Eight years after landing on Mars to search for signs of past water, a NASA rover has hit paydirt with what appears to be a ribbon of the water-deposited mineral gypsum laced inside an ancient rock.

"This is the single most bullet-proof observation that I can think of that we've made this entire mission regarding the liquid water," Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres, lead researcher for NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, told Discovery News.

Spirit, which is no longer operational, and Opportunity both turned up evidence of water-related minerals around their landing sites on opposite sides of Mars' equator, but researchers could not determine where the minerals came from.

"They've been moved around by wind. They've been mixing with other materials. It's a big, jumbled up, fascinating mess," Squyres said.

In contrast, the newly discovered deposit is threaded into an ancient rock on the rim of a large crater named Endeavour, which Opportunity is now exploring.

"This stuff formed right here," Squyres said. "There's no ambiguity about this.

Australian scientists on Thursday hailed the discovery of a pair of insect-like eyes belonging to a freakish prehistoric super-predator which trawled the seas more than 500 million years ago.

Measuring three centimetres (1.2 inches) across and with a whopping 16,000 individual lenses the fossilised eyes, from a huge shellfish-type creature called anomalocaris, were found in rocks on Australia's Kangaroo Island.

Anomalocaris could grow up to one metre long and were considered the "great white shark" of the Cambrian era, topping the ancient marine food chain, according to lead researcher John Paterson.

Modern-day houseflies have about 3,000 lenses in their eyes, while dragonflies have about 30,000 -- the only creature known to have more lenses than anomalocaris.

Paterson said the discovery showed that anomalocaris had lived in well-lit, clear waters and had developed sophisticated vision extremely rapidly, likely triggering an evolutionary "arms race" among other creatures.

Waking up before sunrise can be tough to do, especially on a weekend. On Saturday, Dec. 10th, you might be glad you did. A total eclipse of the Moon will be visible in the early morning skies of western Northern America. The action begins around 4:45 am Pacific Standard Time when the red shadow of Earth first falls across the lunar disk. By 6:05 am Pacific Time, the Moon will be fully engulfed in red light. This event - the last total lunar eclipse until 2014 - is visible from the Pacific side of North America, across the entire Pacific Ocean to Asia and Eastern Europe (global visibility map).


For people in the western United States the eclipse is deepest just before local dawn. Face west to see the red Moon sinking into the horizon as the sun rises behind your back. It's a rare way to begin the day.

Not only will the Moon be beautifully red, it will also be inflated by the Moon illusion. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects. In fact, a low Moon is no wider than any other Moon (cameras prove it) but the human brain insists otherwise. To observers in the western USA, therefore, the eclipse will appear super-sized.

Is there a genocidal countdown built into the motion of our solar system? Recent work at Cardiff University suggests that our system's orbit through the Milky Way encounters regular speedbumps - and by "speedbumps" we mean "potentially extinction-causing asteroids".

Professor William Napier and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe completed computer simulations of the motion of the Sun in our outer spiral-arm location in the Milky Way that revealed a regular oscillation through the central galactic plane, where the surrounding dust clouds are the densest. The solar system is a non-trivial object, so its gravitational effects set off a far-reaching planetoid-pinball machine which often ends with comets being hurled into the intruding system.

The sun is about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is about 80,000 to 120,000 light-years across (and less than 7,000 light-years thick). We are located on on one of its spiral arms, out towards the edge. It takes the sun -and our solar system- roughly 200-250 million years to orbit once around the Milky Way. In this orbit, we are traveling at a velocity of about 155 miles/sec (250 km/sec).

Many of the ricocheted rocks collide with planets on their way through our system, including Earth. Impact craters recorded worldwide show correlations with the ~37 million year-cycle of these journeys through the galactic plane - including the vast impact craters thought to have put an end to the dinosaurs two cycles ago.

Almost exactly two cycles ago, in fact. The figures show that we're very close to another danger zone, when the odds of asteroid impact on Earth go up by a factor of ten. Ten times a tiny chance might not seem like much, but when "Risk of Extinction" is on the table that single order of magnitude can look much more imposing.

Researchers found that sleeping-in when you don't have to work the next day or not under the influence of sleeping pills is a genetic marker.

More than 10,000 people were studied and those with the ABCC9 gene needed around 30 minutes more sleep than those without the gene, reports BBC News.

The study participants reported how long they slept and gave a blood sample so their DNA could be analyzed. The study participants were from the Orkney Isles, Croatia, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia and Germany.

The researchers then observed fruit flies and found that the flies without the ABCC9 gene also slept for three hours less than normal. ABCC9 helps control the body's ability to sense energy levels of cells. This study may help open up a new line of research in sleep studies. Scientists may want to know how variants of the gene regulate how long people will sleep.

On Dec. 1, a camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft recorded a wave of electrically charged material shooting out from the sun and blasting Mercury. Footage of this "coronal mass ejection" (CME), as such events are called, has caught the attention of alien-hunters, who say it has unveiled a giant, "cloaked" spaceship parked near the solar system's innermost planet.

In the footage, one sees a huge spurt of plasma and other solar ejecta washing over Mercury; peculiarly, the material seems to flare up as it hits another nearby object, too. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," YouTube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has quickly spread across the Web.


The commentator says there's "absolutely no explanation" for the nearly Mercury-size mystery object other than that it's a spaceship. "What object in space cloaks itself and doesn't appear until it gets hit by energy from the sun?" siniXster asked.

The question was meant rhetorically, but nonetheless, the video is curious, so we've put it to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) - the group that analyzes data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1), the telescopic camera that shot the new footage.

The massive tsunami generated by the March 2011 Tohoku-Oki quake centered off northeastern Japan was a long- hypothesized "merging tsunami." The tsunami doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its destructive power at landfall," according to a new discovery by NASA and Ohio State University.

Data from NASA and European radar satellites captured at least two wave fronts that day. The fronts merged to form a single, double-high wave far out at sea. This wave was capable of traveling long distances without losing power. Ocean ridges and undersea mountain chains pushed the waves together along certain directions from the tsunami's origin.

The discovery helps explain how tsunamis can cross ocean basins to cause massive destruction at some locations while leaving others unscathed. The data raise hope that scientists may be able to improve tsunami forecasts.

Research scientist Y. Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and professor C.K. Shum of The Ohio State University, Columbus, discussed the data and simulations that enabled them to piece the story together at a media briefing Monday, Dec. 5, at the American
Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"It was a one in 10 million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with satellites," Song said. He is the principal investigator in the NASA-funded study.

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a star named VFTS 102 is spinning its heart out... Literally. Rotating at a mind-numbing speed of a million miles per hour (1.6 million kph), this hot blue giant has reached the edge where centrifugal forces could tear it apart. It's the fastest ever recorded - 300 times faster than our Sun - and may have been split off from a double star system during a violent explosion.

Thanks to ESO's Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, an international team of astronomers studying the heaviest and brightest stars in the Tarantula Nebula made quite a discovery - a huge blue star 25 times the mass of the Sun and about one hundred thousand times brighter was cruising through space at a speed which drew their attention.

"The remarkable rotation speed and the unusual motion compared to the surrounding stars led us to wonder if this star had an unusual early life. We were suspicious." explains Philip Dufton (Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK), lead author of the paper presenting the results.

Vesta is the second-largest object in the asteroid belt - 320 miles across - and is being probed by a hi-tech robot 'surveyor' that will then move on to its bigger 'sister' asteroid Ceres.

New views sent back by the probe, Dawn, this week, reveal an object more like a planet than an asteroid - and scientists say they now consider it a 'transitional body' between the two.

The Dawn spacecraft has been beaming back images since July - the latest show a rugged surface is unique compared to the solar system's much smaller and lightweight asteroids.

Impact craters dot Vesta's surface along with grooves, troughs and a variety of minerals.

'Vesta is unlike any other asteroid,' said mission co-scientist Vishnu Reddy of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. The new findings were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region between our solar system and interstellar space. Data obtained from Voyager over the last year reveal this new region to be a kind of cosmic purgatory.

In it, the wind of charged particles streaming out from our sun has calmed, our solar system's magnetic field has piled up, and higher-energy particles from inside our solar system appear to be leaking out into interstellar space.

"Voyager tells us now that we're in a stagnation region in the outermost layer of the bubble around our solar system," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Voyager is showing that what is outside is pushing back. We shouldn't have long to wait to find out what the space between stars is really like."