on Thursday.
The Mercury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, or Messenger, probe has been circling the innermost planet of the solar system for more than four years, the first close-up studies of Mercury since NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft made three flybys in the mid-1970s.
Out of fuel and losing altitude, Messenger is expected to make a high-speed crash near the planet’s north pole at around 3:25 EDT on April 30, flight controllers told reporters during a webcast news conference.
“The spacecraft will pass behind the planet, out of view from the Earth, and will just not emerge again,” said Daniel O’Shaughnessy, systems engineer with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which operates the spacecraft.
The impact at 8,724 miles per hour (14,040 km per hour) will leave a fresh crater, roughly 52 feet (16 meters) in diameter, that should serve as an interesting reference point for a follow-on European spacecraft called BepiColombo, which is due to arrive in 2024.
The crater may help scientists learn more about the planet’s unexpectedly fast weathering processes, one of dozens of Messenger's finding.
Topping the lead scientist’s list of Messenger discoveries is the detection of elements such as potassium and sulfur on the planet’s surface, volatiles that should have evaporated under the presumably scorching conditions 36 million miles (58 million km) from the sun where Mercury formed and orbits today. Earth, by comparison, is about 93 million miles (150 million km) from the sun.
Messenger also confirmed the existence of ices and other materials, possibly even carbon-based organics, on the floors of craters where sunlight never shines.
As it makes its final descent toward the planet's surface, Messenger will attempt to peer directly inside targeted craters, said lead scientist Sean Solomon, with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.
It also will look for magnetized crust in an effort to flesh out the odd story of why such a tiny planet has such a strong, and recently discovered asymmetrical, magnetic field.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Author and Northeastern University professor Alice Dreger has garnered national attention after covering a pro-abstinence lecture at her son's high school on Wednesday, which led to her being banned from the school.
Mashable reported that Dreger's son invited her to sit in on the lecture at East Lansing High in Michigan. She began "live-tweeting" the class after finding an area with wifi access:
When her son shared information from the sex-ed group Advocates for Youth, Dreger wrote, he was rebuffed by the lecturer:
Dreger's 45-tweet description of the lecture was captured in its entirety on Storify, but some excerpts can be seen below:
Dreger also wrote that the teacher accused her son of "ambushing" him by bringing up information challenging abstinence-only theories, and that she "said f*ck about 10 times in front of some students" after the class.
"I support the appropriate expression of a plurality of viewpoints," principal Coby Fletcher said in a statement. "However, I am very concerned by the utter lack of civility I see conveyed in the tweets and the behavior the tweeter admits to exhibiting in the classroom. This is not representative of the conduct we expect to see adults model for our students."
Putnam also criticized Dreger's language, saying that while she "may well have valid points" regarding the school's approach to sex education, "I'm not sure embarrassing her own school district using tweets littered with the f-bomb is the right way to make them."
Dreger posted her own criticism of Putnam on Thursday:
She also recounted the experience in a column for The Stranger that was published on Thursday, while adding that she regretted not going to school board meetings where the sex-ed curriculum was decided.
"Liberal parents like me, the mistake we make is thinking of ourselves as the kind of people who don't interfere in public schools," Dreger wrote. "As a consequence, the only people who do interfere with sex-ed curricula are the conservatives. If people like me -- people who want to see sex ed include teaching about masturbation, the pleasure urge, the existence of LGBT people -- don't show up and push our side, the 'middle ground' turns out to be damned near the right."
Climate change will have major effects on the ecology and distribution of many animal species. Now new research suggests that rabbits will be particularly hard hit as climatic changes alter their habitat over the coming decades.
Rabbits, hares and pikas could become this century’s new climate migrants – with up to two-thirds of species forced to relocate. There are almost certainly going to be extinctions among some of the more sensitive and less adaptable species.
Rabbits and their relatives hares (referred to in North America as jackrabbits) and the lesser known pikas belong to a group of mammals known as lagomorphs – of which there are 87 species worldwide.
Lagomorphs are particularly interesting to ecologists – and those of my colleagues who work in Global Food Security – as they are a major human food resource, valued game species, agricultural pests, model lab animals and key elements in food webs.
You can find rabbits, hares and pikas almost everywhere, across a huge range of environmental conditions. They’re native to all continents except Antarctica, found from the equator to the Arctic, and from sea level to the very top of the Himalayas.
Mountain-dwelling pikas may look like hamsters, but they’re more closely related to rabbits. Jacob W. Frank, CC BY
A quarter of lagomorphs are already listed as threatened, and 13 species are endangered or critically endangered. We were particularly interested in how predicted changes in climate would affect this already highly vulnerable group.
In our study, colleagues from Queen’s University Belfast and I collated all known records of lagomorph species worldwide. Environmental conditions such as temperature or rainfall were correlated with the sites where each species occurred to establish the suitable habitat within which each can persist. Widely accepted climate models of projected future conditions were then used to extrapolate how suitable habitat would change.
The results, published in the open access scientific journal PLOS ONE suggest that two-thirds of all lagomorph species will be affected. Rabbits, hares and jackrabbits are likely to shift towards the poles with little change in the total size of their range – the geographical area in which the species can be found.
Pikas meanwhile, are likely to shift to ever higher altitudes as the lower slopes warm up leading to huge range declines. This is likely to lead to the extinction of some such as Kozlov’s Pika Ochotona koslowi, a mysterious species unique to China.
Of course the animals won’t just remain still while the climate changes around them – moving towards the poles or to higher ground is a standard strategy to track shifts in suitable habitat. Rabbits, hares and jackrabbits can move long distances and can potentially move to cooler conditions without losing too much of their range; the effects of such shifts on ecosystems are largely unknown but likely to cause significant disruption.
The smaller and less bouncy pikas won’t be so lucky. Pikas inhabit generally cooler conditions in the high mountains of the Himalayas or Rockies and will be driven further upwards until no suitable habitat remains. My colleague Neil Reid, a conservation biologist and lagomorph expert at Queen’s, points out that “they will likely be pushed off the top of the mountains, literally, with total extinction the most probable outcome”.
Species traits can be useful indicators of potential responses to climate change, yet have rarely been linked to changes in distributions. Smaller-bodied species were more likely to exhibit range contractions and shifts to higher ground, but species capable of having large numbers of offspring were more likely to shift towards the poles.
The effect of climate change on lagomorphs is predicted to be so substantial that almost a third of the Earth’s land area (31.5 million km2) will lose at least one species by 2100. It is predicted that northern China will lose up to ten species, whereas Montana and North Dakota in North America are likely to gain up to five species – climate rabbit refugees perhaps, fleeing the ever-warming southern states and Mexico. Generally, species on islands and mountains will be the hardest hit by changing temperatures.
However predictive models are simplified versions of reality and as such are rough approximations of what seems likely to happen. Those we used did not account for the complexity of ecological systems, such as how species – like plants or predators – interact with lagomorphs.
Moreover, small burrowing species such as the Pygmy rabbit Brachylagus idahoensis may be able to shelter from the effects of climate change, while larger species like the European hare Lepus europaeus may have to adapt to mitigate the effects of warming temperatures – for example in the way that the Antelope jackrabbit Lepus alleni uses its long ears to shed excess heat.
So we have to be careful in the interpretation of our models – but the consistency of the results across all lagomorph species does not paint a good picture of the future for the group.
Conservation strategies, such as assisted migration – where humans deliberately move species to areas of more suitable conditions, pre-empting future changes – may be one of the few options to save highly range-restricted species, even if it is highly controversial.
Collection of more species records, particularly for already rare species, as well as targeting data-deficient geographic regions (such as Russia) will be vital in increasing our knowledge of the most threatened lagomorphs and informing future conservation management.
Russia plans to build its own orbiting space station by 2023, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday during a marathon call-in session with the nation.
"By 2023, we plan to create our own national space station in orbit," Putin said.
"This is something far-off in the future, but also necessary for us from the point of view of our national economy."
Russia and NASA recently agreed to keep operating and financing the International Space Station at least until 2024, but future joint space projects remain in doubt, as relations between Russia and the US have plunged to post-Cold War lows over the Ukraine conflict.
The Kremlin strongman said Russia needs its own space station to be able to view its own territory properly from space.
"We use the ISS actively for science and the economy, but from the ISS only 5 percent of the area of Russia can be seen," Putin said.
"From a national station, we should be able to see the whole of the area of our huge country."
"It goes without saying we will bring this project to fruition, and without any doubt, it will be under our control," Putin said.
Russia said earlier this year that it planned to create its own space station using its modules from the ISS after it is mothballed.
In March, the head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said at Baikonur after meeting his NASA that Russia would work jointly with its US counterpart on a project of a new orbital station.
But NASA did not confirm such a plan, saying only that the heads of NASA and Roscosmos discussed future cooperation.
China has also announced plans to complete a permanent orbiting space station by 2023 as part of ambitious plans to become a superpower in space.
The Russia-Soviet space station Mir was ditched in 2001 after 15 years of service.
Putin was speaking during a national phone-in that included a video link with workers at Russia's new cosmodrome under construction, Vostochny in the country's far east.
The new launch pad is designed to reduce Russia's reliance on its rented Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The delayed Vostochny project is mired in scandal, however, with those in charge of the construction under investigation and suspected of misusing millions of rubles in state funds.
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online According to a recent study, Neanderthals living in France nearly 58,000 years ago cut and mutilated the bodies of other Neanderthal adults and children that they killed. Study authors, whose work appeared in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, said it was unclear if these manipulations were done…
Tens of thousands of endangered sea turtles die every year in the United States when they are inadvertently snared in shrimp nets, an environmental group alleged in a lawsuit filed against the government.
The Southeast shrimp trawl industry, the largest in the United States, kills some 53,000 of the turtles each year in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, the advocacy group Oceana said.
"If people knew that their order of shrimp cocktail came with a side of government-authorized sea turtle they would be horrified," said Oceana assistant general counsel Eric Bilsky.
The group has pressed for wider use of turtle excluder devices (TEDs), which are flaps built into nets and big enough for turtles to escape through.
"Studies have shown TEDs are 97 percent effective at preventing sea turtle deaths when used correctly, yet the Fisheries Service is not enforcing their use, or even requiring TEDs in all vessels that can use them," Bilsky added.
In the lawsuit, Oceana alleges that the National Marine Fisheries Service has "violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to determine whether shrimp fishing in this region puts sea turtles at risk of extinction, failing to monitor fishing's impacts on sea turtles and failing to set a limit on how many sea turtles can be caught and killed," said a statement.
Named in the lawsuit are Penny Pritzker, secretary of the US Department of Commerce; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is part of NOAA.
An NOAA media representative contacted by AFP said she could not discuss ongoing litigation.
- 'Not reasonable' -
The lawsuit refers to loggerhead, green, leatherback, hawksbill and Kemp's ridley sea turtles, and says that shrimp trawlers in the southeastern United States kill more per year than all other US Atlantic fisheries combined.
"We do not believe the Oceana lawsuit is reasonable or based on a scientific review of the facts," said John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an industry group.
He said shrimpers are committed to turtle conservation and have stayed below the 12 percent capture rate established by the National Marine Fisheries Service.
"The sea turtle populations are growing and the shrimp industry remains in compliance with federally mandated capture rate limits, which are designed to ensure further recovery of the sea turtles," he said in a statement emailed to AFP.
Last month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed changing the status of green sea turtles in Florida and Mexico from endangered to threatened, on the basis that their populations have rebounded due to successful conservation efforts and the widespread use of fishing nets that allow them to escape.
- 'Drastic non-compliance' -
But not all fisheries are required to use nets with turtle excluder devices.
Some skimmer trawls that operate in shallow waters have argued to the federal government that they work effectively without nets containing TEDs, and so they are exempted from using them.
The National Marine Fisheries Services said on its website that it "does not require a skimmer trawl to have a TED because the nets can be emptied frequently while continuing to fish."
These exempted skimmer trawls are supposed to drag their nets for shorter periods of time and empty them as often as every 30 minutes -- as opposed to two or more hours -- to lower the risk of drowning any sea turtles that may get caught.
But the lack of monitoring has worried some wildlife experts, Oceana marine scientist Amanda Keledjian told AFP.
"That is a significant problem that we are very concerned about," she said.
"TEDs are required in most circumstances for the shrimp trawl fishery, but when they are allowed to do something different, they are really in drastic non-compliance with some of those requirements, which is frustrating."
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