Nasa's Curiosity Rover Prepares To Zap Martian Rocks

NASA's Curiosity rover.

In a BBC report, Nasa's Curiosity rover is getting ready to zap its first Martian rock.

A small stone lying just to the side of the vehicle at its landing site on the floor of Gale Crater has been selected as a test target for the ChemCam laser.

The brief but powerful burst of light from this instrument will vaporise the surface of the rock, revealing details of its basic chemistry.

Dubbed N165, the object is not expected to have any science value, but should show ChemCam is ready for serious work.

"I'd probably guess this is a typical Mars basalt - basaltic rocks making up a large fraction of all the igneous rocks on Mars," Roger Wiens, the instrument's principal investigator, told BBC News.

"A basalt, which is also common under the ocean on Earth, typically has 48% silicon dioxide and percent amounts of iron, calcium and magnesium, and sodium and potassium oxides as well. We're not expecting any surprises," said the Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher.

Curiosity touched down in its equatorial crater two weeks ago.

Its mission is to investigate the rocks at its landing site for evidence that past environments could have supported life.



The rover carries a suite of instruments for the purpose, but its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) experiment has probably garnered most attention because nothing like it has ever been flown to Mars before.

ChemCam sits high up on the rover's mast from where it directs a laser beam on to rocks up to 7m (23ft) away.

The spot hit by the infrared laser gets more than a million watts of power focused on it for five one-billionths of a second.

This produces a spark that the instrument observes with a telescope. The colours tell scientists which atomic elements are present in the rock.

ChemCam is going to be a key part of the process of selecting science targets during Curiosity's two-year mission.

If the laser shows up an interesting rock, the vehicle will move closer and deploy its other instruments for a more detailed investigation.

Assuming the test with the 7cm-wide N165 object goes well, ChemCam will move on to its first science target.

This will be rock exposed on the ground next to the rover by the rocket-powered crane used to lower the vehicle to the crater floor.


Exhaust from this descent stage scattered surface grit and pebbles to reveal a harder, compact material underneath.

The crane made four scour marks in the ground - two either side of Curiosity. These have been dubbed Burnside, Goulburn, Hepburn and Sleepy Dragon.

The names, all related to fire, are taken from ancient rock formations in Canadian North America.

Goulburn Scour will be zapped by ChemCam.

"There's bedrock exposed beneath the soil with interesting patterns of colour," said John Grotzinger, Curiosity's project scientist.

"There're lighter parts; there're darker parts, and the team is busy deliberating over how this rock unit may have formed and what it's composed of. We'll aim the ChemCam [at Goulburn Scour], as well as taking even higher resolution images."

Curiosity has not moved since landing on 6 August (GMT). That is about to change.

The rover is going to roll forward briefly to test its locomotion system in the next few days. A reverse manoeuvre is planned, also.

Researchers want eventually to drive several kilometres to the base of the big mountain at the centre of Gale Crater to study sediments that look from satellite pictures to have been laid down in the presence of abundant water.

This journey to the foothills of Mount Sharp is going to have to wait a few months, however, because the science team intends first to go in the opposite direction.

Several hundred metres to the east of Curiosity's present position is an intersection of three geological terrains.

Again, this location has been given a name - Glenelg. And, again, it is taken from the geology of North America.

The intersection is intriguing and a good place to compare and contrast with the bedrock exposed in Goulburn Scour.

In addition, it may provide access to older, harder rocks. These could make for a first opportunity for Curiosity to use its drill.

"Even though it is in the opposite direction from the path to Mount Sharp, it's the one place we can go to to capture a lot of the information that's persevered in our landing [location]," Prof Grotzinger told BBC News.

Mutant Butterflies Found Near Japan's Fukishima Plant

Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of the Butterflies

In the first sign that the Fukushima nuclear disaster may be changing life around it, scientists say they've found mutant butterflies.

Some of the butterflies had abnormalities in their legs, antennae, and abdomens, and dents in their eyes, according to the study published in Scientific Reports, an online journal from the team behind Nature. Researchers also found that some affected butterflies had broken or wrinkled wings, changes in wing size, color pattern changes, and spots disappearing or increasing on the butterflies.

The study began two months after an earthquake and tsunami devastated swaths of northeastern Japan in March 2011, triggering a nuclear disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi plant spewed radiation and displaced tens of thousands of residents from the surrounding area in the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.

In May 2011, researchers collected more than 100 pale grass blue butterflies in and around the Fukushima prefecture and found that 12% of them had abnormalities or mutations. When those butterflies mated, the rate of mutations in the offspring rose to 18%, according to the study, which added that some died before reaching adulthood. When the offspring mated with healthy butterflies that weren't affected by the nuclear crisis, the abnormality rate rose to 34%, indicating that the mutations were being passed on through genes to offspring at high rates even when one of the parent butterflies was healthy.

The scientists wanted to find out how things stood after a longer amount of time and again collected more than 200 butterflies last September. Twenty-eight percent of the butterflies showed abnormalities, but the rate of mutated offspring jumped to 52%, according to researchers. The study indicated that second-generation butterflies, the ones collected in September, likely saw higher numbers of mutations because they were exposed to the radiation either as larvae or earlier than adult butterflies first collected.

To make sure that the nuclear disaster was in fact the cause of the mutations, researchers collected butterflies that had not been affected by radiation and gave them low-dose exposures of radiation and found similar results.

"We conclude that artificial radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to this species," the study said.


The results of the study bring up concerns about the larger impact of the Fukushima disaster and the impact it will have on the ecosystem in Japan and nearby areas, as well as what we can learn for future nuclear disasters.

"Our results are consistent with the previous field studies that showed that butterfly populations are highly sensitive to artificial radionuclide contamination in Chernobyl and Fukushima," the study said. "Together, the present study indicates that the pale grass blue butterfly is probably one of the best indicator species for radionuclide contamination in Japan."

One of the researchers, Joji Otaki, an associate professor at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, told reporters that while butterflies may be the best indicator, the study should also lead to more research on what else may be affected by the radiation.

"Sensitivity (to irradiation) varies between species, so research should be conducted on other animals," Otaki told the Japan Times.

Otaki said while there is still plenty of research to be done on radiation, there shouldn't be large-scale concern about this kind of mutation in humans.

"Humans are totally different from butterflies and they should be far more resistant" to radiation, he told the newspaper.

Invisible Dark Matter Likely Bountiful Near Sun

Invisible dark matter.

The area around our sun is probably rife with dark matter, the pervasive invisible stuff that populates the universe, a new study suggests.
Dark matter is thought to be all around us, making up a large fraction of the mass in the universe. Yet whatever particles compose dark matter interact so rarely with normal matter that we cannot shine light on it nor detect it through any means other than gravity.
While scientists have been fairly sure for decades that dark matter is common in galaxies and clusters of galaxies, experts have been unclear on just how prevalent it is in our immediate cosmic neighborhood.
Some past measurements have suggested the vicinity of our sun is chock-full of dark matter, while a 2011 study with new data predicted a relative dearth of the stuff near us. [Gallery: Dark Matter Throughout the Universe]

Neil Armstrong, First Man On The Moon, Recovering From Heart Surgery

Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon, laughs during testimony before a House Science, Space and Technology committee hearing on "NASA Human Spaceflight Past, Present and Future: Where Do We Go From Here?" in Washington September 22, 2011. REUTERS/Molly Riley

 Former astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, is recovering from heart-bypass surgery, NASA said on Wednesday.

Armstrong, who turned 82 on Sunday, underwent surgery on Tuesday to relieve blocked coronary arteries. NBC news quoted his wife Carol Armstrong as saying he is "doing great."

Mars Rover Curiosity To Receive Navigation Coordinates.

Curiosity rover on Mars. Image credit Reuters.

After flying more than 350 million miles (563 million km) from Earth, the Mars rover Curiosity is about to get its driver's license.

Mission control engineers in California will spend the next four days remotely installing new computer software in Curiosity that essentially reorients the brains of the six-wheeled vehicle for manoeuvring around the surface of the Red Planet.

The nuclear-powered rover, about the size of a small sports car, can only store so much pre-programmed information in its computer module at once, having less on-board memory capacity than a typical cell phone.

Its previous flight-control software was tailored for the complex tasks of atmospheric entry, descent and landing that brought the mobile science lab to a historic touchdown on the floor of a vast, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater earlier this week.

A new version of the software, uploaded to Curiosity while it was still en route to Mars, is instead specially designed to let NASA engineers safely drive the rover, operate its robot arm, use its power drill, collect samples, sweep away dust and perform other functions as it goes about its science mission.

"Curiosity was born to drive. This software includes the capability for Curiosity to really go out and stretch her wheels," Benjamin Cichy, the rover's senior software and systems engineer, told reporters on Friday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.

The new software package will be installed on Curiosity's main computer and its backup.

All other activities will be suspended for the most part during the upgrade, which was set to begin Friday night, California time, at the start of Curiosity's fifth full day on Mars. Instrument checks, picture-taking and science operations are scheduled to resume on Day 9 of the mission.

Curiosity arrived on Mars Sunday night on a quest for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may once have harboured the basic ingredients necessary for the evolution of microbial life, or may even now be capable of supporting life.

The $2.5 billion project, formally named the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the Viking probes of the 1970s and is touted as the first full-fledged mobile biochemistry lab ever sent to a distant world.

The rover comes equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments capable of analyzing samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beaming results back to Earth.

The principal target of its exploration is a 3-mile- (5-kilometer) high tower of layered rock, named Mount Sharp, which is believed to have formed from sediment that once filled Gale Crater. The mound, which stands a short distance from Curiosity's landing site near the centre of the crater, is seen by Mars scientists as a potential gold mine of geologic study.

An initial review of data collected from Curiosity's arrival on Mars revealed that it blasted through the planet's thin atmosphere at 24 times the speed of sound, pulling the equivalent of 11 times the force of Earth's gravity.

"If you were a human riding on board, it'd be a little bit of a rough ride, but fortunately Curiosity is made of some tough stuff," said Gavin Mendeck, who oversaw the rover's entry. It landed just 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the centre of its projected landing zone.

The rover's chief engineer, Rob Manning, came closest to predicting the exact spot where Curiosity ended up touching down. He also oversaw some of the team's readiness testing.

"We think he might have rigged the system," descent and landing operations lead Allen Chen joked during Friday's news briefing.

Why Women Outlive Men

Newborn baby boy and girl. Scientists are beginning to understand one of life's enduring mysteries -- why women live, on average, longer than men. (Image Credit: © Barbara Helgason / Fotolia).

In a recent report by ScienceDaily,  Scientists are beginning to understand one of life's enduring mysteries -- why women live, on average, longer than men.

Published August 2 in Current Biology, a research led by Monash University, describes how mutations to the DNA of the mitochondria can account for differences in the life expectancy of males and females. Mitochondria, which exist in almost all animal cells, are vital for life because they convert our food into the energy that powers the body.

Study Reveals Lengths Commuters Go to Avoid Each Other.

Bus Commuters.

You're on the bus, and one of the only free seats is next to you. How, and why, do you stop another passenger sitting there? New research reveals the tactics commuters use to avoid each other, a practice the paper published in Symbolic Interaction describes as 'nonsocial transient behavior.' As reported by ScienceDaily.com a study was carried out by Esther Kim, from Yale University, who chalked up thousands of miles of bus travel to examine the unspoken rules and behaviors of commuters.

Immune Response For Rabies Discovered In The Amazon.

Rabies Victim displaying Hydrophobia.

Our immune systems are funny things. An American traveling to Taiwan, for example, might be warned to get a hepatitis vaccine - unless they grew up on a farm. Rabies is even scarier.  If you are bitten by an unknown animal, it requires a series of painful injections because if clinical disease sets in, it is usually fatal.

In the United States, human deaths from rabies have declined over the past century from more than 100 annually to an average of two per year because of aggressive campaigns to vaccinate domestic animals against the disease.  Recent human rabies cases are primarily due to bat bite exposures. Rabies virus infects the central nervous system, ultimately causing disease in the brain and death within a few days of symptom onset. 55,000 people worldwide are estimated to die of rabies each year.

Clearly, avoiding rabies-infected animals is the best way to go but that isn't always possible in developing countries. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Health, have analyzed how some people living in two Amazon communities in Peru survived being exposed to rabies virus without receiving vaccination; strong evidence that an immune response may occur in certain communities where people are regularly exposed to the virus, according to a study published today.
The researchers conducted a survey in two communities in a remote section of the Peruvian Amazon where outbreaks of human rabies infections caused by vampire bat bites have occurred regularly over the past two decades. Several of these people who were previously exposed to rabies virus survived without vaccination, although the study cannot determine whether they ever experienced clinical disease.

New Model Proposes Explanation of Shock Wave Theory on Formation of Solar System.

The downward propagating shock wave has compressed the target cloud core and is injecting shock front material through multiple Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) fingers. (Credit: Image courtesy of Carnegie Institution).

For decades it has been thought that a shock wave from a supernova explosion triggered the formation of our Solar System. According to this theory, the shock wave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of dust and gas, and the newly polluted cloud collapsed to form the Sun and its surrounding planets. Now, a report on ScienceDaily.com explains how new work from Carnegie's Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides the first fully three-dimensional (3-D) models for how this process could have happened.

Vaporizing Earth in Computer Simulations to Aid Search for Super-Earths.

Scientists at Washington University have simulated the atmospheres of hot Earth-like planets such as CoRoT-7b, shown here in an artist’s conception. CoRoT-7b orbits so close to its star that its starward side is an ocean of molten rock. By looking for atmospheres like those generated by the simulations, astronomers should be able to identify Earth-like exoplanets. (Credit: A. Leger et al./Icarus). 

In science fiction novels, evil overlords and hostile aliens often threaten to vaporize Earth. At the beginning of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the officiously bureaucratic aliens called Vogons, authors of the third-worst poetry in the universe, actually follow through on the threat, destroying Earth to make way for a hyperspatial express route."We scientists are not content just to talk about vaporizing the Earth," says Bruce Fegley, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, tongue firmly in cheek. "We want to understand exactly what it would be like if it happened."
And in fact Fegley, PhD, and his colleagues Katharina Lodders, PhD, a research professor of earth and planetary sciences who is currently on assignment at the National Science Foundation, and Laura Schaefer, currently a graduate student at Harvard University, have vaporized Earth -- if only by simulation, that is mathematically and inside a computer.

Biological mechanism for growing animal defense, mating and ornamental systems discovered.

Washington state university entomologist Laura Corley Lavine has helped discover the mechanism  behind the Japanese Rhinoceros beetle elaborate horn. Image credit ScienceDaily.com

 Researchers led by scientists at the University of Montana and Washington State University have discovered a developmental mechanism they think may be responsible for the excessive growth of threatening horns or come-hither tail feathers. heir extreme size attracts potential mates and warns away lesser rivals.

New Apple mountain Lion software brings attention to mountain Lion research.

New Apple Mountain Lion OS X.

  Apple's new OS X release, "OS X Mountain Lion" has brought attention to a little known specie of mountain lion whose home is the wooded hills near the multi-billion dollar company's headquarters in Cupertino U.S.


  According to Physics.Org, since 2008, UC Santa Cruz researchers have captured 36 mountain lions (Puma concolor) in the Santa Cruz mountains as part of the UCSC Puma Project to better understand the big cats' physiology, behavior, and ecology. They've outfitted the lithe, tawny-colored predators with high-tech electronic collars that show where the mountain lions are and where they have been. Fourteen still have active GPS collars, said UCSC environmental studies Ph.D. student Yiwei Wang. Two others are followed manually. Of the remaining 20 lions, some collars have failed, or the lions have disappeared or died.

Gorilla accidentally hangs himself at Prague zoo.

Tatu, pictured in 2007 after his birth was aired live on internet.

Tatu killed himself on Friday morning while playing in a rope structure in the gorilla wing, the zoo director said. "This is the most tragic event that has happened at the Prague zoo since a flood damaged a large section in August 2002," director Miroslav Bobek said in a statement.

Scientists locate seat of Meta-Consciousness through studies of lucid dreamers

Brain regions activated more during lucid dreaming than normal dreaming. Image credit ScienceDaily.com

 The studies of lucid dreamers show which centers of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves in dreams. Lucid dreamers are people who can become aware of dreaming during sleep.
 Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and from Charité in Berlin have now studied people who are aware that they are dreaming while being in a dream state, and are also able to deliberately control their dreams.

Physicists manufacture world's smallest semiconductor Laser.

Smallest Laser production principle.

  A collaboration between Physicists at the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues in China and Taiwan has led to the development of the worlds smallest Laser. This is according to this week's Science report  on their work. Chih-Kang "Ken" Shih, professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin says that they've developed a nanolaser device that operates well below the 3-D diffraction limit which would have a large impact on nano-scale technologies. The miniaturization of semiconductor lasers is key for the development of faster, smaller and lower energy photon-based technologies, such as ultra-fast computer chips; highly sensitive bio-sensors for detecting, treating and studying disease; and next-generation communication technologies.
 Such photonic devices could use nanolasers to generate optical signals and transmit information, and have the potential to replace electronic circuits. But the size and performance of photonic devices have been restricted by what's known as the three-dimensional optical diffraction limit.

New Recruits in the Fight Against Disease: Anti-Bacterial 'Killing Machine' Deciphered

An illustration of the bacteriophage lysin Ply C. (Credit: Image courtesy of Monash University).

In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from Monash University, The Rockefeller University and the University of Maryland detail how the bacteriophage lysin, PlyC, kills bacteria that cause infections from sore throats to pneumonia and streptococcal toxic shock syndrome as reported by Science Daily.