Over 100 published studies may have incorrect results thanks to a glitchy piece of Python code discovered by researchers at the University of Hawaii.

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.

"This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]."

Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria... Under supervision of University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant chemistry professor Rui Sun, Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma, and Thomas Hoye in the journal Nature Protocols . The code computes chemical shift values for NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a common technique used by chemists to determine the molecular make-up of a sample. Luo's results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams' group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results.

Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files.
The researcher who wrote the flawed script told Motherboard that the new study was "a beautiful example of science working to advance the work we reported in 2014. They did a tremendous service to the community in figuring this out."

Sun described the original authors as "very gracious," saying they encouraged the publication of the findings.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: It sounds crazy: a refrigerator made from a rubber band. But if you stretch one and hold it against your lips, it will be noticeably warmer. Release it, and it cools. This simple "elastocaloric" effect can transfer heat in much the same way as compressing and expanding a fluid refrigerant in a fridge or air conditioner. Now, scientists have created a version that not only stretches the rubber band, but also twists it. It may one day lead to greener cooling technology. As a demonstration, the researchers built a tiny fridge about the size of a ballpoint pen cartridge powered by twisted nickel titanium wires. Using this "twistocaloric" method, they cooled a small volume of water by 8C in a few seconds. Next, the team plans to run the device on a repeating cycle, alternately heating the water (and moving that heat to the outside world) and cooling it (so that it can absorb heat from the interior volume). Coated with temperature-sensitive dyes, the fibers could also serve as strain gauges or mood rings. The study has been published in the journal Science.

After the first all-female spacewalk was scrapped in March, NASA has now scheduled another attempt with astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir for October 21. CNN reports: For the intended spacewalk in March, Koch was going to be paired with astronaut Anne McClain, who has since returned to Earth. In March, NASA cited spacesuit availability as the reason for scrapping the walk. McClain herself made the decision and the teams supported her, Koch said. "We do our best to anticipate the spacesuit sizes that each astronaut will need, based on the spacesuit size they wore in training on the ground, and in some cases (including Anne McClain's) astronauts train in multiple sizes," Brandi Dean with NASA's public affairs office told CNN in March. "However, individuals' sizing needs may change when they are on orbit, in response to the changes living in microgravity can bring about in a body. In addition, no one training environment can fully simulate performing a spacewalk in microgravity, and an individual may find that their sizing preferences change in space."

Koch conducted a spacewalk along with fellow astronaut Nick Hague instead of McClain at the time. When asked about spacesuit availability this time around, Koch said there are currently two medium spacesuits on board. After the first all-female plan was shifted, Koch configured the second spacesuit herself using what was available on board. She and Meir have both trained in medium-sized suits for the last six years. Koch will conduct three spacewalks in October, one alongside NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan on October 6, another with Morgan on October 11 and the walk with Meir on October 21.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Nearly one year ago, the Trump administration fired a panel of more than two dozen scientific experts who assisted the Environmental Protection Agency in its review of air quality standards for particulate matter. Now, as the EPA prepares its report on those standards later this month, 20 of those scientists are meeting independently to release their own assessment of current air pollution levels, with a focus on the particles from fossil fuels that can make people sick.

These scientists and researchers, former members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) on particulate matter, said the EPA has stripped the panel down to its core seven members, who are ill-equipped to set air quality standards and don't have the time to do it. "They fired the particulate matter review panel and they said the chartered CASAC would do the review," Chris Zarba, who served as the staff director of the Scientific Advisory Board at the EPA until 2018, said. "In the history of the agency this has never happened. The new panel is unqualified and the new panel has said they were unqualified." The new panel feels their work is necessary for the very reasons that particle pollution is regulated by the EPA: because extended exposure can cause premature death, nonfatal heart attacks, irregular heartbeat, aggravated asthma, decreased lung function and respiratory issues, according to the agency. EPA said it is confident in its own panel and experts and said it "is committed to scientific integrity and transparency." "EPA has the utmost confidence in its career scientist and the members on its science advisory boards and panels," an agency spokesperson said. "EPA routinely takes comments from the public and outside organizations, including those not employed or associated with EPA, and will continue to take into consideration those comments that meet our scientific standards."

Bodhammer shares a report from Popular Mechanics: The U.S. Navy has jumped into the game by filing a patent for a compact fusion reactor, according to exclusive reporting by The War Zone. The success of the device, developed by researcher Salvatore Cezar Pais of the Naval Air Warfare Center -- Aircraft Division, relies on a part called a dynamic fusor. According to the patent, Pais' plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a "concentrated magnetic energy flux" that can squish the gases together.

Coated with an electrical charge, the cone-shaped fusors pump fuel gases like Deuterium or Deuterium-Xenon into the chamber, which are then put under intense heat and pressure to create the nuclei-fusing reaction. Current technology at reactors around the world use superconductors to create a magnetic field. The War Zone reports that the device could potentially produce more than a terawatt of energy while only taking in power in the kilowatt to megawatt range.

A project to produce detailed maps of all the land on Earth through laser scanning has been revealed by researchers who say action is needed now to preserve a record of the world's cultural, environmental and geological treasures. From a report: Prof Chris Fisher, an archaeologist from Colorado State University, said he founded the Earth Archive as a response to the climate crisis. "We are going to lose a significant amount of both cultural patrimony -- so archaeological sites and landscapes -- but also ecological patrimony -- plants and animals, entire landscapes, geology, hydrology," Fisher told the Guardian. "We really have a limit time to record those things before the Earth fundamentally changes." He also said that while it was important to take action on the climate crisis, even if we started "living like the Flintstones," changes are already taking place.

The main technology Fisher hopes to use is aircraft-based Lidar, a scanning technique in which laser pulses are directed at the Earth's surface from an instrument attached to an aircraft. The time it takes for the pulses to bounce back is measured, allowing researchers to work out the distance to the object or surface they strike. Combined with location data, the approach allows scientists to build 3D maps of an area. The method has already helped reveal ancient cities deep in jungles and map the full extent of sites built by rivals to the Aztecs.

The Russian space agency confirmed Friday that legendary cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space and later the commander of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that docked with a NASA Apollo capsule, has died after a long illness. CBS News reports: An accomplished amateur artist and a widely respected statesman in the international space community, Leonov remained a lifelong friend of his Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crewmates and a source of inspiration to a younger generation of cosmonauts who carried his photo to the International Space Station and marked his 85th birthday during a spacewalk in May. "Leonov was certainly a cosmonaut's cosmonaut, he was stout of mind, body and heart," James Oberg, an expert on the Russian space program, said in an interview with CBS Radio. "He came through as a real tough guy who could handle problems, including almost being killed on his first spacewalk. But he also was a very decent human being."

Speaking to the NASA interviewer 50 years later, Leonov said "I really don't know how I managed to turn and go with my legs first. I was running a fever, I was sweating, I could not see much because of the sweat." Oberg said Leonov "always regretted and apologized in later years that he had been given written statements to give the press about how easy it was and how their training was perfect when, in fact, he said, it was just the opposite. He nearly died." Leonov and Belyayev returned to Earth on March 19, 1965, landing nearly 240 miles off course after their Soyuz descent module did not properly separate from from an upper compartment. Compared to the pinpoint landings Soyuz spacecraft make today returning from the International Space Station, Leonov's landing reads like an action adventure.

SpaceX's new Crew Dragon astronaut capsule will be ready for its first manned flight into orbit in the first quarter of next year provided "everything goes according to plan" in upcoming tests, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said on Thursday. From a report: The pronouncement of a revised time frame signaled NASA believes SpaceX is getting the Crew Dragon project back on track following an explosion during a ground test in April and technical challenges with its re-entry parachute system. Bridenstine said successful development of the capsule was key to achieving NASA's top priority -- the resumed "launching of American astronauts on American rockets from American soil" for the first time since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. The NASA administrator spoke to reporters at the end of a visit to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, just outside Los Angeles, where chief executive Elon Musk led him on a tour of the sprawling manufacturing plant. Their joint appearance by a giant glass-enclosed "clean room" where engineers were working on a Crew Dragon marked a show of unity following a rare public spat over delays in the project.

Thanks to Future Meat Technologies, lab-grown meat could be hitting store shelves by 2022. The company "has raised $14 million in new financing to build its first pilot manufacturing facilities to bring the cost of production of a cell-made steak down to $10 per pound -- or $4 if the meat is combined with plant-based meat substitutes," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The $10 price tag is a whole lot lower than the $50 target that experts from the Good Food Institute were talking about back in April of this year -- and represents a significant cost reduction that makes lab-grown meat a potentially commercially viable option much sooner than anyone expected. "With this investment, we're thrilled to bring cultured meat from the lab to the factory floor and begin working with our industrial partners to bring our product to market," said Rom Kshuk, the chief executive officer of Future Meat Technologies, in a statement. "We're not only developing a global network of investors and advisors with expertise across the meat and ingredient supply chains, but also providing the company with sufficient runway to achieve commercially viable production costs within the next two years."

Unlike its other competitors, Future Meat Technologies doesn't have any interest in selling its products directly to consumers. Rather, the company wants to be the supplier of the hardware and cell lines that anyone would need to become a manufacturer of lab-grown meat. The secret to Future Meat's success is its use of undifferentiated fibroblast cells that can be triggered with small molecules to turn into either fat cells or muscle cells. Once the fat and muscle starts growing, they're placed in a culture with a specific resin that removes waste materials that have been an impediment to growth at large scales, according to chief science officer and founder Yaakov Nahmias. While Future Meat doesn't rely on fetal bovine serum to grow its meat products, it does use small molecules derived from CHO cells (Chinese hamster ovaries), which are used in new medical research and drug manufacturing. "Nahmias says using a refrigerator-sized bioreactor, a manufacturer could get about half a ton of meat and fat in about 14 days," adds TechCrunch. "In about one month, growers can make an amount of meat equivalent of two cows' worth of meat (a cow takes about 12 to 18 months to raise for slaughter)."

There's fresh evidence that eating a healthy diet, one that includes plenty of fruits and vegetables and limits highly processed foods, can help reduce symptoms of depression. NPR reports: A randomized controlled trial published in the journal PLOS ONE finds that symptoms of depression dropped significantly among a group of young adults after they followed a Mediterranean-style pattern of eating for three weeks. Participants saw their depression "score" fall from the "moderate" range down to the "normal" range, and they reported lower levels of anxiety and stress too. Alternatively, the depression scores among the control group of participants -- who didn't change their diets -- didn't budge. These participants continued to eat a diet higher in refined carbohydrates, processed foods and sugary foods and beverages. Their depression scores remained in the "moderate severity" range.

In this study, participants in the "healthy eating" arm of the study ate about six more servings of fruits and vegetables per week, compared with the control group. Participants "who had a greater increase in fruit and vegetable intake showed the greatest improvement in depression symptoms," Francis said. Participants were also instructed to increase consumption of whole grains to a recommended three servings per day, as well as three servings per day of protein from lean meats, poultry, eggs, tofu and beans. In addition, they were told to get three servings of fish per week. As for dairy, the recommendation was three servings per day, unsweetened. Participants were also instructed to consume three tablespoons of nuts and seeds per day, as well as two tablespoons of olive oil per day, and were advised to add in spices, including turmeric and cinnamon. Instead of relying on the participants' recollection of what they ate in the past, they used a device called a spectrophotometer to scan the participants' palms and detect what was eaten. "The device can detect the degree of yellowness in your skin, which correlates with your intake of carotenoids, which you get from eating fruits and vegetables," reports NPR.

The scientists also used several research questionnaires to evaluate participants' mental health, including one that asked them how often over the prior week they'd experienced symptoms of depression.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: For the first time ever, scientists have found corals that were thought to have been killed by heat stress have recovered, a glimmer of hope for the world's climate change-threatened reefs. The chance discovery, made by Diego K. Kersting from the Freie University of Berlin and the University of Barcelona during diving expeditions in the Spanish Mediterranean, was reported in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Kersting and co-author Cristina Linares have been carrying out long-term monitoring of 243 colonies of the endangered reef-builder coral Cladocora caespitosa since 2002, allowing them to describe in previous papers recurring warming-related mass mortalities. [T]he researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several years, growing back and starting a new skeleton. They were then able to gradually re-colonize dead areas through budding. "Coral are made up of hundreds to thousands of tiny creatures called polyps that secrete a hard outer skeleton of calcium carbonate (limestone) and attach themselves to the ocean floor," the report mentions. In order to be sure that the polyps were the same animals staging a comeback, "the team used 3D computer imaging to confirm the old, abandoned skeleton was connected to the new structure."

"This process of 'rejuvenescence' was known to exist in the fossil record but had never before been observed in coral colonies that exist today." While further investigation is required, the team says the findings open up the possibility that other modern corals around the world might be apply similar strategies to survive.

The New York Times published findings from an analysis of new data released through Boston University's Database of Road Transportation Emissions. The map embedded in the report shows a year's worth of CO2 from passenger and freight traffic on every road in the United States. From the report: The database provides the most detailed estimates available of local on-road CO2 over the past three decades. Even as the United States has reduced carbon dioxide emissions from its electric grid, largely by switching from coal power to less-polluting natural gas, emissions from transportation have remained stubbornly high. The bulk of those emissions, nearly 60 percent, come from the country's 250 million passenger cars, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Freight trucks contribute an additional 23 percent.

Reducing emissions from driving has been a big challenge, said Conor Gately, who led the project mapping CO2 on America's roads as a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University. Emissions dipped during the recession of the late 2000s, but have been ticking back up since 2013. National fuel economy standards put in place under the Obama administration have helped temper the rise in automotive emissions because the rules require cars and trucks to use less gasoline per mile traveled. But even as vehicles have become more efficient, Americans, buoyed by a strong economy and low gas prices, have been driving more miles and buying more S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, which have lower gas mileage. Freight trucking is also on the rise. Boston University's emissions database, first published in 2015 and updated this week with an additional five years of data, reveals that much of the increase in driving-related CO2 has occurred in and around cities. The report goes on to say that in nearly every metro area, total emissions have increased since 1990. "The New York area, home to 20 million Americans, accounted for the largest share of driving-related CO2," reports The New York Times. "After years of increase, emissions ebbed during the late-2000s recession but rebounded by 2017. In more car-dependent areas, like Dallas-Fort Worth, emissions from driving barely dipped during the recession and have increased rapidly in recent years. But, adjusted for population, these cities flip: Residents in the denser, more transit-friendly New York area contribute far less CO2 from driving on average than their counterparts in Dallas."

As for how the database was created, "Boston University researchers used federal traffic data to calculate the number of miles travelled on local segments of each road in the United States and converted those miles to carbon dioxide emissions by estimating how much fuel is consumed by different types of vehicles using those roads."

Researchers at MIT have proven that Leonardo da Vinci knew what he was doing when he came up with a novel bridge design that would connect Istanbul with its neighbor city Galata. At the time, it would've been the world's longest bridge, with an unprecedented single span of 790 feet -- constructed without wood planks or even mortar joints. But, unfortunately, it was only recently put to the test since the design was rejected by Sultan Bayezid II in 1502 A.D. CNET reports: "It was time-consuming, but 3D printing allowed us to accurately recreate this very complex geometry," MIT graduate student Karly Bast said in a release on Thursday. Bast worked with a team of engineering academics to finally bring to life a faithful 1-to-500 scale model of da Vinci's famously rejected bridge design, putting the Renaissance man's long-questioned geometry to the test by slicing the complex shapes into 126 individual blocks, then assembling them with only the force of gravity. The group, which presented its work this week in Barcelona, relied on the sketches and descriptions found in da Vinci's letter bidding for the job, along with their own analysis of the era's construction methods.

The structure is held together only by compression -- the MIT team wanted to show that the forces were all being transferred within the structure, said Bast. "When we put it in, we had to squeeze it in." Bast said she had her doubts, but when she put the keystone in, she realized it was going to work. When the group took the scaffolding out, the bridge stayed up. "It's the power of geometry," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University describe a superconducting material, B-Bi2Pd, that naturally exists in a quantum state without the additional influence of magnetic fields usually needed for such an effect. The authors write that the low-maintenance, stability of this material makes it a perfect candidate for designing quantum systems. The research will be published Friday in the journal Science by physicists from Johns Hopkins University. "We've found that a certain superconducting material contains special properties that could be the building blocks for technology of the future," the paper's first author, Yufan Li, said in a press release. "A ring of B-Bi2Pd already exists in the ideal state and doesn't require any additional modifications to work. This could be a game changer."

What makes this superconducting material special is the unique state it occupies as its ground state, or when no other forces are being exerted on it. While other superconducting materials can be forced to maintain a quantum state using external magnetic fields or energy-sustaining "quantum spin liquid," the researchers found that this material naturally exists in a quantum superposition, in which current can simultaneously flow clockwise and counter-clockwise in a ring of the material. This discovery is the realization of a prediction made by physicists in the 80s. The authors write that this property makes it an ideal candidate for quantum systems. But that doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet when it comes to our halting approach to universal quantum computing.

Camera bumps on smartphones may soon go away thanks to a team of researchers at the University of Utah who've developed a radically thin camera lens. Gizmodo reports: For comparison, the lens elements used in today's smartphone cameras, which gather and focus light onto a tiny sensor, are a few millimeters thick. It might not sound like much, but the best smartphone cameras use multiple elements, which quickly add up, resulting in a thin phone simply not having enough room to house all of them: hence the camera bump trend. But a team of electrical and computer engineering researchers at the University of Utah have succeeded in creating a new type of optical lens that measures just a few microns thick, or about a thousand times thinner and one hundred times lighter than what you'll find in smartphones today.

The lens the researchers created is actually made up of innumerable tiny microstructures, imperceptible to the human eye, and strategically positioned so that each one bends and redirects light towards a camera's sensor. When they're all working together, they produce the same results as a single curved element does. Manufacturing the lenses also required the team to develop a new fabrication process, a new polymer, and custom algorithms to calculate the shape and position of each microstructure. But the resulting lens can be completely flat, and made of lightweight plastic. If you've ever spent a day carrying around a camera with a big lens hanging off the front, you'll appreciate that benefit alone. The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Iowa man is so bothered by the political climate that his psychologist says he asked for a higher dosage of his anxiety medication. A Chicago woman is so uneasy about politics that she has needed two dental implants to deal with her teeth-grinding habit. And a New York woman says she suffered her first flare-up of multiple sclerosis in 10 years due to political angst. Americans are stressed and politics is a major cause, according to psychologists, psychiatrists and recent surveys.

A study published in September in the journal PLOS One found that politics is a source of stress for 38% of Americans. "The major takeaway from this is that if our numbers are really anywhere in the ballpark, there are tens of millions of Americans who see politics as exacting a toll on their social, psychological, emotional and even physical health," says Kevin Smith, lead author of the study and chair of the political science department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Space scientists are abandoning the heavens to help you decide what to wear and watch and listen to. Whether it's stars or Stitch Fix, it's all about machine learning. Wired: Chris Moody knows a thing or two about the universe. As an astrophysicist, he built galaxy simulations, using supercomputers to model the way the universe expands and how galaxies crash into one another. One night, not long after he'd finished his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, he met up with a few other astrophysicists for beers. But that night, no one was talking about galaxies. Instead, they were talking about fashion. A couple of Moody's astrophysicist pals had recently left academia to work for Stitch Fix, the online personal styling company now valued at $2 billion. Moody gawked at them. "They were like, 'You don't think this is an interesting problem?'" he says. Indeed, he did not. But when his friends described the work they were doing -- sprinkling in phrases like "Bayesian models" and "Poincare space" -- predicting what clothes someone might like started to sound eerily like the work he'd done during his PhD. Quantifying style, he discovered, "turns out to have really close analogues to how general relativity works."

Four years later, Moody works for Stitch Fix too. He belongs to a growing group of astrophysicist deserters, who have stopped researching the cosmos to start building recommendation algorithms and data models for the tech industry. They make up the data science teams at companies like Netflix and Spotify and Google. And even at elite universities, fewer astrophysics PhDs go on to take postdoctoral fellowships or pursue competitive professorships. Now, more of them go straight to work in Silicon Valley. To understand what's driving astrophysicists into consumer product startups, consider the recent explosion of machine learning. Astrophysicists, who wrangle massive amounts of data collected from high-powered telescopes that survey the sky, have long used machine learning models, which "train" computers to perform tasks based on examples. Tell a computer what to recognize in one intergalactic snapshot and it can do the same for 30 million more and start to make predictions. But machine learning can also be used to make predictions about customers, and around 2012, corporations started to staff up with people who knew how to deploy it.

"This is a highly charged story," began Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, announcing that a trio of chemists who spent decades developing the lithium ion battery were today awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work. From a report: These batteries, small and powerful compared to older battery technology, made possible pocket-sized mobile phones, laptop computers, electric cars, and renewable energy devices such as solar panels that can help address the problems of climate change, Ramstrom says. The prize will be shared by John B. Goodenough from the University of Texas at Austin, M. Stanley Whittingham from Binghamton University in New York, and Akira Yoshino, who works at Asahi Kasei Corporation and Meijo University in Japan. They will split the roughly $1 million award. Lithium batteries have been touted as Nobel-worthy for years, says Bonnie Charpentier, president of the American Chemical Society. "I think that it's magnificent that Goodenough won this year," she says, noting that at age 97 he is the oldest Nobel laureate. Yoshino is 71, showing that the research stretched across generations.

Indeed, it was in the 1970s that Whittingham began investigating the use of lithium, the smallest and lightest metal in the periodic table of the elements. That size and weight made it possible to pack a lot of lithium into a small space, unlike the large and heavy lead-acid batteries that dominated at the time. Lithium had another advantage: it easily gave up its electrons, and batteries produce electricity when electrons flow from one end, called the anode, to the other end, called the cathode. Whittingham put metallic lithium in one end and a layered material called titanitum disulphide at the other; the titanium had spaces that could capture the flowing electrons. However, this combination of materials also had the unfortunate potential to explode. Slashdot interviewed Goodenough two years ago. You can read the interview here.

Astronomers have spotted 20 more moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the total number of Saturnian moons to 82, surpassing the 79 that are known to orbit Jupiter. The Guardian reports: The scientists discovered the moons when they set algorithms to work on decade-old images captured from the powerful Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. By comparing images taken over hours and days, the algorithms distinguished between stationary stars and galaxies and moons that hurtled around the planet. Depending on the angle of approach, comets and asteroids straying too close to Saturn in the early solar system would have become locked into radically different orbits around the planet. Only three of the new moons have so-called prograde orbits, meaning they circle Saturn in the same direction that it rotates. The other 17 are in retrograde orbits, meaning they orbit the planet backwards. One is the most distant moon ever spotted from the planet.

The outer moons of Saturn fall into three broad families according to how they orbit the gas giant. Two of the new prograde moons appear to belong to a group that swings around Saturn at an angle of about 46 degrees. The moons, named after Inuit mythology, may once have belonged to one far larger moon that broke apart in the distant past. The new retrograde moons appear to belong to another group named after Norse mythology and are also thought to be fragments of a much bigger parent moon that was smashed to pieces in the solar system's violent past.

Slashdot reader ClickOnThis writes: An article on CNN reports results from a team of Japanese researchers who discovered that painting cows to look like zebras makes them less attractive to biting flies. I think they're a shoo-in for a 2020 Ig Nobel Prize. From the article: "A team of Japanese researchers recruited six cows and gave them each black-and-white stripes, black stripes and no stripes. They took photos of the cow's painted right side, counting the number of bites as they happened and watching how the cows reacted. While unpainted cows and cows with black stripes endured upward of 110 bites in 30 minutes, the black-and-white cows suffered fewer than 60 in the same period, researchers found. Zebras' stripes have more than aesthetic value; they help fend off bloodsuckers. Past studies have proven flies are less likely to land on black-and-white surfaces -- the polarization of light impairs their perception, so they can't properly decelerate, researchers wrote." The downside is that ranchers would need to spray down their cows multiple times a week for best results. "But fewer bites would improve the health of the cows, which would benefit the economy," reports CNN. "Plus, subbing in paint for pesticides would benefit the environment and human health, too, researchers said."

The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.