Dragon is expected to return near the end of October

SpaceX is about to take another historical step for the private sector: its Dragon capsule will carry a load of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) on its first official mission.

SpaceX's Dragon made its first trip to the ISS back in May of this year as a test run. All went well, with the Dragon successfully docking at the ISS and then splashing down into the Pacific Ocean.

Thanks to that successful run, SpaceX can now move forward with its very first official mission. The Dragon capsule will carry 1,000 pounds of supplies to the ISS on October 7, and plans to reach the orbiting station on October 10.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota - A fleet of picture-snapping NASA satellites that for 40 years has documented forest fires, tsunamis and everyday changes in the Earth's geography will soon get a new member.

With Landsat 8 set for a February launch, nearly 140 scientists and engineers from more than 25 countries are scheduled to gather in South Dakota next week to discuss how to best download, process and distribute the millions of data-rich images used in agriculture, education, business and government.

Since 1972, Landsat satellites have been continuously snapping pictures across the globe as part of a 40-year mission to document the planet.

But with Landsat 7 aging and its older sibling Landsat 5 failing, a new orbiter is needed to continue the long-term data record, said Jenn Sabers, remote sensing branch chief at the U.S. Geological Survey Center for Earth Resources Observations and Science.

"One of the things we want to do is preserve that legacy by ensuring that we collect consistent data with the prior missions," Sabers said. "Although we have that consistency, we also want to make improvements."

The USGS Center for EROS, located in the middle of farmland north of Sioux Falls, is the main federal repository for satellite images. Officials wanted to locate the centre in the middle of the U.S, and they chose South Dakota in 1970 over several other states, partly due to persistent campaigning by the late Sen. Karl Mundt.

US, California - The space shuttle Endeavour touched down in Los Angeles on Friday on the back of a jumbo jet, greeted by cheering crowds as it ended a celebratory final flight en route to its retirement home at a Southern California science museum.

The 75-ton winged spaceship, ferried by a modified Boeing 747, landed at Los Angeles International Airport shortly before 1:00 p.m. after hop-scotching across the country from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and flying a victory lap over California.

Hundreds of office workers stood atop downtown skyscrapers, cheering as the shuttle banked low around the city as it arrived from its last stopover at Edwards Air Force Base, about 100 miles north of the city in the Mojave desert.

"Let me be the first to say, welcome to Los Angeles, Endeavour," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said during a ceremony on the tarmac.

The shuttle's arrival brought two major freeways leading to the Los Angeles airport to a standstill as drivers got out of their cars to watch the spacecraft make its final approach.

High in the stratosphere, a vortex of winds is spinning, and that lofty swirling eddy might stir the ocean depths. New supercomputer simulations suggest that the stratospheric vortex of winds helps churn the oceans around the planet - and therefore also might help shape global climate, the researchers say.

Scientists knew that activity in the stratosphere 10 kilometers to 50 kilometers above Earth plays a role in what happens in the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere extending from the planet's surface to the stratosphere.

They also knew the behavior of the troposphere influences the circulation patterns of the oceans, which, in turn, drive climate. Research reported earlier this year hinted that events in the stratosphere might directly affect the oceans, but those findings were based on a single climate model and a computer simulation that modeled the stratosphere for a relatively short 260 years.

To delve deeper into any stratosphere-oceans link, climate scientist Thomas Reichler of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his colleagues reexamined simulations from a well-known climate model developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that compiled 4000 years of atmospheric and ocean conditions, and compared these with weather and ocean data collected over the past 30 years.These revealed a surprising link between stratospheric winds and ocean currents as deep as 2 kilometers beneath the waves.

The researchers report online today in Nature Geoscience that the findings from that climate model were supported with data from 18 other models.

Every 2 years on average, they found, the stratosphere suddenly warms by several tens of degrees Celsius. During these events, a polar vortex of up-to-130-kilometer-per-hour stratospheric winds encircling the Arctic can weaken or change direction (from counterclockwise to clockwise around the North Pole) for up to 2 months.

Coronal cavities, which are holes in the sun's outer atmosphere or corona, may be the root cause behinds solar eruptions, according to new research. Understanding them may lead to a much better ability to predict potentially dangerous solar storms.

The coronal cavities act as "launch pads for billion-ton clouds of solar plasma called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

Understanding the roots of CMEs is a high priority for solar researchers, since blasts that hit Earth squarely can disrupt radio communications, satellite navigation and power grids."

"We don't really know what gets these CMEs going," Terry Kucera, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. "So we want to understand their structure before they even erupt, because then we might have a better clue about why it's erupting and perhaps even get some advance warning on when they will erupt."

Early humans were able to move from Africa after a single genetic mutation allowed them to become vegetarians, scientists claim.

The switch, which allowed humans to process vegetables, meant that humans were able to move away from water sources and spread across the continent.

A team of geneticists compared DNA sequences from a variety of people around the world to see how different populations relate to one another and when they have gone their separate ways. The scientists found that a key genetic variant gave humans the ability to convert fats from plants into essential nutrients for the brain.

The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science (PLOS), suggests that the gene mutation would have allowed Homo sapiens to leave the bodies of water in central Africa where they ate fish.

A team of scientists from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in North Carolina, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle analyzed the genes of 1,092 individuals representing 15 different human populations that were sequenced as part of the 1000 Genome Project and 1,043 individuals from 52 populations from the Human Genome Diversity Panel database.

The Khoe-San people of southern Africa, who speak a language based on clicking sounds, are descendants of the most ancient genetic split found yet in living humans, finds an international group of scientists.

The results also reveal some of the evolutionary changes that helped give rise to modern humanity.

Anatomically modern humans (us), evolved about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Differences between people living today and our evolutionary relatives include much less pronounced eyebrow ridges and larger brains.

Much remains uncertain about how modern humans originated in Africa's cradle of humanity. For instance, researchers had long thought humans arose in eastern Africa, but recent studies hint at roots in southern Africa.

If two birds meet deep in the forest, does anybody hear? Until now, nobody did, unless an intrepid biologist was hiding underneath a bush and watching their behavior, or the birds happened to meet near a research monitoring station. But an electronic tag designed at the University of Washington can for the first time see when birds meet in the wild.

A new study led by a biologist at Scotland's University of St. Andrews used the UW tags to see whether crows might learn to use tools from one another. The findings, published last week in Current Biology, supported the theory by showing an unexpected amount of social mobility, with the crows often spending time near birds outside their immediate family.

The study looked at crows in New Caledonia, an archipelago of islands in the South Pacific. The crows are famous for using different tools to extract prey from deadwood and vegetation. Biologists wondered whether the birds might learn by watching each other.

If you're a patient at Rhode Island's Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, there's one visitor you don't want stopping by your bed: a white and tortoiseshell cat named Oscar.

Not because Oscar isn't friendly -- by all accounts he is -- but because according to a doctor who works there, David Dosa, Oscar has the mysterious power to predict who's going to die.

He is said to wander the building, stopping to see patients who only have a short time to live -- in some cases surprising the staff with the predictions. The cat is credited with correctly predicting at least 50 deaths at the nursing home over the past five years.

Oscar first rose to prominence in 2007 when Dosa wrote a piece in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine about the cat, and later in a popular 2010 book titled Making the Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.

What might explain Oscar's strange powers?

There are a few things to note about the story. First, though Dosa's piece about Oscar in The New England Journal of Medicine is sometimes described as a "study," it was nothing of the sort. No scientific experiments or medical research was conducted on the feline's alleged death-detecting abilities; the piece was instead a personal essay.

There's nothing wrong with essays, but they are essentially stories and anecdotes, which don't necessarily carry any scientific or evidential weight.

A new variety of cloud is attempting to be officially added to the classification system after first being discovered in 1951.

Meteorologists and "cloudspotters" are looking to formally add undulatus asperatus clouds, or "agitated waves," to the official list of cloud species. The clouds look like a fluffy blanket that cover part or all of the sky.

The United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva has the final say in cloud classification, but it may be a few years until the cloud species gets its official status.

The cloud formation was officially proposed as a separate cloud classification by the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2009.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society, began working with the Royal Meteorological Society to promote the cloud type.