Science & TechnologyS


Telescope

Update! Huge dust storm threatens NASA rovers on Mars

Will Dunham
Reuters
Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:26 UTC
A dust storm raging on Mars presents the worst threat to date to the continued operation of NASA's two rovers, threatening to starve the solar-powered robots by blocking out sunlight, NASA said on Friday.

The little, six-wheeled rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, are operating at two distant sites just south of the Martian equator. The large regional dust storm that has lasted almost a month has been worse at Opportunity's locale, NASA said.

©Reuters
An undated NASA illustration depicting one of two six-wheeled rovers operating on the surface of Mars.
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Cloud Lightning

Flashback 'Scary Storm' on Mars Could Doom Rovers

Dave Mosher
Space.com
Sat, 07 Jul 2007 05:32 UTC
A giant dust storm that now covers nearly the entire southern hemisphere of Mars could permanently jeopardize the future of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, officials told SPACE.com today.

The new and potentially bleak outlook is a stark shift from the prognosis earlier this week. Further compounding the threat to the rovers, a second large dust storm has recently appeared on the Red Planet.

The first and largest dusty squall has reduced direct sunlight to Mars' surface by nearly 99 percent, an unprecedented threat for the solar-powered rovers. If the storm keeps up and thickens with even more dust, officials fear the rovers' batteries may empty and silence the robotic explorers forever.

"This is a scary storm," said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. "If it gets any worse, we'll enter into some uncharted territory. There's been a lot of discussion about what we're going to do if (the rovers) don't have enough power to run during the day."
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Bizarro Earth

Shocking! Tiny brain no obstacle to French civil servant


Reuters
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:58 UTC
A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal.

The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they learned he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus -- water on the brain -- as an infant.
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Question

Flashback Is your brain really necessary?


Alternative Science
Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:33 UTC
Is your brain you really necessary? The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor the late Dr. John Lorber.

When Sheffield's campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student's head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination.
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Magic Wand

One species, many genomes: Adaptation to the environment has a stronger effect on the genome than anticipated


Max Planck Society
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:11 UTC
Faster growth, darker leaves, a different way of branching - wild varieties of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana are often substantially different from the laboratory strain of this small mustard plant, a favorite of many plant biologists. Which detailed differences distinguish the genomes of strains from the polar circle or the subtropics, from America, Africa or Asia has been investigated for the first time by research teams from Tübingen, Germany, and California led by Detlef Weigel from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. The results were surprising: The extent of the genetic differences far exceeds the expectations for such a streamlined genome, as the scientists write in this week's edition of Science magazine.
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Magic Wand

Groundbreaking research changing geological map of Canada


EurekAlert / University of Alberta
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:45 UTC
Researchers exploring a remote terrain in Arctic Canada have made discoveries that may rock the world of Canadian geology.

Geologists from the University of Alberta have found that portions of Canada collided a minimum of 500 million years earlier than previously thought. Their research, published in the American journal Geology, is offering new insight into how the different continental fragments of North America assembled billions of years ago.

Lead researcher Michael Schultz, a graduate student at the U of A, took advantage of a rare opportunity to explore the Queen Maud block of Arctic Canada, a large bedrock terrain that is said to occupy a keystone tectonic position in Northern Canada.

Because of its remote location, the Queen Maud block has remained understudied. Until now. "In terms of trying to figure out how Canada formed, this block held a lot of secrets," said Schultz.
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Bizarro Earth

Robotic Insect Takes Off for the First Time

Rachel Ross
Technology Review
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:15 UTC
A life-size, robotic fly has taken flight at Harvard University. Weighing only 60 milligrams, with a wingspan of three centimeters, the tiny robot's movements are modeled on those of a real fly. While much work remains to be done on the mechanical insect, the researchers say that such small flying machines could one day be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.

©Robert Wood
This tiny robot weighs just 60 milligrams and has a wingspan of three centimeters. It's the first robot to achieve liftoff that's modeled on a fly and built on such a small scale.
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Chess

Checkers 'solved' after years of number crunching

Justin Mullins
New Scientist
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:51 UTC
The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now "solved".

Draughts is merely the latest in a steady stream of games to have been solved using computers, following games such as Connect Four, which was solved more than 10 years ago.

The computer proof took Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, 18 years to complete and is one of the longest running computations in history.
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Ark

Archaeologists Dig Up Roman Bath Complex

MARTA FALCONI
Associated Press
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:27 UTC


©AP Photo/Andrew Medichini
Archaeologists work in Rome, on the ruins of a 2nd-century bath complex believed to be part of a vast, luxurious residence of a billionaire who gathered his fellow Romans to party and relax.

ROME - Archaeologists said Thursday they have partly dug up a second-century bath complex believed to be part of the vast, luxurious residence of a wealthy Roman.
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Star

Scientists Unveil The Mystery Behind Saturn's "Walnut Moon"


AHN
Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:20 UTC
A new study conducted on Saturn has solved the mystery of the "Walnut Moon" associated with the planet. Scientists at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California now say that a burst of radioactivity warmed and softened Saturn's moon Iapetus soon after it formed, allowing it to be molded into its walnut-like shape, rather than the expected sphere.

Iapetus, Saturn's icy moon, is now 20 miles wider at the equator than the poles. An Iapetus day is nearly 80 Earth days long. The moon also has a broad bulge around its equator capped by a narrow ridge, giving it the appearance of a walnut.

Since long time, scientists were working to find out how it acquired its distinctive walnut shape since the ridge was discovered in 2004 in images from the Cassini spacecraft.
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