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The government may have inadvertently revealed a secret when the California director of a NASA center mentioned the "100 Year Starship," where astronauts leave the Earth to colonize another planet, but don’t return because the destination is so far away that it would take too long to make a round trip. So why don’t they just send robots instead? It would certainly be cheaper: Obama cancelled our projected trip to the moon when he was told it would cost $150 billion, but we could send robots there for less than $200 million.
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Are you fat because you’re stressed? Or are you fat because of a virus you caught when you were a kid? A virus that can cause respiratory infections has been linked to childhood obesity. In the latest study, pediatricians found that fat children had antibodies in their blood that reveal an earlier infection with this virus. Blood tests of many obese adults also show evidence of this antibody. You might have even gotten fat because of the antibiotics you took to get RID of the virus. A new theory is that antibiotic use early in life has resulted in the disappearance, or extinction, of key bacteria in the human gastrointestinal tract that help keep the weight off.read more

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Bees are disappearing due to colony collapse disorder (CCD), but the ones that are still flying are great navigators, able to wend their way home through complex landscapes after visits to flowers far removed from their nests. But bees are more like humans than you might expect: Some (but not all) have memory problems that increase with age. To test how old bees adapt to a changed home location, researchers trained bees to a new nest box while their former nest was closed off. Groups composed of mature and old bees were given several days in which to learn the new home location and forget about the old one.read more