Reuters Science News Summary

Following is a summary of current science news briefs. Why do zebras have stripes? They make bad landing strips for flies

Scientists are providing new evidence to answer the longstanding question about why zebras have stripes. It appears stripes make terrible landing strips, bamboozling the fierce blood-sucking flies that try to feast on zebras and carry deadly diseases. Researchers on Wednesday described experiments demonstrating that horse flies have a difficult time landing on zebras while easily landing on uniformly colored horses. In one experiment, the researchers put cloth coats bearing striped patterns on horses and observed that fewer flies landed on them than when the same horses wore single-color coats. Israel's first moon mission set for liftoff from Florida Thursday

Israel's first spacecraft designed to land on the moon is set to blastoff from Florida on Thursday in the first privately-funded lunar mission, as the Jewish state seeks to become only the fourth nation to reach the surface of Earth's natural satellite. The unmanned robotic explorer named Beresheet - Hebrew for the word "genesis" - was due for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 GMT Friday) atop a Falcon 9 rocket launched by the California-based entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX company. Exclusive: SpaceX, Boeing design risks threaten new delays for U.S. space program

NASA has warned SpaceX and Boeing Co of design and safety concerns for their competing astronaut launch systems, according to industry sources and a new government report, threatening the U.S. bid to revive its human spaceflight program later this year. NASA is paying SpaceX $2.6 billion and Boeing $4.2 billion to build rocket and capsule launch systems to return astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil for the first time since America's Space Shuttle program went dark in 2011.