Science X Newsletter Week 11

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Here is your customized Phys.org Newsletter for week 11:

	Storks give up on winter migration in favor of junk food White storks are addicted to junk food and make round-trips of almost 100km to get their fix - according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
	Researchers turn carbon dioxide into sustainable concrete Imagine a world with little or no concrete. Would that even be possible? After all, concrete is everywhere—on our roads, our driveways, in our homes, bridges and buildings. For the past 200 years, it's been the very foundation of much of our planet.
	Turning mortal enemies into allies? Ants can On an African plateau surrounded by flat-topped trees as far as the eye could see, wind whistled through the acacia thorns like someone blowing across a bottle. Kathleen Rudolph was more concerned with the ants raining down on her from the trees. The hat, long sleeves and garden gloves the University of Florida researcher wore for protection didn't help.
	Mathematician pair find prime numbers aren't as random as thought (Phys.org)—A pair of mathematicians with Stanford University has found that the distribution of the last digit of prime numbers are not as random as has been thought, which suggests prime's themselves are not. In their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, Robert Lemke Oliver and Kannan Soundararajan describe their study of the last digit in prime numbers, how they found it to be less than random, and what they believe is a possible explanation for their findings.
	Mysterious 'Tully monster' is a vertebrate, research finds The Tully Monster, an oddly configured sea creature with teeth at the end of a narrow, trunk-like extension of its head and eyes that perch on either side of a long, rigid bar, has finally been identified.
	Scientists discover neural mechanisms in mouse brains that indicate that we actively forget as we learn They say that once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you never forget how to do it. But new research suggests that while learning, the brain is actively trying to forget. The study, by scientists at EMBL and University Pablo Olavide in Sevilla, Spain, is published today in Nature Communications.
	NASA to test fire in space by burning unmanned orbiting craft NASA said it will test the effects of a large fire in space by setting off a blaze inside an orbiting unmanned space craft.
	Europe-Russia mission departs on hunt for life on Mars (Update 3) A joint European-Russian mission aiming to search for traces of life on Mars left Earth's orbit Monday at the start of a seven-month unmanned journey to the Red Planet, space agency managers said.
	Four new giant planets detected around giant stars (Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of four new giant exoplanets orbiting stars much bigger than our sun. The newly detected alien worlds are enormous, with masses from 2.4 to 5.5 the mass of Jupiter and have very long orbital periods ranging from nearly two to slightly more than four Earth years. The findings were published on Mar. 11 in a research paper available online at arXiv.org.
	Scientists find the temperature at which glass becomes a liquid While glass might be thought of in terms of holding wine or as a window, the stability of glass affects areas as diverse as nuclear waste storage, pharmaceuticals, and ice cream. Recently, chemical physicists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory made a key discovery about how glass forms.
	Fluid dynamics explain how quickly a vampire could drain your blood Throughout human history there have been tales of vampires – bloodsucking creatures of folklore that prey on their victims by draining their life essence, usually via the blood.
	Hubble unveils monster stars Astronomers using the unique ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have identified nine monster stars with masses over 100 times the mass of the Sun in the star cluster R136. This makes it the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date. The results, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, raise many new questions about the formation of massive stars.
	400,000-year-old fossils from Spain provide earliest genetic evidence of Neandertals Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes later, perhaps as the result of gene flow from Africa.
Researchers crack 50-year-old nuclear waste problem, make storage safer Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have adapted a technology developed for solar energy in order to selectively remove one of the trickiest and most-difficult-to-remove elements in nuclear waste pools across the country, making the storage of nuclear waste safer and nontoxic—and solving a decades-old problem.
	Most eccentric planet ever known flashes astronomers with reflected light Led by San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane, a team of researchers has spotted an extrasolar planet about 117 light-years from earth that boasts the most eccentric orbit yet seen.
	Pluto reveals more secrets Eight months after its encounter with the New Horizons spacecraft, Pluto continues to surprise the scientists who study this distant world.
	Fertilizer applied to fields today will pollute water for decades Dangerous nitrate levels in drinking water could persist for decades, increasing the risk for blue baby syndrome and other serious health concerns, according to a new study published by researchers at the University of Waterloo.
	Fundamentally accurate quantum thermometer created Better thermometers might be possible as a result of a discovery at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where physicists have found a way to calibrate temperature measurements by monitoring the tiny motions of a nanomechanical system that are governed by the often counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics.
	Sweet 'quantum dots' light the way for new HIV and Ebola treatment A research team led by the University of Leeds has observed for the first time how HIV and Ebola viruses attach to cells to spread infection.
	Beyond record hot, February was 'astronomical' and 'strange' Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as "astronomical," ''staggering" and "strange." They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood.

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