Screen-shot Map of Life (Image: Yale University)

A new website, built on a Google Maps platform, allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of nearly all of Earth’s species, including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, as well as the fresh water fish of North America.

This initial version of  “Map of Life” shows how all of Earth’s animals are geographically distributed throughout the world.

“It is the where and the when of a species,” says Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, who helped lead the project. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animals and plants, and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”

A joint effort with the University of Colorado and the Calgary Zoological Society, the ongoing project is outlined in “Trends in Ecology and Evolution”.

The team anticipates “Map of Life” will be a useful tool for a number of people, including professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, ecological and conservation organizations, as well as interested members of the general public.

(Map of Life demo)

Data for the project includes contributions from various museums; local and regional checklists; and observations recorded by both professional and amateur scientists.

The map is expected to grow as additional data is continuously added by both professionals and amateurs, allowing researchers to identify and fill knowledge gaps, while at the same time offering a unique tool which can be used to detect change over a period of time.

Just how in-depth and extensive the map will be depends upon the continual input, support and participation by others in the scientific community.  In future versions, the mapping tool will offer various mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information.

Fundamentally, the map is, “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share, and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity,” Jetz says.

Little girl snacks on cotton candy (Photo: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Attitudes, relationships, intentions and personal behavior control are all factors which influence whether children reach for junk food rather than opting for healthy snacks, such as fruit and vegetables.

A University of Cincinnati study finds intentions are a major factor behind a child’s snack choices. This is driven by several variables, such as the child’s attitude toward eating healthy or unhealthy foods, as well as the social or peer pressure the child feels.

While we all love to snack from time to time, we don’t always go for the healthier choice, opting instead for junk food, which is  high in calories but low in nutritional value.

Children are no different when it comes to snacking, but as awareness of childhood obesity continues to rise, researchers and public health officials are increasing their scrutiny of children’s eating habits, including what they choose to eat as snacks.  Zeroing in on the problem of obesity in children is an important public health concern and could help prevent future health threats such as diabetes and heart disease.

The study points to the strong influence of parents, teachers and other adults kids know and trust.  If a parent or teacher has good snacking or eating habits, this can influence what the child eats well, too.

The amount of control children feel they have over snacking is another factor influencing snack choice; in other words, if they are given the freedom to choose their own snacks rather than having them already selected for them.

Published in the International Quarterly of Community Health Education, the study looked at the eating and snacking behaviors of 167 fourth- and fifth-grade elementary schoolchildren in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area over a 24-hour period.

The study did find that snacking was a major part of the children’s caloric intake, about 300 calories a day from foods like chips, candy and cookies.  These so-called high-calorie, low-nutrition foods made up around 17 percent of the kids’ daily caloric needs.  Only 45 calories of the study group’s daily intake came from healthy snacks like fruits and vegetables.

Healthy choice - boy eating an apple (Photo: AP Photo/Jacqueline Arzt)

Researchers also examined whether children thought selecting lower-calorie snacks over the high-calorie versions was a good idea; how confident there were in knowing how to pick the lower-calorie snack foods; and whether they were influenced or felt pressure from their parents, teachers or friends in picking the lower-calorie snacks.

The demographics of the children in the study group were varied and included a mix of boys and girls, Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.

There are also differences in snack choices along the lines of gender and ethnicity.  Girls in the study tended to eat more of the high-calorie snacks, taking in an average of 348.3 calories a day, while boys consumed around 238.8 calories each day.

African-American children ate the smallest amount of high-calorie snacks, at 221.6 calories a day. Hispanic children consumed 297.6 snack calories daily, followed by Caucasian children who ate 282.3 calories a day. Asian-American children who took in about 280.8 calories a day.

Among the ethnic groups measured, the study also finds that both Hispanic and Asian-American children consume more of the healthier snacks, such as fruit and vegetables, than both Caucasian and African-American children.

The study’s authors say their research suggests more care and concern should be given to what foods children choose for their snacks, because they’re relatively cheap and easy for children to buy.

You can listen to what Dr. Paul Branscum, one of the study’s authors, says about the study, what it revealed and how important it is to the future health of our children to pay attention to their choices of snack foods and encourage healthier eating habits.

It what it calls an historic step in the search for signs of life on other planets, NASA says its astronomers have detected light coming from a “super-Earth” planet 41 light years away.

It marks the first time direct light from a rocky super-Earth planet has been seen, researchers said.

The planet, called 55 Cancri e, is 25 times closer to its star (55 Cancri) as Mercury is to the Sun. New data from the Spitzer Space Telescope indicates the planet is about twice as big and eight times as massive as Earth.  The side of it that faces the sun is more than a scorching 2,000 Kelvin (1,727 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt metal.  And, one year on 55 Cancri e lasts a mere 18 Earth minutes.

According to NASA, the Spitzer Space Telescope and others have been able to study this planet in the past by analyzing how the light from it changed as the planet passed in front of the star.  With this new discovery, Spitzer was able to actually measure just how much infrared light comes from the planet itself.

New data from the Spitzer shows that 55 Cancri e is a “water world,”  with a rocky core that’s surrounded by water which is in a “supercritical state,” meaning the water is in both liquid and gas forms, and is capped with a blanket of steam.

NASA says these new findings are concurrent with prior theories regarding the makeup of the planet

“It could be very similar to Neptune, if you pulled Neptune in toward our sun and watched its atmosphere boil away,” said principal investigator, Michaël Gillon of Université de Liège in Belgium.

>>> Read more…

Addicted to Facebook

(Image: AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, file)

Younger users are much more likely to become addicted to Facebook than older people, according to a new worldwide study of people who use the social networking website.

With more than 800 million active members, Facebook has become a worldwide phenomenon.  Many Facebook members find themselves checking the website numerous times of day to get the latest info on their friends and their activities.

Dr. Cecilie Schou Andreassen from Norway’s University of Bergen headed the “Facebook Addiction” study.  Her team also developed the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale to measure dependency.

The team found Facebook addiction happens much more to younger users than those who are older, and that anxious and socially insecure people tend to use the website more.  Andreassen believes this is because those who are anxious or insecure find it easier to communicate with others through Facebook and other social media rather than through face-to-face conversations.

According to the study, organized and more ambitious people aren’t as likely to become as addicted to Facebook, although they often use it as an important professional networking tool.

The study also found women are more at risk of developing Facebook addiction than men probably,  according to Andreassen, because of the social nature of Facebook.

Andreassen’s Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale lists six warning signs.

• You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or planned use of Facebook
• You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more
• You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems
• You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success
• You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook
• You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies

>>> Read more…

Universal vaccine could eliminate need for seasonal flu shots

A syringe is used to draw H1N1 swine flu vaccine. (Photo: AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Canadian research has revealed a possible new way to develop an influenza vaccine that could eliminate the need for seasonal flu vaccinations.

Each year pharmaceutical companies manufacture and distribute a new flu vaccine to protect people against three different strains of influenza viruses that are expected to be most common during the upcoming flu season.

Rather than having to update a flu vaccine for each year, scientists have been at work to develop what they call a universal vaccine which protects against all types and strains of influenza.

Studying the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” vaccine, a University of British Columbia research team found that that specific flu vaccine triggered the immune system to produce a number of antibodies that protect against many other flu viruses, including the dreaded H5NI avian (bird flu) strain of influenza.

Team leader Dr. John Schrader found that a protein in the flu virus called hemagglutinin (HA) is a lot like a flower with a head and a stem.  It’s the head of this protein that binds the flu virus to the healthy human cell, like an electrical plug into a socket.

Most vaccines, according to Schrader, help the body develop antibodies that attack the head of the protein in order to prevent infection. But, since the flu virus tends to mutate quickly, that part of the HA protein changes rapidly so new and different vaccines are needed for each flu season.

But Schrader and his research team found that the 2009 H1N1 vaccine also built up antibodies that attacked the stem of the protein, thereby neutralizing the flu virus.

“The stem plays such an integral role in penetrating the cell that it cannot change between different variants of the flu virus,” said Schrader.

According to Schrader, he has evidence producing vaccines based on a mix of flu viruses circulating in animals, but not humans, should have the same effect, possibly making influenza pandemics and seasonal influenza a relic of the past.

>>> Read more…

New research pinpoints origin of the domestic horse

A horse is reflected in a pool of water (Photo: AP Photo/David Duprey)

The domesticated horse originated in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine, southwest Russia and west Kazakhstan, mixing with local wild stocks as they spread throughout Europe and Asia, according to a new study.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge (UK) used a genetic database of more than 300 horses from across the Eurasian Steppe to reach their conclusion.

The new study finds the Equus ferus, the extinct wild ancestor of today’s domestic horse, migrated out of East Asia about 160,000 years ago, to be domesticated in the western Eurasian Steppe, their herds constantly replenished with wild horses as they spread across Eurasia.

“The spread of horse domestication differed from that of many other domestic animal species, in that spreading herds were augmented with local wild horses on an unprecedented scale,” said Dr. Vera Warmuth of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

>>> Read more…

A smart door knob does more than just open or close doors. (Photo: Disney Research, Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University)

Imagine having a doorknob that knows whether it should lock or unlock itself, based on how a user grips it; or a smartphone that silences itself if its user puts a finger to his or her lips; or  a chair which automatically adjusts the lighting in a room by sensing whether the user is leaning forward or reclining in the chair.

These and other applications could soon be possible with a new sensing technique developed by a collaborative research team of Disney Research, Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

The Touché system uses something its developers call Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS), a more advanced form of capacitive touch-sensing technology, which is currently used in the touchscreens of most smartphones.

But, unlike today’s touchscreens which only sense electrical signals at one frequency, Touché’s SFCS technology can monitor signals across a broad range of signals, which would make it possible for the object to not only sense the touch itself, but also to recognize a wide range of complex motions and configurations of the person touching it.

Since different body tissues can produce a wide range of capacitive properties, the SFCS device can take advantage of these differences and produce multiple results, according to its developers.  And while today’s touchscreen technology senses signals from a person’s fingertips, the new Touché system can do so from different  parts of the finger or hand as well as other parts of the human body.

“Signal frequency sweeps have been used for decades in wireless communication, but as far as we know, nobody previously has attempted to apply this technique to touch interaction,” said Ivan Poupyrev, senior research scientist at Disney Research, Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University. “Yet, in our laboratory experiments, we were able to enhance a broad variety of objects with high-fidelity touch sensitivity. When combined with gesture recognition techniques, Touché demonstrated recognition rates approaching 100 percent. That suggests it could immediately be used to create new and exciting ways for people to interact with objects and the world at large.”

To demonstrate Touché’s technology, the researchers came up with what they called a smart doorknob. Their smart door knob, depending on whether it was grasped, touched with one or two fingers or if were perhaps pinched, provides appropriate signals that program a door to lock or unlock itself, permit an authorized guest to enter while preventing an unauthorized guest, or possible intruder, from entering the premises.  The developers said they could also program the door knob to leave a vocal message when touched, such as “We’re away right now,” or “We’ll be back soon.”

The Disney/CMU researchers presented their findings today at CHI 2012, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas, where they have been recognized with the group’s Best Paper Award.

SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array

The recent discovery of Earth-like planets has changed the way scientists look for life on other planets, according to the scientist who inspired Jodie Foster’s character in  “Contact,” a 1997 film about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Astronomer Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research in California, has devoted her career to the  search for signs of intelligent beings elsewhere.

There’s always been a fascination with the possibility intelligent life exists beyond our planet.  Last year’s discovery of a super-Earth planet some 600 light years away, which might support human-like life, added to that excitement.

Modern efforts in the search for extra-intelligence beyond Earth (SETI) can be traced back to the brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla who, in 1896, suggested that radio could be used to contact extraterrestrial life.

Today, several scientific organizations, including the SETI institute, use sophisticated technology, such as powerful radio-telescopes, to search for intelligent forms of life somewhere out in the cosmos.

Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research (Photo: SETI Institute)

So, are we alone in the universe?

“Actually, I don’t know,” she says.  “That’s what we’re trying to do at the SETI Institute, to look for evidence of someone else’s technology and thereby, perhaps, answer this old, old question.”

According to Tarter, the discovery of the exoplanets has “profoundly changed the way we do our business.”

In the past, Tarter and her colleagues just pointed their telescopes at stars they thought might be suitable hosts for planets that could support life.

But the discovery of the exoplanets and the data being sent back to Earth by the Kepler mission have changed that.

“It’s a whole new ballgame because we know where those planets are, so we now know where to point our telescopes” she says, “and we know we’re pointing at a planetary system.  And since life, as we know it, is a planetary phenomena, we think this is a good place to look, and so we think it has improved the odds that someday we might be successful, because we’re now looking in the right places.”

So far, the Kepler mission has found about 2,000 exoplanet candidates, while Earth-based telescopes have found nearly 1,000 more.

Although a recent  Princeton study found little supporting scientific evidence that life could exist beyond our own planet, Tarter says there’s also very little evidence that extraterrestrial life doesn’t exist.

“We are out of evidence from either side of the argument,” she says.

SETI research,  she believes, is worth at least a small investment to try answer the old question of whether there is life beyond our planet.

“Everything we’ve learned over the past few decades tells us that life, in fact, could be more prevalent than we once might have thought,” Tarter says.

She points to past and current research that shows  planets are abundant.

“We’re not quite there yet, but we can almost taste it,” Tarter says.  “It seems that, from what we now know, [it’s] quite inevitable that there will be Earth analogs out there.”

The combination of research into microbial life living in extreme conditions here on Earth, along with the existence of exoplanets, “make the universe appear more bio-friendly than we once might have guessed.”

Dr. Tarter appears this week on the radio edition of “Science World.” She’ll discuss how ordinary people can help search for extraterrestrial intelligence by trying out SETILive the SETI Institute’s new citizen science project,   see right column for scheduled times, or check out the full interview with Dr. Tarter below.

Other stories we cover on the “Science World” radio program this week include:

• First US commercial resupply mission to the ISS postponed again
• Use of midwives improves maternal healthcare in rural Nigeria
• US farmers use GPS to save money, help the environment
• Australian researchers explore “extreme” earthquakes
• Warmer ocean speeds melting of Antarctic ice-shelves

(Images: Jossifresco via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons)

People who consider themselves highly religious are less motivated by compassion than non-believers, according to a new study from the University of California at Berkeley

After conducting three experiments, social scientists found that people who considered themselves to be “less religious” were consistently driven by compassion to be more generous to those in need.

As far as those described as being “highly religious”, researchers found that their measure of generosity was largely unrelated to how generous they were.

Compassion is defined by the study “as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.”

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Although the Berkeley study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, examined the connection between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly study the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others.

Researchers involved with the study do theorize however, that a sense of moral obligation, rather than compassion, drive religious people more strongly than those who are more non-religious.

Size matters to female crickets

(Image: Open Clip Art Library)

It turns out the size of a male cricket matters to female crickets, and the male crickets aren’t above faking it to attract a mate, according to a new study from England’s University of Bristol.

To attract females, male crickets sing loud and repetitive songs at night by rubbing their wings together. This sets the wings into a resonant vibration, which produces a loud and intense sound, allowing the female crickets to find them.  The lady crickets also listen for this sound in order to find the hottest guys.

The male cricket mating song contains many cues females can use to assess their desirability. However, most have thought the one attribute that couldn’t be faked or augmented was the sound which indicates the cricket’s size.

Males communicate their size through their mating song.  Lower pitched sounds are usually produced by larger males, while the sounds the smaller guys produce have a higher pitch. So, the females – who prefer larger male crickets – simply listen for those lower-pitched sounds to find the guy cricket of their dreams.

Experts have always thought the smaller males were stuck with making the high pitched, squeaky sounds.  But the study found that tiny and nearly transparent tree crickets, said to be highly unusual creatures, use temperature to change the pitch of their song making them sound much bigger than they really are.

Warmer temperatures made the tree crickets livelier and they called faster, producing sounds in a higher frequency mode. However, when it was cooler, the crickets behaved in the opposite manner, producing lower-pitched sounds making them sound much bigger than they really were, allowing the little guys to attract females.

Speaking more than one language fine-tunes hearing and enhances attention

(Image: Flickr/Creative Commons)

Speaking more than one language can enhance attention and working memory, according to a new study from Northwestern University, by fine tuning a person’s auditory nervous system, allowing them to manipulate verbal input.

The study’s research, led by Northwestern University’s bilingualism expert Viorica Marian and auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus, found that speaking more than one language changes how the nervous system responds to sound.

“People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp,” Marian said. “But the advantages we’ve discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages. It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound.”

The researchers, working with 23 bilingual (English and Spanish speaking) teenagers along with 25 teens who only spoke English, recorded their subjects brain-stem responses to complex speech sounds under loud and quiet conditions.

Both groups had the same response when the listening conditions were quiet.  But, when it wasn’t so quiet, and there was a bit of background noise, the researchers found that the brains of the bilingual teens were much better a picking up and detecting speech sounds.

“Bilinguals are natural jugglers,” said Marian. “The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved ‘inhibitory control,’ or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others.”

(Photo: Jeremy Burgin via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Many of  us believe finding some form of  life beyond our own planet is inevitable,  and the recent discovery of Earth-like planets – in a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface – has renewed excitement about eventually finding extra-terrestrial life.

However,  two Princeton University researchers suggest those expectations may be more based in optimism rather than scientific fact.

Princeton’s Edwin Turner  and David Spiegel wanted to separate fact from expectation.

So they took what science currently knows about the existence, or likelihood of extra-terrestrial life, and performed a Bayesian analysis, which evaluates just how much of what is considered to be a scientific conclusion comes from actual hard scientific fact and what comes from assumptions made by the scientist involved.

What the duo found will disappoint those counting on meeting ET.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Turner and Spiegel report finding little supporting scientific evidence that life exists, or could exist, beyond our own planet.

Instead, they found that most of what has been concluded about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life has been taken from what scientists know about the origins or emergence of life on early Earth.  And that our expecting life to be found on Earth-like exoplanets mostly centers on the assumption of what could or would happen if conditions similar to those that allowed life on Earth to flourish were found elsewhere.

Taking what we already know about life on other planets, the researchers say it’s very possible Earth may be an oddity compared to other planets, because life took root quickly and early in our planet’s history.  If this is true, then the chances of Earth-like planets hosting life would be low.

“If scientists start out assuming that the chances of life existing on another planet as it does on Earth are large, then their results will be presented in a way that supports that likelihood,” Turner said. “Our work is not a judgment, but an analysis of existing data that suggests the debate about the existence of life on other planets is framed largely by the prior assumptions of the participants.”

So what do you think?  Are our current expectations of finding life out there in the cosmos based on scientific fact or on mere optimism as suggested by the authors of this study?

This image, with more than a dozen lava coils visible, shows an area in a volcanic region named Cerberus Palus that is about 500 meters wide. (Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

An Arizona State University graduate student has discovered unique spiral patterns in solidified lava flows on the surface of Mars.

In a paper published in Science, Andrew Ryan describes the snail-like patterns as ranging in size from about one meter to 30 meters across.

While lava flows such as these have been found on the Big Island of Hawaii and near the Galapagos Rift on the Pacific Ocean floor, Ryan says they’ve never been detected on Mars before.

Ryan was originally doing research into possible interactions of lava flows with floods of water in the Elysium volcanic province located near the Mars equator.

Some of the features of this Martian volcanic region include what has been described as large slabs or plates of volcanic rock that look like the broken floes of pack ice that can be found in Earth’s Arctic Ocean.

For several years, scientists have theorized there was a frozen ocean in that region, and that the physical appearance of the  volcanic plate’s chunks of ice floe may be caused by ice that lies beneath them.

It was these claims of ice that drew Ryan to focus his research on that area of Mars.

Newer lava lying between two older plates of rough, hardened lava was still hot and plastic enough to form coils and spirals when the plates slid past one another. This image shows an area about 360 meters wide in Cerberus Palus.   (Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Ryan was fascinated by the terrain that lies between the plates and the high-centered polygonal patterns that were found there.

That led him to examine images of the region captured by the various Martian probes circling the planet.

After scrutinizing almost 100 images, Ryan determined that the various landforms, including the lava flow coils, that he saw were indeed volcanic and not ice related.

His findings confirmed what he and his colleagues had thought all along.

“This region is very close to the Martian equator and we don’t expect to find near-surface ice that close to the equator,” Ryan says.

As to how the lava flows coils themselves were formed, Ryan explains, “The coils form on flows where there’s a shear stress — where flows move past each other at different speeds or in different directions.  Pieces of rubbery and plastic lava crust can either be peeled away and physically coiled up — or wrinkles in the lava’s thin crust can be twisted around.”

Once some numerical modeling has been done, Ryan says that it might be possible to learn a bit about the composition of the lava that formed the coils.

He also plans to do further research which he hopes will help determine the viscosity, or thickness, of the lava while it was solidifying and forming the coils.

Andrew Ryan joins us on this week’s radio edition of Science World to talk about his discovery, as well as the research and study he conducted to back-up his findings.  Tune in (see right column for scheduled times) or check out the interview below.

Other stories we cover on the “Science World” radio program this week include:

• India launches new observation satellite
• Study: Africa may have huge supplies of freshwater underground
• Experts say no danger from new case of mad cow disease
• WHO sees gains in fight against malaria but concerns remain
• HIV treatments may also work to help prevent initial infection
• First US commercial resupply mission to the ISS postponed
• Titanic director backs plan to mine precious metals from asteroids

This computer-generated image shows a conceptual rendering of a Planetary Resources spacecraft preparing to capture a water-rich, near-Earth asteroid. (AP/Planetary Resources)

What do filmmaker and deep sea explorer, James Cameron, and Google co-founder, Larry Page, have in common?

They’re both backing a new venture to extract natural resources, such as precious metals and water, from more than 1,500 near-Earth asteroids (NEA).

The firm that plans to turn what sounds like science fiction into science fact is called Planetary Resources of Seattle, Washington.

In a press release announcing the venture, the company says a single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid could contain the equivalent of all the platinum group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum) that have ever been mined on Earth.

Along with mining precious metals, the company also hopes to take advantage of water-rich asteroids, which they hope will function as “stepping stones” for future deep space exploration.

The water will be used to provide various life supporting functions, such drinking water and breathable air, as well as to help make rocket fuel.

This computer-generated image shows a conceptual rendering of satellites prospecting a water-rich, near-Earth asteroid. (AP/Planetary Resources)

The way Planetary Resources sees it, providing water, air and fuel at these space-based “pit stops” will revolutionize space exploration and make space travel much more economical.

To get the project moving, Planetary Resources has developed a new line of space craft which will initially be used to survey the targeted asteroids for resources.  Later, the vehicles will extract water and metals from the asteroids.

The first of these vehicles will launch within 24 months, according to Eric Anderson, company co-founder and co-chairman.

Meanwhile, NASA is also planning a mission to a near-Earth asteroid. The U.S. space agency won’t be mining for precious metals, but it does plan to extract and return at least a 60-gram sample of the asteroid to Earth.

The Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) will study asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36 in detail.

Currently scheduled to launch 2016 and return with the sample in 2023, the NASA mission is expected to cost approximately $800 million.

A NASA space probe studying Saturn recently treated scientists to a bit of a surprise – rather odd little objects piercing in and out the planet’s F Ring, leaving a glittering trail of mini-jets behind.

The objects appear to travel in packs, producing multiple mini-jets which look like the barb of a harpoon.

Scientists already knew somewhat large objects can create channels, ripples and snowballs, or clumps of icy material, within the F ring.  What they didn’t know was what happened to these objects after they were created.  Scientists thought some of these “snowballs” were broken up into smaller pieces by collisions or tidal forces as they orbited in the F ring around Saturn.

These images, from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, show trails which were dragged out from Saturn's F ring by objects that are about one kilometer in diameter. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/QMUL ) (Click image for larger view)

Finding the mystery objects suggests scientists now have proof some of the smaller chunks of those collisions survived and, because they were set into varying orbits, these little objects went on to break through the F ring on their own.

To make their findings, scientists carefully went through about 20,000 images produced during the seven years the Cassini space probe has been at Saturn.  So far, about 500 of these weird little objects have been found.

“I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member.

The F ring, Saturn’s outermost main ring, has a circumference of 881,000 kilometers and is considered the most active ring in the Solar System, since its features tend to change over a period of hours.

Saturn’s rings are mostly made of ice with an average thickness of  about 10 meters.  The pieces of ice that make up the main rings spread out some 140,000 kilometers from the center of the planet.

The Cassini space probe’s next notable encounter will be  a flyby past Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, on May 2.