A NASA team has tested a space suit in a setting with extreme conditions akin to some of those found on Mars -- an Argentine base in Antarctica -- for possible use on a visit to the Red Planet.

The NDX-1 space suit, designed by Argentine aerospace engineer Pablo de Leon, endured frigid temperatures and winds of more than 47 mph (75 kph) as researchers tried out techniques for collecting soil samples on Mars.

"This was the first time we took the suit to such an extreme, isolated environment so that if something went wrong we couldn't just go to the store" and buy a repair kit, De Leon told Reuters recently after returning from the one week expedition.

The $100,000 (61,331 pound) prototype suit, created with NASA funds, is made out of more than 350 materials, including tough honeycomb Kevlar and carbon fibres to reduce its weight without losing resistance.

During the "Mars in Marambio" mission, named after the Argentine air force base, a team of NASA scientists went on simulated spacewalks, operated drills and collected samples while wearing the gear.

De Leon himself wore the pressurized suit, which he said was bound to make anyone feel claustrophobic with its helmet and built-in headset for communicating with the outside world.

On Saturday March 19, 2011, astronomer Stephen James O'Meara watched the rare Super Moon closely. Scientifically termed a lunar perigee-syzygy; a new or full Moon (syzygy) that coincides with the Moon at its closest approach to Earth (perigee) in 18 years.

O'Meara, didn't set out in life to find a connection between the Moon and volcanic eruptions, but destiny set him on a path to do just that. Since 1610, when the great scientist Galileo was attacked and condemned for presenting a new theory of the Universe, based on his scholarly telescope observations - that the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun and not the other way around - new scientific ideas have been difficult, if not impossible, to prove to the prevailing scientific community.

O'Meara has been a rogue scientist his entire life. "As a teen I piloted my Dad's lobster boat in Boston under a bridge, and success was highly dependent on the height of the tides whether I'd make it or not. I was acutely aware of the tides at all times, their height and unimaginable strength; a wrong decision meant disaster. I was very, very aware of the Moon's gravitational affect on Earth tides at a very early age." said O'Meara.

Scientists believe a new study of the San Andreas fault within the Salton Trough could change assumptions about the eventual Big One.

Reporting from the Salton Sea -- Three days after the earthquake and tsunami devastated northeastern Japan, Gary Fuis walked across the San Andreas fault under a moonlit sky. The desert was quiet. A breeze fanned through the creosote. To the west, he could see the Salton Sea, and to the east, the headlamps of the night crew taking up their positions.

In a little more than an hour, they would start detonating their explosives, generating seismic waves that would be recorded by seismometers buried throughout these sandy hills and positioned on the floor of the Salton Sea.

A geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey, Fuis is overseeing an ambitious project to create an underground image of one of the most seismically active and geologically complex regions of the country, a triangle of land extending from Palm Springs to the Mexico border.

This work, he believes, will change current assumptions about the earthquakes that originate here, especially the Big One expected on the San Andreas fault. For nearly three weeks his teams have worked night and day to cover hundreds of miles and position thousands of instruments.

Like a petulant adolescent, Saturn is sending out mixed signals.

Recent data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the variation in radio waves controlled by the planet's rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, the northern and southern rotational variations also appear to change with the Saturnian seasons, and the hemispheres have actually swapped rates. These two radio waves, converted to the human audio range, can be heard in a new video below.


"These data just go to show how weird Saturn is," said Don Gurnett, Cassini's radio and plasma wave science instrument team lead and professor of physics at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. "We thought we understood these radio wave patterns at gas giants, since Jupiter was so straightforward. Without Cassini's long stay, scientists wouldn't have understood that the radio emissions from Saturn are so different."

Saturn emits radio waves known as Saturn Kilometric Radiation, or SKR for short. To Cassini, they sound a bit like bursts of a spinning air raid siren, since the radio waves vary with each rotation of the planet. This kind of radio wave pattern had been previously used at Jupiter to measure the planet's rotation rate, but at Saturn, as is the case with teenagers, the situation turned out to be much more complicated.

When NASA's Voyager spacecraft visited Saturn in the early 1980s, the radiation emissions indicated the length of Saturn's day was about 10.66 hours. But as its clocking continued by a flyby of the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses spacecraft and Cassini, the radio burst varied by seconds to minutes. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters in 2009 analyzing Cassini data showed that the Saturn Kilometric Radiation was not even a solo, but a duet, with two singers out of sync. Radio waves emanating from near the north pole had a period of around 10.6 hours; radio waves near the south pole had a period of around 10.8 hours.

Astronomers have found the coldest known star - a brown dwarf in a double system about as hot as a cup of tea. The discovery blurs the line between small cold stars and large hot planets. The star, CFBDSIR 1458+10B, is the dimmer member of the binary system, about 75 light-years from Earth.

Lead study author Michael Liu, from the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, said finding ever-cooler stars "has been one of the big themes of this field since it's existed in the last 15 years." Brown dwarfs are essentially failed stars; they lack enough mass for gravity to trigger the nuclear reactions that make stars shine. Liu said while the idea of a brown dwarf is many decades old, they were first confirmed in 1995, the same year the first gas giants were detected around other stars.

"Residing at the extremes of low mass, luminosity and temperature, brown dwarfs serve as laboratories for understanding gas-giant extrasolar planets as well as the faint end of the star formation process," write the authors in the new paper, in the Astrophysical Journal. "The coolest known brown dwarfs, the T dwarfs, have temperatures (~600 - 1400 K) ... that are more akin to Jupiter than any star."

Liu said cool brown dwarfs are exciting to find partly because they make great proxies for studying the mysteries of water cloud formation in the atmospheres of gas giants. Such clouds are believed to form when temperatures dip below 400 to 450 K.

New research provides the first evidence that sensory recalibration - the brain's automatic correcting of errors in our sensory or perceptual systems - can occur instantly.

"Until recently, neuroscientists thought of sensory recalibration as a mechanism that is primarily used for coping with long-term changes, such as growth during development, brain injury or stroke," said Ladan Shams, a UCLA assistant professor of psychology and an expert on perception and cognitive neuroscience. "It appeared that extensive time, and thus many repetitions of error, were needed for mechanisms of recalibration to kick in. However, our findings indicate we don't need weeks, days, or even minutes or seconds to adapt. To some degree, we adapt instantaneously.

"If recalibration can occur in milliseconds, as we now think, then we can adapt even to transient changes in the environment and in our bodies."

While rescue workers in Japan continue their search for missing persons amid the rubble in Sendai and beyond, geologists are sifting through seismic data and satellite images for hints to what caused one of the most catastrophic earthquakes in recorded history. For the past week, scientists around the world have posted charts and maps on blogs and websites to help describe the extent of the quake, and the vulnerabilities that possibly triggered the massive rupture.

So far, data have shown the quake may have redistributed the Earth's mass and moved the planet's axis, increasing its speed of rotation and shortening the day by a fraction of a second. There are also reports that a significant portion of Japan's eastern shoreline dropped off by several feet as a result of motion along a fault line further east where one tectonic plate slid under another. There are reports that the east coast of the island of Honshu may have also shifted to the east as a result of the quake. Scientists observed what may be farther-reaching effects, as the tremor may have also momentarily shifted the position of a large glacier in Antarctica.

Bradford Hager, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the outpouring of scientific analyses is thanks in part to Japan's extensive monitoring system - a network of thousands of sensors on land and sea that have continuously kept tabs on local seismic energy.

"It's incredible how instrumented this quake is," Hager says. "With a thousand GPS receivers, you can see there's a lot of detail. Having that data will enable us to understand and statistically forecast earthquakes in the future."

Our nearest planetary neighbors, Mars and Venus, have no oceans or lakes or rivers. Some researchers have speculated that they were blown dry by the solar wind, and that our Earth escaped this fate because its strong magnetic field deflects the wind. However, a debate has arisen over whether a magnetic field is any kind of shield at all.

The controversy stems from recent observations that show Mars and Venus are losing oxygen ions from their atmospheres into space at about the same rate as Earth. This came as something of a surprise, since only Earth has a strong dipolar magnetic field that can prevent solar wind particles from slamming into the upper atmosphere and directly stripping away ions.

"My opinion is that the magnetic shield hypothesis is unproven," says Robert Strangeway from UCLA. "There's nothing in the contemporary data to warrant invoking magnetic fields."

Each of the three planets is losing roughly a ton of atmosphere to space every hour. Some of this lost material was originally in the form of water, so this begs the question: how did the planets end up with vastly different quantities of water if they are all "leaking" to space at similar rates?

"The problem is in taking today's rates and trying to guess what was happening billions of years ago," says Janet Luhmann of the University of California, Berkeley. She believes Earth's magnetic field could have made the difference in the past when the solar wind was presumably stronger.

"People aren't putting all the cards on the table," Luhmann says. "We can't say that magnetic fields are unimportant from the current data."

Both Luhmann and Strangeway agree that sorting out what makes one planet wet while another is dry will require more data on how the atmospheric loss depends on the Sun's output.

Superconductivity Approaches Room Temperature

Superconductors.ORG herein reports the observation of superconductivity near 20 C.

In eight magnetization tests a small amount of the compound (Tl5Pb2)Ba2MgCu10O17+ consistently produced sharp diamagnetic transitions (the Meissner effect) near 20 Celsius (see above graphic), and resistive transitions that appeared near 18.5C (see below right). These temperatures are believed accurate +/- 2 degrees.

More than 40 years ago, pioneering tectonic geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson published a paper in the journal Nature describing how ocean basins opened and closed along North America's eastern seaboard.

His observations, dubbed "The Wilson Tectonic Cycle," suggested the process occurred many times during Earth's long history, most recently causing the giant supercontinent Pangaea to split into today's seven continents.

Wilson's ideas were central to the so-called Plate Tectonic Revolution, the foundation of contemporary theories for processes underlying mountain-building and earthquakes.

Since his 1967 paper, additional studies have confirmed that large-scale deformation of continents repeatedly occurs in some regions but not others, though the reasons why remain poorly understood.

Now, new findings by Utah State University geophysicist Tony Lowry and colleague Marta Perez-Gussinye of Royal Holloway, University of London, shed surprising light on these restless rock cycles.