When the privately owned SpaceX rocket hopefully launches from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Tuesday, May 22, (it has already been delayed several times), it will carry a grocery run of 1,000 pounds of food and clothing and the remains of 308 deceased, including James "Scotty" Doohan, of Star Trek fame.

The mission, financed by South African billionaire Elon Musk, will visit the International Space Station, but not before releasing a capsule containing ashes of Scotty and hundreds of others. Families paid up to $3,000 to send their remains to the stars.

Doohan died in 2005, at the age of 85. His ashes were sent into space in 2007, but the capsule ended up crashing in the New Mexico desert. A year later, a portion of his ashes were launched by another SpaceX rocket but that unsuccessful mission plunged into the Pacific Ocean.

Easter Island, often called one of the most remote places on the planet, is peppered with the heads of more than 800 stone figures. Now archaeologists have discovered that beneath those mysterious heads are carved bodies, entombed in the earth below.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a 63-square-mile island in the South Pacific Ocean, far from the coast of its closest neighbor, Chile.

Archaeologists believe the statues were carved between A.D. 1100 and the 1800s, when Westerners found the island and its isolated culture.

For years, visitors have photographed and established theories about the stone sentinels dotting the island. But only recently did researchers begin unearthing the stone bodies, previously unknown until the Easter Island Statue Project, lead by director Jo Anne Van Tilburg, began excavating the large statues.

Early evidence suggests that some statues are more than 30 feet in height, and weigh more than 80 tons.

While Treasure Valley beekeepers have reported an increase in swarms this spring, the same cannot be said for several states across the U.S. In fact, Minnesota and Nebraska are reporting huge losses of honeybees.

Here in Idaho, beekeepers said they have been quite busy, rounding up as many as 100 swarms this spring. The increased numbers are due primarily to the mild winter.

But a recent study from Purdue University said, "populations of honeybees and other pollinators have declined worldwide in recent years. A variety of stressors have been implicated as potential causes, including agricultural pesticides. Neonicotinoid insecticides - widely used and highly toxic to honeybees - have been found in previous analysis of honeybee pollen and combs."

The Huffington Post reports that the massive honeybee deaths in the nation's Midwest may be caused by a big marketing ploy.

Within the last 15 years, U.S. corn cultivation has drastically changed. It has gone from a crop requiring almost no insecticides and negligible amounts of fungicides, said the Huffington Post, to a crop where "the average acre is grown from seeds treated or genetically engineered to express three different insecticides (as well as a fungicide or two) before being sprayed prophylactically with RoundUp (an herbicide) and a new class of fungicides that farmers didn't know they 'needed' before the mid-2000s."

Several times a year, NASA warns of an asteroid perilously close to Earth. The news, not uncommon, is usually met with feigned or even dismissive interest. But now, NASA has estimated that there are around 4,700 asteroids close enough and big enough to pose a risk to Earth.

According to CNN, the asteroids are bigger than 330 feet across and large enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere.

"We're paying attention to the issue," said Amy Mainzer, astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who also insisted that people shouldn't panic about the news.

NASA also said a 40-meter asteroid would strike the Earth with an impact comparable to a 3-megaton nuclear bomb.

The space agency used the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer - better known as WISE - to find the asteroids. From there they estimated how many more were actually out there.

• National Geographic
• This undated image made available by National Geographic shows four long numbers on the north wall of a ruined house related to the Maya calendar and computations about the moon, sun and possibly Venus and Mars; the dates stretch some 7,000 years into the future.

Explorers have found the oldest Mayan calender ever discovered, and it goes way beyond Dec. 21, 2012.

The National Geographic reports that archaeologists have uncovered what they call a "Mayan megacity," complete with a vibrant mural that calculates "vast amounts of time."

"Contrary to the idea the Maya predicted the end of the world in 2012, the markings suggest dates thousands of years in the future," wrote Erik Vance for National Geographic News.

Explores found "an ancient workroom of a Maya scribe," or record-keeper. Inside the workroom were numbers on the wall with fixed tabulations. They are "tables more or less like those in the back of your chemistry book," said one of the archeologists. Some of the newly discovered calculations include dates some 7,000 years into the future, "adding to the evidence against the idea that the Maya thought the world would end in 2012 - a modern myth."

Sky watchers are preparing for what is being dubbed "Supermoon." Space.com is trumpeting the biggest full moon of the year, scheduled for this coming weekend, or as the website calls it: Supermoon Alert.

The moon will come within 221,902 miles of Earth late Saturday night, and it will also be a full moon, ready to offer an extra-bright, extra-big show. Space.com said this weekend's full moon should be about 16 percent brighter than average because of its proximity.

Also, the Earth's tides are expected to be particularly high and low. When the moon comes closest to our planet - known as perigee - the moon exerts about 42 percent more tidal force than it will during its next cycle two weeks later.

We're reminded that to view the supermoon at its best effect, we should look as it rises or sets. When the moon is tucked behind buildings or trees, an optical illusion makes it appear much larger.

New research indicates that aggressive pancreatic tumors may be treatable with a new class of drugs because of the discovery of the USP9x gene. Fewer than one in five people with pancreatic cancer survive past the first year after being diagnosed.

The study—published today in the journal Nature—showed that the gene in question was being switched off in cancerous cells, but drugs with the potential to turn USP9x back on and stop the spread of cancer are already being tested.

"We looked in human tumor specimens and we found that [USP9x] was missing in a fraction of patients—the patients that did very poorly ... the people who died the fastest," said researcher David Tuveson. "Patients that had a low level of the gene died very quickly after their operation and the patients who at the end of their life had lots of metastasis, they had also a very low level of this protein."

Scientists in Switzerland demonstrated early this morning how a partially paralyzed person could control a robot using only brain signals. The team of scientists at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne said their experiment takes them closer to enabling immobile patients through a robot avatar.

The Associated Press reports that today's demonstration involved a partially tetraplegic patient who imagined lifting his fingers to direct a robot positioned at a university 62 miles away. The AP reports that similar experiments in the U.S. and Germany involved invasive brain implants or able-bodied patients, but this morning's experiment employed a simple head cap to record brain signals.

• MGH-UCLA Human Connectome Project
• A powerful new scanner shows that the layout of brain fibers more closely resembles a Manhattan-like street grid than a pile of spaghetti.

A new groundbreaking study indicates that the human brain is laid out in a complex series of grids, rather than the commonly held belief that brain fibers are tangled like a pile of spaghetti.

The new report from Massachusetts General Hospital used a newly developed scanner to map the brain's fibers.

"Basically, the overall structure of the brain ends up resembling Manhattan," physicist Van Wedeen told the Boston Globe. "[It's as if] you have a two-dimension plan of streets and a third axis, an elevator going in the third dimension."

Wedeen and his team at MGH scanned living human subjects and animals, using the new scanner that reportedly can achieve 10 times the resolution of conventional MRI machines.

Conventional wisdom says that caffeine disrupts night owls, but new research indicates that a few too many cups of joe will bother morning people a bit more.

A study in the journal Sleep Medicine asked 50 college students to record their caffeine intake and their sleeping patterns. Early risers were found to take much longer to fall asleep at night, as opposed to night owls.

The survey also found that some people cleared caffeine consumed in the evening from their systems within a few hours, but lunchtime coffee could still be in a person's system well into the night.