The latest NASA "Image of the Day" image.

Total news: 21
Last news: August 26, 2010 04:00:00

Summaries of this week's top stories, from Science Magazine

Total news: 204
Last news: August 27, 2010 09:23:44

The discovery of a novel strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus able to jump from livestock to humans has sparked a multicountry effort to see how dangerous it might be.

Author: Dan Ferber - [Read more]

The National Science Foundation has quietly folded a recent earmark into a competitive grants program, eliminating what seemed to be one states advantage.

Author: Jeffrey Mervis - [Read more]

Archaeologists are using Googles eye in the sky to bring covert activities to light, from prison building at Guantánamo Bay to looting in the Middle East.

Author: Heather Pringle - [Read more]

Over the past 5 years, a handful of research teams have found that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) could become cancerlike after growing for months in the lab. But three of these research teams have now discovered that the cancerlike cells they spotted are unrelated to the original MSCs.

Author: Gretchen Vogel - [Read more]

Political tensions between Israel and the Arab world are threatening to overshadow an upcoming chemistry conference in Jordan. The verbal sparring has already created plenty of raw feelings and led to much finger-pointing.

Author: Robert F. Service - [Read more]

Chinese astronomers thought they had their hands full, fine-tuning their complicated new survey telescope into next year. Now they have a more urgent problem: Light pollution could jeopardize its ambitious science program.

Author: Richard Stone - [Read more]

U.S. physicists want to take parts from their massive twin gravitational-wave detectors and use them to build a third detector near Perth in western Australia, greatly enhancing the experiments ability to pinpoint sources of gravitational waves, should such waves ever be spotted.

Author: Adrian Cho - [Read more]

This week, a long-awaited paper about the link between a virus and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) finally saw the light of day. The study confirms a controversial 2009 paper that reported CFS patients are often infected with the virus, called XMRV.

Author: Martin Enserink - [Read more]

Coral reefs are reeling from extensive bleaching in the Indian Ocean and throughout Southeast Asia. And although some hard-hit areas have cooled—offering hope that some reefs may rebound—other regions are just now heating up.

Author: Dennis Normile - [Read more]

The picturesque, but snow-capped volcanoes, composing the Islands of the Four Mountains in Alaskas Aleutian Island chain look suspiciously like an alien world in this August 2010 image from the ASTER camera aboard NASAs orbiting Terra satellite. The islands contain restless Mt. Cleveland, an active volcano currently being watched to see if it emits an ash cloud that could affect air travel over parts of North America. A close look at Mt. Cleveland, seen near the image center, shows red vegetation (false color), a white snow-covered peak, a light plume of gas and ash, and dark lanes where ash and debris fell or flowed. Millions of volcanoes have likely been active over the turbulent history of the Earths surface, while about 20 volcanoes are erupting even today, at any given time. Image Credit: NASA - [Read more]

At the Society for American Archaeology meeting, an archaeologist argued that the ball courts found throughout Mesoamerica likely began as a communal game and only later were co-opted by elites who used them for ritual and political goals.

Author: Andrew Lawler - [Read more]

Excavators are peeling back the layers of dirt on the village of Sanyangzhuang, which was buried by a flood on the Yellow River 2000 years ago, to reveal a unique 2000-year-old time capsule of Chinese rural life, they reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting.

Author: Andrew Lawler - [Read more]

New tree ring data detailing monsoon failures from 1250 C.E. to the present suggest that droughts coincided with political upheaval, presumably by causing crop failure, researchers reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting.

Author: Andrew Lawler - [Read more]

Platelets are known for thwarting blood loss, but new research shows these simplified cells defend against microbes and perform other duties—and theyre also drug targets in sepsis and other conditions.

Author: Mitch Leslie - [Read more]

A record-setting Japanese mission to an asteroid is due to land in June after overcoming a 7-year history of mishaps.

Author: Dennis Normile - [Read more]

Nobel Prize–winning biologist Paul Nurse is stepping down as president of Rockefeller University in New York City to become president of the Royal Society in London, the United Kingdoms science academy.

Author: Jocelyn Kaiser - [Read more]

Just as researchers are preparing the $1.5 billion, 7.5-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer for liftoff on the last flight of NASAs space shuttle, its developer, Samuel C. C. Ting, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has decided to swap out a key piece of hardware.

Author: Adrian Cho - [Read more]

Disease specialists have launched an emergency operation in western China to avert a possible outbreak of pneumonic plague in the wake of a magnitude-6.9 earthquake in Qinghai Province.

Author: Richard Stone - [Read more]

Irans government has begun to remove academics who oppose the authoritarian regime of President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, according to human-rights activists in the country.

Author: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee - [Read more]

After a 6-year legal battle, Arizona State University has now agreed to return more than 100 DNA samples to the Havasupai, a tiny tribe of Native Americans who charged that their DNA had been collected by university researchers without proper consent, and pay $700,000, among other concessions.

Author: Jennifer Couzin-Frankel - [Read more]