Reuters Science News Summary
Following is a summary of current science news briefs.
U.S. astronauts perform seven-hour spacewalk outside station
Two U.S. astronauts sailed through a seven-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Thursday to pack up a spare cooling radiator and tackle other maintenance, a NASA TV broadcast showed. In their second spacewalk in two weeks, Commander Jeffrey Williams and Flight Engineer Kate Rubins left the station's airlock around 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) as the station orbited 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
Oldest fossils found in Greenland, from time Earth was like Mars
The earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth has been found in rocks 3.7 billion years old in Greenland, raising chances of life on Mars aeons ago when both planets were similarly desolate, scientists said on Wednesday. The experts found tiny humps, between one and 4 cm (0.4 and 1.6 inches) tall, in rocks at Isua in south-west Greenland that they said were fossilized groups of microbes similar to ones now found in seas from Bermuda to Australia.
Rocket explodes on launch pad in blow to Elon Musk's SpaceX
An explosion destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to Elon Musk's SpaceX and its cargo during preparations for a routine test firing at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday, two days before it had been due to blast off and place a satellite in orbit. SpaceX said there were no injuries and that an "anomaly" during the static fire test resulted in the loss of the rocket and a communications satellite owned by Israel-based Space Communication which was going to be used by Facebook to expand internet access in Africa.
Dogs use same parts of brain to process speech as humans, Hungarian study says
"Super, well done," her trainer says, and Maya, a Hungarian golden retriever, happily holds up her left paw, responding to the praise. Maya works with a group of Hungarian researchers at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who have scanned the brains of 13 dogs, finding that dogs process words and intonation to work out messages similarly to humans.
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