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The space shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew lifted off at 6:36 p.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station for an assembly mission, designated STS-118.
"This is serious business we're in here," said Endeavour's Commander Scott Kelly to the shuttle launch director shortly before lift off. "I'm proud of your team for getting Endeavour ready to go fly. I'm also proud of my crew and the rest of the astronaut office for the competence and professionalism and consistently making something that is incredibly difficult look easy."
Kelly then added, "We'll see you in a couple of weeks, and thanks for loaning us your space shuttle."

A new WWF study tracking pygmy elephants by satellite shows that the remaining herds of these endangered elephants, which live only on the island of Borneo, are under threat from forest fragmentation and loss of habitat.
Borneo pygmy elephants depend for their survival on forests situated on flat, low lands and in river valleys, the study found. Unfortunately, it is also the type of terrain preferred for commercial plantations. Over the past four decades, 40 percent of the forest cover of the Malaysian State of Sabah, on the northeast of the Island of Borneo – where most of pygmy elephants are – has been lost to logging, conversion for plantations and human settlement.

Most people think of Sir Isaac Newton as the father of gravity but he also created one of the earliest observations of interference in his “dusty mirror” experiment.
In a darkened room, he used a prism and a small hole in a screen to form a quasi-monochromatic beam from sunlight, which he shone onto a back-quick silvered mirror. The mirror was angled to return the beam back through the hole and on the screen. Newton observed dark and light rings of light, which he found “strange and surprising.”
It was 100 years later when the British scientist Thomas Young determined the rings were caused by interference at the screen between two paths of light scattering from dust particles on the mirror's front surface.

Even small fossils, such as bones from the hand or foot can tell us much about our ancestor’s and their behavior. Such may be the case with an ape that lived more than nine million years ago.
A study published in the latest journal issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences reports on the structure of the hand of Hispanopithecus, a critically important fossil from an ape that lived during the late Miocene of Spain.
Ape hands are typically viewed as a compromise between the ‘true hands’ of humans and the ‘foot-hands’ of other primates. There are carpal and metacarpal differences, among other things, and significant differences in proportions.

The long-term risk of suicide is tripled for women who have undergone cosmetic breast implant surgery, according to a new study led by Loren Lipworth, Sc.D., of the International Epidemiology Institute in Rockville, Md, and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn. This long-term study further confirms the link between breast implants and a strikingly high risk of suicide and other related causes of death.
The increased suicide risk, together with a similar increase in deaths from alcohol or drug dependence, suggests that plastic surgeons should consider mental health screening and follow-up for women who seek breast implants, according to the new study.

While cardiovascular disease occurs in both men and women, it does not affect them in the same way. Risk factors and protective factors for heart diseases are likewise unequal.
The molecular mechanisms responsible for these differences are so far unknown, but some believe it is due to chromosomal linked genes or sexual hormones such as estrogen and testosterone. While the mechanisms behind the differences are unknown, the physiological differences are clear.
A new study examining chronic exercise in male and female mice finds that moderate long-term exercise provokes a sex-dependent cardiac adaptation that is different for females versus males. The findings may eventually help improve treatment strategies for women and men with heart disease.

Women have a “female advantage” when it comes to chronic kidney disease. When compared to men, they have fewer and less severe episodes of this disorder throughout most of their lives. That advantage disappears, however, when the woman is diabetic. For reasons still unclear, diabetic women – regardless of age – are diagnosed with kidney and heart diseases almost as frequently as men.
What is it about diabetes that predisposes a woman to develop renal disease at levels generally associated with her male counterpart? Researchers at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease have been studying the phenomenon and have identified a novel observation to help explain why.

Jenna Rickus, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue, has developed a "living electrode" coated with specially engineered neurons that, when stimulated, releases a neurotransmitter to inhibit epileptic seizures.
It's part of a larger collaboration focusing on creating a neuroprosthesis that dispenses a neurotransmitter called GABA and calms the brain once the onset of a seizure is detected.

Traditional plow-based agricultural methods and the need to feed a rapidly growing world population are combining to deplete the Earth's soil supply, a new study confirms.
In fact, long-established practices appear to increase soil erosion to the point that it is not offset by soil creation, said David Montgomery, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences.
No-till agriculture, in which crop stubble is mixed with the top layer of soil using a method called disking, is far more sustainable, he said.

The emerging threat of pesticide resistance means that biological malaria control methods are once again in vogue. New research published in the online open access journal BMC Public Health shows how Nile tilapia, a fish more commonly served up to Kenyan diners, is a valuable weapon against malaria mosquitoes.
Annabel Howard and Francois Omlin from the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, Kenya, introduced Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus L.), to abandoned fishponds in western Kenya. The study, funded by the Government of Finland, BioVision Foundation (Switzerland) and the Toyota Environment Foundation, monitored pond life, comparing the restocked ponds with a control pond nearby.

Many common diseases exhibit gender bias and gender differences have been observed in the development of high blood pressure (hypertension) and heart (cardiovascular) disease. Previous studies have reported that gender may affect vascular physiology and the body’s response to some types of blood pressure medications.
Although gender is usually accounted for in association studies, newer research has focused on identifying autosomal (not on the X or Y chromosomes) genes that contribute differentially to complex traits (blood pressure) or diseases (hypertension). In a new study, researchers examined the differential contribution of genetic factors involved in regulating blood pressure based on samples drawn from a large community.

Just when you thought it was safer to stay out of the water.
Microbes that result in beach closures and health advisories when detected at unsafe levels in the ocean also have been detected in the sand, according to a recent study by a team of Stanford scientists.
Published in the July 1 issue of Environmental Science and Technology, the study found that sand at beaches all along the California coast contained some level of fecal indicator bacteria. Moreover, when the researchers looked closely at the sand quality at a popular beach in Monterey, Calif., they found evidence of human waste-raising doubt about the commonly held belief that some fecal indictor bacteria occur naturally in the sand and are therefore benign.