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Saturday, November 9, 2013

ScienceDaily: Top Science News

ScienceDaily: Top Science News


Super-Typhoon Haiyan lashes the Philippines

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:18 AM PST

Super-Typhoon Haiyan was lashing the central and southern Philippines on Nov. 7 bringing maximum sustained winds of a Category 5 hurricane. The U.S. National Hurricane Center website indicates that a Category 5 hurricane/typhoon would cause catastrophic damage: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

NASA's GRAIL mission puts a new face on the moon

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:17 AM PST

Scientists using data from the lunar-orbiting twins of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission are gaining new insight into how the face of the moon received its rugged good looks.

Robotic advances promise artificial legs that emulate healthy limbs

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:13 AM PST

Recent advances in robotics technology make it possible to create prosthetics that can duplicate the natural movement of human legs. This capability promises to dramatically improve the mobility of lower-limb amputees, allowing them to negotiate stairs and slopes and uneven ground, significantly reducing their risk of falling as well as reducing stress on the rest of their bodies.

'Tiger stripes' underneath Antarctic glaciers slow the flow

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:13 AM PST

Researchers have discovered that most resistance to the movement of glaciers over the underlying bedrock comes from narrow, high-friction stripes that lie within large, extremely slippery areas underneath the glacier. These stripes are thought to govern the speed at which Antarctic glaciers are moving.

It's complicated: Dawn spacecraft spurs rewrite of asteroid Vesta's story

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:13 AM PST

Just when scientists thought they had a tidy theory for how the giant asteroid Vesta formed, a new paper from NASA's Dawn mission suggests the history is more complicated. If Vesta's formation had followed the script for the formation of rocky planets like our own, heat from the interior would have created distinct, separated layers of rock (generally, a core, mantle and crust). In that story, the mineral olivine should concentrate in the mantle. However, that's not what Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) instrument found.

Edited RNA plus invasive DNA add individuality

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:13 AM PST

An enzyme that edits RNA may loosen the genome's control over invasive snippets of DNA that affect how genes are expressed, according to new research. In fruit flies, that newly understood mechanism appears to contribute to differences among individuals such as eye color and life span.

Black holes don't make a big splash

Posted: 08 Nov 2013 06:10 AM PST

Throughout our universe, tucked inside galaxies far, far away, giant black holes are pairing up and merging. As the massive bodies dance around each other in close embraces, they send out gravitational waves that ripple space and time themselves, even as the waves pass right through our planet Earth. Scientists know these waves, predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, exist but have yet to directly detect one. In the race to catch the waves, one strategy -- called pulsar-timing arrays -- has reached a milestone not through detecting any gravitational waves, but in revealing new information about the frequency and strength of black hole mergers.

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