Mes: agosto 2019

Ruling out a strike by space debris or a micrometeoroid, Russian engineers say a small leak in a Soyuz crew ferry ship docked to the International Space Station was the result of a hole drilled into the wall of the spacecraft’s upper compartment, an apparent case of human error. The hole was discovered and patched last week. According to Russian media accounts, Dmitry Rogozin, director general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told reporters Monday the hole was drilled “by a human hand” and that he was not ruling out any theories, saying it could have happened on the ground before launch or after the spacecraft reached orbit June 6. Known for controversial comments and tweets, Rogozin — a former deputy prime minister who was sanctioned by the Obama administration in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — did not address why an astronaut or cosmonaut might do such a thing given the obvious danger to the space station and its six-member crew. “We are considering all the theories,” Rogozin said Monday in a report posted in English by the TASS news agency. “The one about a meteorite impact has been rejected because the spaceship’s hull was evidently impacted from inside.” While he said it was too early to come to a conclusion, “it seems to be done by a faltering hand.” “It was done by a...

Researchers say a new study should help ease the minds parents of premature babies when it comes to how well their children will perform in school. The report, published in JAMA Pediatrics, finds that babies born early often catch up to their peers academically. About 10 percent of babies in the U.S. are born prematurely — before 37 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We know a lot about the medical and clinical outcomes [of premature babies] and we know some about short-term educational outcomes, but what we didn’t know is how the babies do once they get further out into elementary school and middle school,” the study’s first author Dr. Craig Garfield, associate professor of pediatrics and of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told CBS News. The study found that two-thirds of babies born at only 23 or 24 weeks were ready for kindergarten on time. The researchers were surprised to see that nearly 2 percent of these extreme preemies even achieved gifted status in school.  Though extremely premature babies often scored low on standardized tests, preterm infants born 25 weeks or later performed only slightly lower than full-term infants. For babies born after 28 weeks, the differences in test scores were negligible. For the study, the researchers analyzed data on more than 1.3 million babies born...

The runaway bestseller, “The Help,” is a look back at the relationships between white women and their black maids in Mississippi in the early 1960s. The book was written by Kathryn Stockett, and the film version premieres today. The author has sparked a lot of controversy because she’s white, yet wrote her novel from the perspective of an African-American housekeeper. If that’s not unusual enough, she let her best friend, a relative unknown, direct the film. Stockett’s explosive novel is set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a time of segregation and sit-ins, CBS News Correspondent Bill Whitaker reports. It’s the story of a rebellious Southern belle who collaborates with black maids to write a book pulling the covers off the complex, often painful relationships between a pampered, privileged class of white women and the black women who served them. “The Help” has been a bestseller for more than 100 weeks, and the movie has A-list actors, including Viola Davis and Emma Stone. Stockett and the film’s director, Tate Taylor, are lifelong friends who grew up in Jackson, Miss., raised by black housekeepers. “The Help” is her first book and his first major motion picture. Stockett reluctantly showed Taylor her manuscript after 60 literary agents had rejected it. Taylor said of her book, “You think you know your best friend so well, and I...