Science News

NASA's shuttle Discovery landed safely Tuesday morning after poor weather had thwarted two initial landing opportunities Monday. The orbiter touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:08 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, ending its 15-day mission to the International Space Station . [More]

On paper, the main crux of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) recently released National Broadband Plan is fairly straightforward: help 100 million rural, underprivileged and otherwise underserved households across the U.S. get access to the Internet at speeds of at least 100 megabits per second over the next decade. The reality of the country's efforts to expand broadband access is much more complicated, according to a roundtable discussion hosted Monday by New York Law School in New York City. [More]

MONTREAL--Rational calculations do not dictate financial decisions, as psychologists have revealed in recent years. Emotions often sway our spendthrift or miserly ways. In particular, positive feelings promote risk taking--gambling in Vegas, say, or going on a shopping spree--whereas bad moods prompt protective selling or saving. In some cases, our feelings may have an obvious origin: studies show that sunshine breeds stock surges, whereas clouds curtail purchasing. But much of what influences our spending is far more subtle--subliminal, in fact. Now psychology graduate student Julie L. Hall of the University of Michigan reports at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting that subconscious emotional cues have a far greater impact on financial risk taking than conscious ones do. What is more, one particular brain region mediates the connection between what influences our feelings and the financial decisions we make. [More]

What happens when a language learned as a child is forgotten over time? Many adoptees and emigrants have no conscious memory of their native tongue, but a new study suggests at least some information remains in the brain. [More]

By Patrick Lannin

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - The ash cloud surging from an erupting Icelandic volcano is hanging lower in the air, which is good news for travellers, but strong winds higher up moving ash still made conditions uncertain, officials said on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON--To decrease your risk of cancer , don't count on antioxidant supplements, a panel of researchers said here at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research . But assessing antioxidants' role (and that of many other dietary supplements) in preventing disease has been notoriously difficult. [More]

How’s this for a possible new culprit for breast cancer sufferers: they may be able to blame their grandmas’ diets. That’s the implication of a study done with rats. Researchers [Sonia de Assis et al.] affiliated with the Georgetown University Medical Center fed a group of pregnant rats a high-fat diet throughout their gestation, with 43 percent of calories coming from fat. A control group ate a normal diet. Both groups consumed the same total calories. All the rats’ offspring and the next generation, the granddaughters, ate a normal diet.

That high-fat diet increased breast cancer in the rats’ female offspring. And, more surprisingly, it apparently increased breast cancer in the granddaughters. They had an 80 percent chance of developing the disease, compared with 50 percent in the control group. The results were presented at the meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.