Science

April will fortunately not be as cold as March, but it's not expected to be very warm either. According to Accuweather, pockets of cold air will continue to invade from the northern Plains to the Midwest and Northeast into the first half of April, dashing hopes of a break from the snow and cold those areas are currently enduring.

The overall weather patten into the first part of April will continue to be about a month behind schedule. March was like a typical February, and Accuweather says that the first half of April will be what March should have been like.

The kind of weather that we can expect from now to mid-April is a bit of a mixed bag. It's likely to include strings of chilly, unsettled days with clouds and showers, or days when it starts off sunny but then brings clouds and thunderstorms with hail. Additional heavy, wet lake effect snow is not even out of the realm of possibility for the Great Lakes area to the central Appalachians.

Fortunately, long-range meteorlogists are expecting that the atmosphere will begin to behave more like it should be for this time of year from the northern Plains to the Midwest and Northeast

Not only is the Enterprise, NASA's original prototype space shuttle, a historic spacecraft, but now it's also a historic place. Located in New York City at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, the test orbiter has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Enterprise is the first of NASA's retired space shuttles to receive the distinction, which is given out by the National Park Service.

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States' official list of properties considered worthy of preservation, and was first authorized in 1966 as part of the National Historic Preservation Act. The register is also part of a national program to coordinate and provide support for both public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect the U.S.'s historic and archeological resources.

The Enterprise is a full-scale test spacecraft that was used for flight trials inside the atmosphere and tests on the ground. It also helped to pave the way for orbiters worthy of space travel to launch into orbit.

Researchers have discovered two new species of mouse lemur on the African island nation of Madagascar, and are now showing off the tea-cup sized primates to the world.

The mouse lemurs have so much in common that it is impossible to tell them apart without genetic sequencing. They also only weight about 2.5 to 3 ounces. They feature grey-brown fur, large eyes, and are shy and nocturnal and blend in with the rainforest.

The first of the two new species is called Anosy mouse lemur, Microcebus tanosi. The other species is the Marohita mouse lemur, Microcebus marohita. Despite being cousins, the two species apparently do not interbreed.

These two species of lemurs were first discovered in 2003 and 2007, when study co-author Rodin Rasoloarison captured them. He then weighed and measured the tiny primates, and took skin samples for genetic analysis in the lab.

The species looked similar on the outside, however their DNA told a different story. In order to determine where the animals fit into the lemur family tree, scientists analyzed two mitochondrial and four nuclear DNA genes.

In April 2011, a two-headed shark was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a tiny bull shark discovered by fishermen in the uterus of an adult female shark. Researchers have finally confirmed that it was an actual two-headed shark, and not a conjoined twin.

Researchers from Michigan State University said that the two-headed shark would not have survived for very long in the wild. They also say that there have been other reports of two-headed sharks, specifically blue sharks, but this marks the first time that a two-headed shark has been discovered among bull sharks.

The researchers who were investigating the shark used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the shark to determine that it had two distinct heads, hearts, and stomachs. The rest of the shark's body ended in just one single tail. According to the scientists, this condition is known as axial bifurcation, which can also happen in humans.

Two new studies to be published in the European Physical Journal D demonstrate that the speed of light is variable in real space. Textbook explanations of the speed of light assume that light travels in a vacuum, but space is not a vacuum.

Both Marcel Urban of the University of Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France and Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sanchez-Soto from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany propose that simple changes in physics theory that alter long-held concepts and present experimental proof and analysis that support the changes.

Urban and his team propose that particle pairs such as electron-positron or quark-antiquark pairs can affect the speed of light. Each photon of light would be acted upon by the transitory magnetic and electrical fields of electron-positron or quark-antiquark pairs, thus producing a small variation in the speed of light which is theoretically on the order of 50 attoseconds per square meter of crossed vacuum. The difference in speed could potentially be measured with high speed lasers.

Meanwhile, Leuchs and Sanchez-Soto propose that the impedance of a vacuum depends only on the sum of the square of the electric charge of particles, but not on their masses. Variations in the speed of light would indicate the number of charged elementary particles in a given space. The researchers have proven these results experimentally.

Scientists in both Europe and the United States are proceeding with plans to purposly smash a spacecraft into a large, nearby asteroid in 2022 to see what happens and to view inside the space rock.

The European led-"Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment" (AIDA) mission is due to launch in 2019, when it will launch two spacecraft - one built by scientists in the U.S., and the other built by the European Space Agency - for a three-year voyage to the astroid Didymos and its companion. Didymos is said to have no chance of impacting Earth, which is what makes it a good target for this mission.

Didymos is a binary asteroid system that consists of two separate space rocks that are bound together by gravity. The primary asteroid is huge, measuring, 2,625 feet across, and is orbited by a smaller asteroid that measures about 490 feet.

This binary asteroid system is an interesting target for AIDA because it will give scientists their first close look at the space rock system while also providing new insights into ways to deflect dangerous asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth.

In 2022, the Didymos asteroids will be 6.8 million miles from Earth during a close approach, which is the reason that the researchers have timed the mission for that year.

Scientists say that they were able to collect and preserve embryos from the world's most endangered wild cat - the Iberian lynx - by removing the ovaries.

Conservationists hope that the fertilized eggs could be implanted into a surrogate mother of a closely related species, possibly a Eurasian lynx female. Just one successful surrogate pregnancy could help the endangered felines, whose dwindling population was estimated at less than 200 a decade ago.

An Iberian lynx by the name of Azahar was a part of a breeding program in Silves, Portugal, but had difficulties giving birth and had to undergo two emergency Caesarean sections in two consecutive pregnancies.

Scientists say that the rocky space object that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago might not have been an asteroid, and could have instead been a comet.

The Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which measure 112-miles across, was made by the impact which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and 70% of all species on Earth. According to a new study the crater was likely blasted out out by a faster, smaller object than originally thought.

Evidence of the object's impact is derived from a global layer of sediments that contain high levels of the element iridium, which is also known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary and could have have occurred on Earth naturally. The new research, which was presented last week at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

New research suggests that the often cited iridium values are incorrect. Researchers arrived at this conclusion by comparing these valued with levels of osmium, which is another element that was delivered via the impact. Their calculations indicate that the space rock generated less debris than had previously been thought, which implies that it was a smaller object than an asteroid. For something to have created a crater so large, it would have had to have been travelling exceptionally fast.

Jason Moore, a paleoecologist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said:

"How do we get something that has enough energy to generate that size of crater, but has much less rocky material? That brings us to comets."

At the end of the Triassic period at least half of the Earth's species, living on both land and in the ocean, went extinct. This paved the way for dinosaurs to take over and dominate for the next 135 million years. While scientists have suspected that massive volcanic eruptions were likely to blame for the mass extinctions, they had not been able to pin down the precise timing of the eruptions until now.

In a study published this week in the journal Science, researchers say that they've confirmed that eruptions that would have been large enough to bury the United States under 300 feet of lava occurred at the same time that large numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from fossil record.

Terence Blackburn, lead study author and a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C., explained that 201 million years ago, tectonic forces forces began ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart.

Blackburn said that the underlying mantle rock melted, which generated these large eruptions. The rift happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. This also eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin.

The huge eruptions, which are also known as flood basalt events, happened during four periods over the course of 600,000 years. The first round of volcanism, however, is what contributed to the extinction of so many different organisms.

The margin of error in calculating the timing of these eruptions ranged between one and three million years, which thus led to uncertainty over which happened first - the eruptions or mass extinction. Using a rare mineral known as zircon, which is found in igneous rocks like basalts, the scientists were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years, which put the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event.

Two new species of lizards have been discovered in the rain forests of Peru in a little-explored area of the Andes Mountains in the northeast region of the South American country. Both of the new species are quite colorful, and feature splotches of green and brown that help them to blend into the mountain rain forests where they live.

The lizards were discovered in Cordillera Azul National Park, Peru's third-largest national park. One of the species, Enyalioides azulae, is named for the park. The second species, Enyalioides binzayedi, is found in the same river valley and is named after the man who helped to fund the survey, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the United Arab Emirates military. He created the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund to help preserve various species around the world.

Both Enyalioides azulae and Enyalioides binzayedi are a type of woodlizard, a group of lizards that were thought to only contain a handful of lizards. However, since 2008 three new species have been found in this group, in addition to the two newest discoveries, which suggests that more species could be waiting to be discovered in other unexplored areas near the Andes.