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Climate change is threatening U.S. landmarks from the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to the César Chávez National Monument in Keene, California with floods, rising sea levels and fires, scientists said on Tuesday. National Landmarks at Risk, a report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, highlighted more than two dozen sites that potentially face serious class="mandelbrot_refrag"> natural disasters . They include Boston's historic districts, the Harriet Tubman National Monument in Maryland and an array of NASA sites including the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. "The imminent risks to these sites and the artifacts they contain threaten to pull apart the quilt that tells the story of the nation's heritage and history," Adam Markham, director of climate impacts at the union, a non-profit organization for science advocacy in Washington D.C. and the study's co-author, said in a statement. The report is not slated fo

The U.S. Air Force is working as fast as it can to certify the ability of privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to compete for work launching military and intelligence satellites into orbit, a top general said on Tuesday. General William Shelton, who heads the Air Force Space Command, said SpaceX was likely to achieve certification in December or January, but the process could not be accelerated given the complex issues that still needed to be addressed. "It's very difficult to pick up the pace on that," Shelton told reporters after a speech at a space conference hosted by the Space Foundation. In addition to certifying SpaceX's three launches, the Air Force was also looking at the firm's financial and auditing systems and manufacturing processes, he said. SpaceX last month sued the Air Force for excluding it from a multibillion-dollar 36-launch contract awarded to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of the two biggest U.S. weapo

The human placenta, the organ that nourishes a developing baby, is not the pristine place some experts had assumed. Researchers said on Wednesday they have identified a relatively small but thriving group of microbes that inhabit the placenta alongside human cells in a finding that may point to new ways of spotting women at risk for pre-term births. There were clear differences in the makeup of placental microbes, or microbiome, in women who had premature babies compared with those who delivered full-term babies, said Dr. James Versalovic, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine and head of pathology at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. Versalovic said this knowledge could lead to diagnostic tests to forecast which women may be at risk for pre-term birth and help obstetricians manage those pregnancies in new ways. Scientists have known that microorganisms routinely reside in large numbers in certain parts of the human body such as the gut, which is naturally awash with

A Florida scientist studying simple sea animals called comb jellies has found the road map to a new form of brain development that could lead to treatments for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. "There is more than one way to make a brain," University of Florida researcher Leonid Moroz, who led an international research team, told Reuters. Moroz said his research, published on Wednesday in a report in the magazine Nature, also places comb jelly-like creatures on the first branch of the animal kingdom's "tree of life," replacing and bumping up sponge-like species from the bottom rung of evolutionary progression. Moroz said that finding should lead to a reclassification of the animal kingdom's "tree of life" and reshape two centuries of zoological thought. Comb jellies are different from common jellyfish. Moroz said his team found that comb jellies' molecular makeup and the way they developed was radical

A cross between a sleek cat and a wide-eyed teddy bear that lives in Andean cloud forests and an eyeless snail that lives in darkness 900-plus meters (3,000 feet) below ground in Croatia rank among the top 10 new species discovered last year, scientists announced on Thursday. The list, assembled annually since 2008, is intended to draw attention to the fact that researchers continue to discover new species. Nearly 18,000 were identified in 2013, adding to the 2 million known to science. An international committee of taxonomists and other experts, assembled by the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, selects the top 10. The list is released in time for the May 23 birthday of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish botanist considered the founder of modern taxonomy. Scientists believe nature holds another 10 million undiscovered species, from single-celled organisms to mammals, and worry that thousands are becoming extinct faster than they are being identified, said

An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Thursday with a classified satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office. Five minutes after the 9:09 a.m. EDT/13:09 GMT launch, rocket manufacturer United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership of Lockheed Martin and class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Boeing , shut down its live webcast under a prearranged news blackout ordered by the U.S. military. While the mission unfolds under a veil of secrecy, the future of the Atlas 5 launcher is getting wide public view. Potential rival Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) filed a lawsuit last month to attempt to end ULA’s exclusive right to sell launch services to the U.S. military. In its lawsuit, SpaceX also questioned whether the Atlas rocket’s Russian-made RD-180 engine violated economic sanctions that the United States imposed to punish class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Russia for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peni

NASA unveiled its "global selfie" on Thursday, a mosaic of more than 36,000 pictures uploaded to social media showing people and places around the world in commemoration of Earth Day, the U.S. space agency said. _0"> NASA asked people on April 22, Earth Day, to upload pictures tagged with #GlobalSelfie to social media sites like class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Facebook , Twitter and Instagram. Users on every continent and 113 countries or regions - including class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Antarctica , class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Yemen and class="mandelbrot_refrag"> Peru - joined in. After weeks of collecting and curating the more than 50,000 submissions, the so-called "global selfie" was released. "We were overwhelmed to see people participate from so many countries. We're very grateful that people took the time to celebrate our home planet together, and we look forward to everyone doing their par