Florida

Cassini spies 2 Saturn moons

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has spied two new little moons around satellite-rich Saturn, the space agency said Monday from Cape Canaveral.

Saturn’s tally of known moons now stands at 33.

The images were taken by Cassini on June 1 from 10 million miles out, as it approached the ringed planet. The spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn on June 30.

The two newly spotted, faint moons are about 2 miles and 2 1/2 miles across, and 120,000 miles and 131,000 miles respectively from Saturn’s center. That’s considerably smaller than the moons with 12 mile diameters previously discovered in Saturn’s orbit.

New York

Report ranks nation’s best party schools

The State University of New York at Albany returned to No. 1 on the list of party schools, while Brigham Young University kept its title as top “stone-cold sober” school in an annual survey of American college life.

The Princeton Review’s report ranked Albany seventh in the use of hard liquor and marijuana, ninth in beer drinking and first in “students (almost) never study.”

The annual “Best 357 Colleges” survey, conducted since 1992, is based on responses from more than 110,000 students at campuses around the country. The review has no affiliation with Princeton University.

The University of Colorado at Boulder ranked No. 1 last year and ninth this year.

Washington, D.C.

Tiny corkscrew clears blood clots in stroke victims

A tiny corkscrew-like device to remove blood clots from the brains of stroke victims won government approval Monday, giving doctors a new treatment option that could save lives and shave the $53 billion annual bill to treat strokes and their aftermath.

In 80 percent of strokes, a blood vessel in the brain becomes blocked by a blood clot, increasing the chance of severe disability or death.

The Merci Retriever, produced by Mountain View, Calif.-based Concentric Medical, is threaded through an artery to remove the clot and restore blood flow.

The device, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, was tested at 25 medical centers in 141 patients.