LAUREL, Md. - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft successfully completed a flyby of Jupiter early this morning, using the massive planet's gravity to pick up speed for its 3-billion mile voyage to Pluto and the unexplored Kuiper Belt region beyond. "We're on our way to Pluto," said New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. "The swingby was a success; the spacecraft is on course and performed ... [full story]

WASHINGTON - NASA will send a flight surgeon, two astronauts and a Cincinnati doctor into the ocean depths off the Florida coast May 7-18 to test space medicine concepts and moon-walking techniques. It is the first undersea mission to include a NASA flight surgeon. Veteran space flyer Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper will lead the 12-day undersea mission aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Aquarius Underwater Laboratory. NASA Flight Surgeon Josef Schmid, NASA Astronaut Jose Hernandez ... [full story]

The United Nations Foundation (UN Foundation) and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, released today "Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable," the final report of the Scientific Expert Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. The report, prepared as input for the upcoming meeting of the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), outlines a roadmap for preventing unmanageable climate changes and adapting to the degree of change that can no longer ... [full story]

Biologist Steven Amstrup discusses global warming, polar bears in Oregon Zoo lecture Scientists agree: If greenhouse-gas emissions remain uncurbed, the consequences to the planet will be devastating. Wildlife biologist Steven Amstrup discusses the effects of global warming on polar bears as part of the Wildlife Conservation Lecture Series on Tuesday, Feb. 27, at the Oregon Zoo. Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the Alaska Science Center, is an expert on polar bears and has studied ... [full story]

ANTHROPOLOGY 101 The Poles once considered it unlucky to refuse the request of a pregnant woman. If you did, it was thought, mice would come and chew your clothes. PRIME NUMBERS 9.5 - Average number of species added each year to the U.S. endangered species list by federal officials under George W. Bush PRIME NUMBERS - The average number of species added each year to the U.S. endangered species list by federal officials under George ... [full story]

To reach the public, communicators urged to focus locally, with targeted approaches Americans believe global warming is real but a moderate and distant risk. While they strongly support policies like investing in renewable energy, higher fuel economy standards and international treaties, they strongly oppose carbon taxes on energy sources that put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These results were reported by Anthony Leiserowitz, a courtesy professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon, in ... [full story]

Poorly managed marine fisheries are in trouble around the world, researchers say, while ecosystem-based management is a powerful idea that in theory could help ensure sustainable catches - but too often there’s a gap in translating broad concepts into specific action in the oceans that successfully meets these larger goals. To address that, Mark Hixon, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University, today modified a very old set of rules and issued “Ten Commandments” ... [full story]

Many commercially prized fish from the depths of the world’s oceans are severely threatened by over-fishing and the species’ ability to recover is constrained by the fishes’ long lifespans and low reproductive success, a panel of experts said today at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. Some of the fish species living at depths greater than 500 meters take decades to reach breeding maturity, so there are no quick-fix ... [full story]

Expedition 14 Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin retracted a stuck antenna on a cargo spacecraft during a 6-hour, 18-minute spacewalk that ended at 10:45 a.m. CST Thursday.On Oct. 26, the antenna failed to retract when the Progress vehicle docked to the station's Zvezda Service Module. Moving the antenna was necessary to ensure it would not interfere with the Progress undocking in April.Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin had planned to release the antenna latch with ... [full story]

A study being published this week suggests that gas and vapor movement to the top of the magma body may have caused fairly rapid increases in pressure and could have been the triggering mechanism that caused Mount St. Helens to erupt in both 1980 and 2004. Researchers used analysis of the trace element lithium to reach these conclusions, finding that crystals in the erupting lava were highly enriched with lithium in the first few weeks ... [full story]

Sci­en­tists have tra­di­tion­ally as­cribed the first peo­pling of the Amer­i­cas to the Clo­vis cul­ture—big-game hunters thought to have roamed North Amer­i­can plains start­ing around 11,500 years ago. Clo­vis spear- or arrow-heads re­cov­ered from the Gault site, Tex­as. (Cour­te­sy Cen­ter for the Study of the First Amer­i­cans, TAMU) But that idea has been wide­ly chal­lenged in re­cent years. Now, an an­thro­po­l­o­gist has found ev­i­dence he claims could be the fi­nal nail in the cof­fin for the ... [full story]

Chimps in Sen­e­gal are reg­u­lar­ly mak­ing and us­ing spears to hunt oth­er, small pri­ma­tes, with­out hu­man help, ac­cord­ing to re­search led by an an­thro­po­l­o­gist. It’s the first study to re­port reg­u­lar tool use by non-hu­mans while hunt­ing oth­er ver­te­brates, ac­cord­ing to the U.S. Na­tion­al Ge­o­graph­ic So­ci­e­ty, which helped fund the work. A bush­ba­by (Otole­mur gar­netti) was a re­ported vic­tim of a spear-wielding chimp. (Im­age cour­te­sy U.S. Nat'l Hu­man Ge­nome Inst.) Anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Io­wa State ... [full story]

Hutchison aims to reduce environmental and health concerns The safest possible future for advancing nanotechnology in a sustainable world can be reached by using green chemistry, says James E. Hutchison, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. "Around the world, there is a growing urgency about nanotechnology and its possible health and environmental impacts," Hutchison said in his talk Feb. 18 during a workshop at the annual meeting of the American Association for ... [full story]